Seasons of Sorrow: The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God

Hey, friends, David Robbins here, president of Family Life. And I so appreciate when I get comments from partners like this one.

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Oh yeah. And it marked her. I watched my parents go through that same loss with my sister. And it changes someone forever, especially as a parent as you go through it. I mean, I was a sister and it marked me and your brother, it marked you.

And it's hard. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com or on the Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. So today we're going to talk about hope and grief, walking through grief, comfort and grief.

And we've got a couple in here who walked that journey. Tim and Aileen Shelly's are here and first time on Family Life Today, right? So welcome, guys. Thanks. And it's sort of interesting, first time Aileen's been with you, Tim, right, to do an interview?

Yeah. I mean, you're world famous. You travel the world. You're on all these programs. But Aileen is often at home taking care of all the stuff that you're leaving behind. But today we got you both. So I'm pretty excited. Are you Aileen?

I don't know. This look is sort of like... Daring headlights a little bit. Well, we're glad you're here. But Tim, you're a famous blogger. You started blogging before blogging was cool even. You made blogging a thing. I don't know if it was ever cool, but yeah, so I've been doing it for a very long time now. Yeah, and it's chalies.com.

You got it. And thousands a day. I've been reading some of your blogs and I'd love to talk about several different...

I mean, if you guys want to spend the whole day here in Orlando, we could do this all day. But obviously, this book we're going to talk about today, Seasons of Sorrow, the Pain of Loss, and the Comfort of God. Tell us your story.

Maybe the place to begin is with the Lord granting us three lovely children. We were young when we got married and... How young? We were 21. I was 21.

Aileen was 22. He loves to pull that out. What, that you're older? That I'm older. Yeah.

Seven months. That means she's more mature than you. You're right. Absolutely. And more wise.

Of course. So that's us pretty quickly with Nick. He was born within a couple years of us getting married. And he was joined a little bit later by Abby, Abigail, who was born about two years after Nick. And then finally, Michaela. And so today, Michaela is 16. She's finishing up high school this year. Abby is 20 and she's married to Nate.

They live in Louisville, Kentucky. And then Nick is, I think, who we're here to speak about today. And Nick went to be with the Lord in November of 2020. Yeah, take us back to that day. Obviously, I've read it through Seasons of Sorrow, which you sort of wrote chronologically, right, from sort of that moment on.

But take us back to November 2020. Nick was a student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was newly engaged to a sweet young lady named Rin. He was doing just really well in life. He was an assistant resident advisor at his college. And so he had to lead the students in some games. They went to a park to play a game. And for reasons that we still don't really know, he just collapsed and was gone.

Nobody could revive him. And so that entered us into this season of grief, this season of loss. And the way I work things through in life is to write about it. That's how I write through joys and pains and everything in between. And so even on that first evening as we were trying to figure out what to do and we eventually managed to find a flight that would take us down to Louisville so we could be with our daughter down there, I just started to write.

And eventually over time that writing sort of led into the beginning of Seasons of Sorrow. Aileen, what was that like? I'm assuming you guys got a call? Yeah, the first thing we knew that something was wrong, Abby's fiancé, then her boyfriend texted us, texted me actually, and just said that Nick had collapsed and they weren't sure what was going on.

I was on the couch at home and I remember leaping to my feet. And we didn't know at that point how serious it was. Abby was there, but she hadn't texted us at that point at all. Was she with him? Were they both with him? Yeah, both Rin and Abby were with them. Both Hall's, Nick's Hall and Abby's Hall, which was Nick's sister hall, was at the park with them. So there was a lot of kids there.

Ugh, but that is a parent's nightmare. You don't even know what's going on, first of all. And then how did you find out? Well, it was also in the middle of a pandemic. So the borders were closed at the time, I suppose. Oh. So it was complicated.

Yeah, it was at that point in time the borders were largely closed, at least it was forbidden to drive across the borders. And so there were all these other complications. But yeah, we found out what Aileen said, that there were some things going on. And then eventually we got a call from the hospital, just a doctor who had said that they had done everything they could, but unfortunately there was nothing more they can do and Nick was gone.

