Spiritual Grief

Writing an ethical will, a document that includes stories and reflections about your past, is an ancient tradition. It can include joy and regrets, and ultimately becomes both a way to remember a loved one who is gone and a primer on how to live a better, happier life. Beloved Rabbi Steve Leder has helped thousands of people to write their own ethical wills, and in this intimate book helps us write our own.

Renew your appreciation for the breathtaking beauty that surrounds us in life's simplest details. Encouraging you to reflect even deeper on the concepts explored in her bestselling book One Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp offers sixty wisdom-soaked devotions, complete with scriptures, prayers, and reflection questions.

In a period of almost unbearable uncertainty and fear, many of us have wondered, “Does God see us? Can he help us through this nerve-racking time?” Beloved Bible teacher Dr. David Jeremiah shares through psalms that God is always walking beside us. Now is the time to Shelter in God.

Dr. Chauncey Crandall knows his patients well. When they are dying, he sits at the bedside with them and holds their hands. He prays with them. Sometimes he can feel what they feel and see what they see. At other times his patients have near-death experiences and "come back" with astonishing descriptions of the afterlife.

Frederick Buechner has grappled with the nature of pain, grief, and grace ever since his father committed suicide when Buechner was a young boy. He continued that search as a father when his daughter struggled with anorexia. In this essential collection of essays, including one never before published, Frederick Buechner finds that the God who might seem so silent is ever near. He writes about what it means to be a steward of our pain, and about this grace from God that seems arbitrary and yet draws us to his holiness and care.

For the past 25 years, Heaven has inspired us to live well on Earth even as we long for eternity. Drawing on Scripture, Joni Eareckson Tada answers the deepest questions of our hearts about what heaven will be like, who we will see there, and who we will be there. This updated and expanded edition of Joni’s classic brings a new understanding of what heaven is, along with new mysteries and hopes. Now in her late 60s, Joni is much closer to heaven than she was when she first wrote the book in her mid 40s.

Grief is a personal journey, never the same for any two people and as unique as your life and your relationships. Although loss is an inevitable part of life, how you approach this fact can make the difference between meaningless pain and the manifestation of understanding and wisdom. This audio book shares a mindful approach to dealing with grief that can help you make that difference.

Life is painful. Everyone's story comes with unique challenges, difficulties, bumps, and bruises that leave you lost and drowning in their wake. It could be a financial disaster, a health issue, or the loss of a loved one. Dr. Tony Evans understands life's hardships firsthand. In the span of less than two years, he lost his brother, sister, brother-in-law, two nieces, father, and wife. At the same time, both of his daughters received cancer diagnoses. Dr. Evans had to put into practice, at the deepest levels, the truths he has preached about God for more than 40 years.

We've lost the practice of lament. Most people don't know how to process personal or communal mourning and instead struggle to honor their tears, vulnerability, and the full weight of these disillusioning times. But tending our grief might be exactly what we need to reimagine a way forward. Tracing her difficult experiences of a catastrophic home fire, a threat to her child's well-being, and other devastating losses and upheavals, Terra McDaniel offers a clear framework for expressing heartache and burdens.

Living in a broken world gives us plenty of reasons to armor up, shut down, and numb out. But God wants more for us than just getting by. When we harden ourselves to the world, we not only close ourselves off from the good things God intends for us, but close off avenues God wants to work through in others' lives as well.

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.

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.

In Courageously Expecting, author Jenny Albers meets you in this difficult season as someone who has also experienced the worst and cautiously hoped for the best. She invites you on a thirty-day journey through the complicated and often contradictory emotions that accompany pregnancy after a loss.

When Colin Campbell’s two teenage children were killed by a drunk driver, Campbell was thrown headlong into a grief so deep he felt he might lose his mind. He found much of the common wisdom about coping with loss—including the ideas that grieving is a private and mysterious process and that the pain is so great that “there are no words”—to be unhelpful. Drawing on what he learned from his own journey, Campbell offers an alternative path for processing pain that is active and vocal and truly honors loved ones lost.

Every person who lives long enough will eventually encounter circumstances that are difficult to explain theologically. From years of counselling experience, Dr. James Dobson offers assurance of God's constant care, even when human suffering is beyond our comprehension.

A Dream So Big is the story of Steve Peifer, a corporate manager who once oversaw 9,000 computer software consultants, who today helps provide daily lunches for over 20,000 Kenyan school children in 35 national public schools, and maintains solar-powered computer labs at 20 rural African schools.

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.

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.

Mattie Jackson draws on her experience of grieving the sudden death of her young husband to extend to you a safe and guided place to journey from devastating loss toward comfort and healing. Whether your sorrow is recent, or you’re still feeling the ache of a loved one’s absence, or you're lamenting a difficult situation, this book is an honest companion, validation for the hard days, and a sustaining guide to help soften the psychological stages of grief.

As a troubled teenager, Tamara Laroux just wants the pain to go away. Crying out to God for forgiveness, she makes the heart-wrenching decision to end her life. As she plummets from her body to a place of vast darkness, torment, and agony, Tamara instantly realizes the finality of her rash decision and begs God to save her.