Spiritual Grief

Let these words help you articulate your own sorrows, bring you to your knees, encourage you to confess your insufficiency, and express your most genuine emotions. In Our Suffering, Lord Be Near will help find hope in God when your world is falling apart. God can handle your suffering. So, tell Him.

Popular Instagram poet and bestselling author Morgan Harper Nichols reimagines the classic heroine's journey—from the very first call to adventure, through trials, hardships, and new relationships, all the way back home—and offers key lessons and affirmations to encourage and equip you every step of the way.

Anne affirms that Heaven truly is the home of your dreams: a home of lasting value that's fully paid for and filled with family, where you will be wanted and welcomed. Best of all, Heaven is a home you are invited to claim as your own. With over 40 percent new and revised content, Anne Graham Lotz has updated her classic book on Heaven for a whole new generation of listeners, and also for herself. With her father, mother, and husband now gone, Lotz beautifully adds her own vulnerability and stories to the journey contained in Heaven: My Father's House.

The son of a preacher, 18-year-old Tim Timberlake learned to appreciate the extraordinary value and gift of each minute of every day the hard way through the tragic and sudden loss of his father. Tim began a journey to not just get through each day, but to exhaust every opportunity of potential of that day, moment by moment, fulfilling his God-given purpose. Now a pastor himself, Tim inspires others to approach each day in a way that they live out their own God-given purposes and passions.

What do you do when you are suddenly navigating a life you didn't sign up for? You never saw this pain coming, and you're facing a future you'd pass up if you could. Lisa Appelo understands deeply. She has experienced the raw emotions and uncertainty that come when everything falls apart. Lisa went to bed married and woke up a widow and single mom to seven children. She wrestled with impossible questions about her future—and then found life-changing answers that gave her the strength to move forward with true joy.

Life can be hard. Although there are moments of beauty and goodness, more often than not, life is marked by fear, struggle, disappointment, and loss. And we don't know what to do with it. We've tried to find hope and security in various people and places—but each has proved unworthy of our trust. We need more. Something—or Someone—who won't fail us when our world falls apart. In this book, beloved author and Bible teacher Michele Cushatt presents a better way.

Immigrant daughter, novice chaplain, bereaved friend: author Chenxing Han (Be the Refuge) takes us on a pilgrimage through the wilds of grief and laughter, pain and impermanence, reconnecting us to both the heartache and inexplicable brightness of being human.

Similar to a novel in which listeners choose their own paths, Why Is There Suffering? by Bethany Sollereder allows listeners who want to better understand the existence of suffering the opportunity to sort through the most common and viable options, ultimately discovering answers that make the most sense to them.

Tens of thousands of women and families every year lose a baby to miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant death. The statistics are sobering - between 10 percent and 20 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, 1 percent in stillbirth, and nearly 23,000 babies die before their first birthday - but statistics alone miss the depth of the hurt. Each loss is personal and devastating.

We all are living an earthly story with a beginning, middle, and end. While aspects of our story's closing hold mystery, we do not have to feel lost as we move toward it. We instead can lean on the support and wisdom of others who know the path ahead. In Anticipating Heaven, a medical expert with a Christian faith will lead you through end-of-life matters, offering practical advice and spiritual comfort.

Through a panoramic overview of what the Bible says about suffering, the authors make clear who God is, why he permits so much heartache and pain, and how it is we can trust him. With both a practical edge and heartfelt warmth, When God Weeps offers dependence on his love and mercy in spite of our doubts, fears, longings, and questions.

After her brother died unexpectedly and her mother moved into a dementia-care facility, spiritual travel writer and Episcopal deacon Lori Erickson felt called to a new quest: to face death head-on, with the eye of a tourist and the heart of a pastor. Blending memoir, spirituality, and travel, Near the Exit examines how cultures confront and have confronted death by investigating Egypt's Valley of the Kings, Mayan temples, Colorado cremation pyres, Day of the Dead celebrations, Maori settlements, and tourist-destination graveyards.

Everyone has had to say goodbye. Experiences of loss abound: death, illness, unemployment, severed ties, financial struggles, or geographical moves, to name but a few. Joyce Rupp has a healing gift for helping readers and listeners to reflect, ritualize and reorient themselves when loss looms large in their lives. In this book, she writes about healing and recovered hope. This audio edition includes six chapters, rooted in Scripture, and concluding with questions for further reflection.

Join New York Times best-selling author Shauna Niequist as she invites you to experience the precious gifts and wisdom that only come the hard way - through change, loss, and transition. In this collection of poignant essays, Shauna reflects on her own journey of making peace with change, the nuanced mix of excitement and heartbreak that comes with it, and the practices that offer us strength and hope along the way. A tribute to life at the edges, Bittersweet is a love letter to the bittersweet and sacred work that change does in us all.

When the oldest of Kate Braestrup's four children was 10 years old, her husband, a Maine state trooper, was killed in a car accident. Stunned and grieving, she decided to pursue her husband's dream of becoming a Unitarian minister. She eventually began working with the Maine Game Warden Service, which conducts the state's search-and-rescue operations when people go missing in the wilderness.

En Un corazón en el desierto, Patricia Namnún guía a las mujeres en un viaje de esperanza que les ayudará a reconocer su temporada de sequía espiritual, dejar de creer las mentiras que se dicen a sí mismas, y tener el valor de abrazar Su verdad y volver a Aquel que es el único que puede hacer que ríos de agua viva fluyan dentro de ellas una vez más.

When you’re in the midst of suffering, you want answers for the unanswerable, resolutions to the unresolvable. But there is a pathway through this suffering. It’s not easy, but God will use it to lead you toward healing. This path is called lament. In the midst of your darkest times, you will discover that lament leads you back to a place of hope - not because lamenting does anything magical, but because God sings a louder song than suffering ever could, a song of renewal and restoration.

Melissa Zaldivar talks honestly about losing everything that once defined her and how God used unexpected opportunities, like working at Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, to spark a journey of working through her grief and encountering the all-sufficient love of Christ. Weaving inspiring passages of Scripture and insights from Little Women into her personal story, Melissa encourages listeners with her discovery that it’s when we have nothing left to offer that we can receive God’s love the most. And that’s something that can never be lost.

After years on the road performing at sold-out venues, Tyson Motsenbocker returned home to the impending death of his 57-year-old hero and mother. He begged God to heal her, but she died anyway. When they buried her body, Tyson also buried the childhood version of his faith. Shortly before her death, however, Tyson became intrigued by the complicated legacy of Father Junipero Serra, the 18th-century Franciscan monk and canonized saint who dedicated his life to the idea that tragedy and suffering are portals to renewal.

More than a decade ago, Jerry Sittser prayed for the protection of his family, yet three of his loved ones - his daughter, his wife, and his mother - died in an automobile accident. What went wrong? When God Doesn't Answer Your Prayer takes an honest and probing look at the problem of unanswered prayer. In doing so, it draws us ever deeper into a relationship with the God who is the end of all our prayers, the object of our faith, and the one who fulfills our deepest longings.