There are times in life when hope wears thin—
when it is not slowly spent, but suddenly taken.
Moments when we are overtaken, as a ship is overtaken by a storm it did not see coming. What was once navigable turns without warning. The wind rises faster than response. The water presses from every side. And the vessel that moments ago still carried direction finds itself reduced to the work of staying above what is already pulling it down. There is no single blow. No clear failure to name. Only the growing certainty that what is happening cannot be stopped. Breath gives way. Strength follows. And the depths do not pause or ask permission.
Death is a thief. It does not only take the one it intends. It drags behind it a widening path of grief, pulling others into its wake—parents, children, friends—caught not by choice, but by nearness. Hearts are torn past the point of easy mending. And even when time returns, even when care is taken and threads are drawn back together, the repair is never invisible. The joining remains. Not as failure, but as memory—felt, seen, and carried
Loss comes dressed in other forms as well. Friends leave without explanation. Furry companions slip quietly from our sides. A life’s pursuit—a dream carefully tended, a calling slowly formed—is taken by another with a stronger résumé, or by someone practiced in self-promotion, and doubt enters where confidence once lived. Not loudly. Patiently. As if it had been waiting.
Words follow, as they always do.
In these seasons, untimely and often pushed from lips that lack discernment—not out of cruelty, but discomfort. Silence feels dangerous to those who are not standing in the storm. So hope is offered quickly, decisively—like a nail hammered into rock, struck again and again with confidence, though it has no place to go. The certainty belongs to the one holding the hammer, not to the surface receiving the blow.
They offer hope shaped by their own telling of theology—true words, yes, but rearranged. Framed not to bear weight, but to bring closure. Scripture pressed into a picture it was never meant to finish, meaning forced into a space where patience was required.
Some are spoken to wound. Others arrive as comfort, drawn from familiar proverbs and offered too soon, before grief has found its footing or learned how to stand.
God would never allow what you are going through unless you had done something wrong.
You need to remember Romans 8:28—He works all things for good.
As though God Himself authored the tragedy.
As though evil were simply misunderstood good.
As though grief were a problem of perspective.
Choose joy, you are told—spoken not as invitation, but correction. As if joy were something that could be summoned on command, rather than something that returns only when it is ready, and not a moment sooner.
And then—without warning, without effort—someone comes near.
They do not explain.
They do not defend God.
They do not hurry meaning into the space grief has claimed.
They remain.
An embrace arrives that does not attempt repair. A presence that does not ask for resolution. A friend who does not rearrange sorrow into something manageable, but is willing to stand inside it with you—without flinching, without retreat.
They gather the words that never learned how to form—the ones that exist only as tears. They allow grief its place. Not hidden. Not rushed. Not corrected.
And here, something true becomes visible.
A God who laughs with those who laugh and weeps with those who weep. A God who does not chastise mourners for their pain, who does not demand emotional restraint. Tears held even in the shortest verse—standing at the grave of a friend, weeping, without explanation.
I do not see sorrow rebuked.
I do not see pain hurried away.
I see compassion.
Love.
Kindness.
No insistence on moving past what has been lost. No demand that grief justify itself or make itself useful.
In times of distress, care is required. Not conclusions. Not borrowed certainty. Not treatments offered before the wound has even been seen.
In uncertain seasons, the truest thing we can do is walk with them.
A shoulder offered in silence often carries more weight
than words spoken too quickly—
and landing where they were never meant to fall.
© 2025 Steven Scott. All Rights Reserved.
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