Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day at numbness, silence.

Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein.

Don't get me wrong: grief sucks, it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit.

So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?

a hospital for the broken, not a museum for the perfect.

A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out" (Isaiah 42:3).

When you have a major loss in your life, the first thing you need to do is tell God exactly how you feel.

For the life of the believer, one thing is beautifully and abundantly true: God's chief concern in your suffering is to be with you and be himself for you.

You would not ask someone with a broken arm to swim the English Channel, so you cannot demand that the broken to live as if they were whole.

Grief is a form of validation; it says the wound mattered. It mattered. You mattered. That's not the way life was supposed to go.

God knows the burdens you carry and the tears you shed. He is the healer of broken hearts, broken dreams and broken lives. Trust Him; He never fails.

Considering myself called of my God to instruct the ignorant, comfort the sorrowful, confirm the weak, and rebuke the proud; by tongue and lively voice in these corrupt days rather than to compose books for the age to come, seeing that so much is written, and yet so little well observed, I decree to contain myself within the bounds of that vocation whereunto I found myself especially called.