Hello Friend,

I've been thinking and processing about how hard we work to be okay. We read books, listen to podcasts, save encouraging quotes, and remind ourselves to choose joy, look for the good, practice gratitude, and keep moving forward...oh wait, and find purpose in it all so we can minister to others.

Trust me, none of those things are bad, and they are all important, but lately I've been wondering if we've taken this whole positivity thing a little too far. We've become experts at cheerleading ourselves into a better frame of mind, sometimes while completely ignoring the messy, painful underside of real life.

There are plenty of days when I want to throw my hands up and say, "I'm not strong enough to manage all of this." It's not because I've lost faith, I'm ungrateful, or I've forgotten that God is good; sometimes life is just really, really hard.

I'm tired of feeling like I need to put a positive spin on it all. Maybe that's why I haven't shown up in this space in a while.

Have you ever felt this way?

It feels like everywhere we turn, there's a message telling us to cope, cope, cope... find the good, choose joy, and keep going. As if we can spray a little perfume on our pain and make it smell like something beautiful.

But what happens when we can't find the good? We're too exhausted to look for the lesson, and the loss is still a loss, and the disappointment still hurts.

What if we're just sad?

I've noticed how quickly we try to move ourselves or others out of those feelings. We tell ourselves or others we shouldn't be this upset, and we think about how other people have it worse. We search for something to be grateful for so we can feel better about feeling bad.

Then, before we know it, we're not just carrying the weight of whatever we're going through; we're also carrying the added burden of believing we shouldn't be struggling with it in the first place.

When did sadness become something we needed to apologize for?

What if the world has grief all wrong?

Romans 12:2 tells us:

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

I've always thought about this verse in terms of the obvious ways the world pulls us away from God, but lately I've been thinking about how it applies to grief, too.

What if one of the patterns of this world is the expectation that we should always be okay? What if we've been following the pattern of this world when it comes to grief? What if we were not meant to find the silver lining, stay strong, and keep our sadness from making other people uncomfortable?

We live in a culture that loves a comeback story. We admire people who overcome adversity and come out stronger on the other side, and those stories are beautiful. Parts of my story include a beautiful plot twist.

But what about the days before the comeback? The days when we’re still in the thick of it? The days when we don’t feel strong, when healing seems painfully slow, and when we can’t yet see how God might bring something good from what has happened?

Do those days count for less? I don’t think so.

Perhaps not conforming to the pattern of this world means refusing to measure our grief by the world’s expectations. It means recognizing we don’t have to rush our healing to make other people comfortable. We can stop treating sadness like a problem to solve and start seeing it as a human emotion that deserves compassion. It means allowing God to renew our minds with His truth rather than the world’s timeline for getting over our pain.

We don't have to pretend we're okay to prove our faith is strong.

Faith doesn’t mean pretending it doesn’t hurt.

When I look at Scripture, I see a God who makes room for the whole of our humanity. David poured out his anguish in the Psalms. Jeremiah lamented. Job questioned. Even Jesus wept. God didn’t ask them to put on a happy face before they came to Him. He invited them to bring Him the truth.

The sadness. The questions. The disappointment. The things they couldn’t understand.

And I think we need that reminder: We can love God and still have hard days. We can be grateful and still grieve. We can trust Him and still feel afraid of what comes next. We can believe His promises and still struggle to feel them in the middle of our circumstances.

None of those things makes our faith less real. God can be faithful, and life can still hurt.

Both things can be true.

Why I wrote The Freedom to Feel

This is why I wrote my book, The Freedom to Feel: Finding God in Grief and Trauma. After walking through years of loss and trauma, I began to understand how easy it is to feel like we’re supposed to move through grief a certain way. To find the lesson. To look for the good. To get back on our feet and keep going. But grief isn’t always neat and tidy. It doesn’t follow a timeline, and it doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes we feel sadness, anger, confusion, relief, gratitude, and even joy all in the same day. Sometimes we feel close to God. Other times, we wonder where He is. And sometimes, we’re simply exhausted by the weight of it all.

In a recent podcast, I was reminded. I didn’t write my book because I figured out how to make grief easier or discovered a formula for turning pain into something beautiful.I wrote it because I needed the reminder that God wasn’t asking me to hide my messy emotions from Him. He was inviting me to bring them into His presence.

I wanted others to know they didn’t have to choose between their faith and their feelings. They could invite God into their grief rather than feeling like they had to get through it before they could experience His presence. We don’t have to turn every hard thing into a testimony before we’re allowed to admit that it hurts.

Sometimes, we need to sit with the hurt for a while and allow God to minister to us. Not because we’re choosing to stay there forever, but because we’re allowing ourselves to acknowledge where we are today. Hope doesn’t require us to deny what’s hard. It reminds us that what’s hard isn’t the whole story.

Maybe caring for ourselves sometimes looks less like another pep talk and more like offering ourselves the same compassion we’d offer a friend sitting across from us at the kitchen table. We wouldn’t tell her to hurry up and be happy. We’d listen. We’d make room for her tears. We’d remind her that she doesn’t have to figure everything out today.

Why is it so hard to offer ourselves that same kindness?

I’m still learning this myself.

With love,

P.S. If you’re walking through grief or trauma and need the reminder that you don’t have to hide your messy emotions from God, that’s why I wrote The Freedom to Feel: Finding God in Grief and Trauma. My hope is that these pages will help you discover that you can bring God your whole heart: the broken, hurting, questioning parts, and find Him present with you along the way.