Sadness
Sadness - Part 7: The God Who Turns Your Sorrow Into Dancing
Posted on Tuesday, June 2, 2026 at 12:00 AM
There is a morning that comes — not for every sadness, not on a schedule we can predict, but it comes — where you realize the weight in your chest has shifted. It has not disappeared entirely. Some of it may never fully leave this side of heaven. But something has changed. The sorrow is no longer the only thing defining you. There is air in the room again. There is a forward step that feels possible.Sadness - Part 6: When Sadness Lingers - The Danger of Isolation and Unprocessed Grief
Posted on Monday, June 1, 2026 at 12:00 AM
There is a moment in grief when the initial shock wears off and the real weight settles in. The cards have stopped coming. The meals have stopped arriving. Everyone around you has returned to their lives, and you are left standing in a room that still feels wrong - a chair that is empty, a silence that used to be a voice. This is where sadness becomes dangerous. Not because the emotion is wrong, but because what you do with it matters.Sadness - Part 5: Paul, Job, and Elijah — When God's Servants Were Deeply Sad
Posted on Sunday, May 31, 2026 at 12:00 AM
There is a version of the Christian life that looks effortless. The person of faith who never wavers, never weeps, never sits in the ashes of their own decisions or circumstances and wonders if God has forgotten them. That version of the Christian life does not actually exist in the Bible. Paul was sad. Repeatedly. Job was devastated. Elijah wanted to die. These are not obscure outliers — they are some of the most prominent faithful figures in Scripture.Sadness - Part 4: The Psalms of Sorrow — An Entire Prayer Book Built on Lament
Posted on Saturday, May 30, 2026 at 12:00 AM
If you grew up in a church that mostly sang praise songs, the Psalms can feel like a foreign country. There are songs of triumph, yes — Psalms 23, 91, 117. But there are also songs that feel uncomfortable to sing in public. Songs about feeling abandoned by God. Songs soaked in tears. Songs that sound more like a 3 a.m. conversation with a counselor than a Sunday morning anthem.Sadness - Part 3: Jesus Wept — The God Who Enters Into Your Sorrow
Posted on Friday, May 29, 2026 at 12:00 AM
There is a moment in the Gospel of John that should quietly wreck you. Jesus has just arrived at the village of Bethany. His friend Lazarus is dead. Mary and Martha meet Him on the road, and the text says something that seems almost redundant — something that, on the surface, tells us nothing we don’t already know: Jesus wept. John 11:35. The shortest verse in the entire Bible. Two words in the original Greek: Jesus wept.Sadness - Part 2: The Anatomy of Sadness — What It Is and What It Is Not
Posted on Thursday, May 28, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Somewhere along the way, sadness got a bad reputation in Christian circles. Not because the Bible condemns it — it doesn’t — but because we started confusing emotional honesty with spiritual failure. Like if you’re a mature Christian, you should be able to pray away the heaviness and move on. But that’s not how sadness works. And it’s not what the Bible models. Sadness is a natural response to loss. A relationship that ended.Sadness - Part 1: Sadness Is Not a Spiritual Failure
Posted on Wednesday, May 27, 2026 at 12:00 AM
This is the first post in our new series “Emotions and the God Who Meets Us in Them.” In our last series, we talked about anger. Today, we turn to a harder emotion — one the church has often struggled to name well. There is a particular kind of shame that comes when you are a Christian and you are sad. It shows up as an unspoken whisper — sometimes spoken aloud — that says you should be different than this.