Good grief.

the monthly letter

Grief is not a gentleman.

It doesn’t tiptoe (at least not often), nor does it knock at the door and wait. Grief more often comes like an unexpected thunderstorm on a bright summer day. Or sometimes, for longer stretches, it becomes the long rainy-season drizzle as the backdrop to your laundry-folding and grocery shopping and attending meetings and teaching little fingers to tie shoes. There … just there.

SOAR subscribers: after I sent this same note to you all and received feedback in the comments and offline, I went back to Zondervan and asked permission to resend this to all of my readers. They obliged and I chose to include you in this second send — because I know Mayhem / Maycember (our affectionate names for the wildly-full month of May) can cause people like me to need to see things twice before I metabolize them 😉.

We often want to shuffle grief into its appropriate place: it’s ok to grieve after the loss of someone you love, but not for decades. Don’t grieve old things — they’re over. Don’t grieve small things — you might become Eeyore. 

We have unspoken rules about grief that, when you open the Bible, don’t appear to match what God says about grief. “He comforts those who mourn” (Matthew 5:4), for example.

I wonder if we form these rules out of our fear of this ungentlemanly presence and what it might do.

The chapter from The Gift of Limitations I have heard about most from readers is Chapter 6: Good Grief! The Power of Grief to Grow Our Surrender. I asked my publisher if I could share the audio version of this chapter with you, and they said YES! (They also permitted me to give you permission to share this chapter with your friends — so forward away.) Also included at the end of this chapter: my impromptu adoration (more of which are sprinkled throughout the full audiobook).

Here it is below.

The Gift of Limitations Audiobook Chapter Six

Until next month,

Sara