And so yeah, that came as a complete shock and surprise to us. There was no reason to think Nick had been ill. There was nothing he did, nothing he took, nothing had been done to him. He's a healthy young man.

Healthy young man, just literally his heart stopped for reasons that are unknown and undiagnosed. What was going on in your home between that first text or call when you jumped off the couch? Was it a long time before? I mean, you're not there. One of the strange things about this whole grief journey is that I have very few memories of the first three months.

And I think it's the Lord's way of protecting me, which I am so grateful for. I do have snapshots, but I don't have a cohesive timeline for three months. And so I remember bits and pieces of that night, but not that much, thankfully, which I'm very thankful for. That period of time between we got, I don't know, it seemed very short in some ways, but I don't think it was. We immediately called Paul.

Once you got our pastor, our senior pastor, the first thing we did was call him. And you guys are living in Toronto at that time. So your kids are in the United States, you're in Canada, and you can't get to the United States? We couldn't drive. We could fly, but we couldn't drive over the border. And at this point in time, almost all the flights are canceled, right? Almost all the airlines have grounded their fleets. If you go back to November 2020, it was right at the height of everything being shut down, the world being shut down.

They hadn't started reopening things yet, et cetera. So it was a very difficult time. Thankfully, we were able to eventually get a flight that would take us down in a relatively short order. But it was a very difficult time.

And I think what Aileen said is true. We, in a sense, purposely haven't gone back and tried to relive that night. We're content to allow those memories fade in time. And I think that's one of the features God builds into our finite humanity, is if we don't really ponder things, they slide away.

Many of those things drift out of our mind. And in this case, we're generally content for that to happen, at least those details, because it was just such a painful evening. But you also have the trauma of your daughter who's there. And I'm sure you're thinking of and carrying that in your mind, too, of how can you care for her?

I mean, there was some of that that night. Tim's family lives in Georgia. And so I had called one of his sisters and basically told her, I think I need you to go to be with Abby. I can't have Abby by herself because at that point we weren't sure if we were going to be able to make it down or not. So there were options. And we have a couple of friends we know of down south, one lovely couple, who right when Nick first went down to Boyce told me if I ever need anything, here's my phone number, text me, because she had had her husband far away and just knew that distance and sending someone you love so far away to a different place was really hard. And so we did have some contacts we could rely on, which I was so thankful for.

And that family actually became very important later on to us, to Abby in particular. So we did have options, but it just wasn't ideal. But death never really is ideal. And what you want, of course, is to be together. You just want to gather all your people together, be together, to cry together, to love one another, and just to be in the same space at the same time.

And it did happen much faster than we would have thought, thankfully. But, yeah, we just wanted to be there. So we've been talking a lot about your son, Nick. But we want to know him. Like, if you had to share this is who our boy was, what would you say?

Yeah, that's actually one of the hardest questions I get asked. I can talk about myself and my grief, but to talk about Nick is really hard for me. So he was my firstborn. So he was born in March of 2000. And he was my first baby, so I didn't know what I was doing at all. But he was really the most delightful little guy. He was always smiling. He was exuberant. He loved garbage trucks when he was little.

Typical boy. As he grew up, he was always so very introspective. So he was always looking at himself and trying to figure out how he could do life better, I think. He was always concerned about doing the right thing. He was one of the kindest people I know. He was very sarcastic in a typical Canadian fashion, which I think sometimes came across as a little bit abrasive. And he was very, very quirky, which was always delightful.

He didn't have the easiest time in high school, I would say. But he was always very firm in his faith. He came to Christ at, I think, about 13 and never really looked back at that point. And when he went off to Boyce College, he had determined that he wanted to be a pastor. And he went there determined to serve well.

And I think he did. And he met Rin down there, who has become a daughter in so many ways, which I am so very thankful for. Nick chose so well in Rin. She really was perfect for him. And they were engaged. And they were engaged. They had been engaged for about three months, I think, before he passed away. And they were in the midst of planning their wedding. And he would have not been happy having so many people talking about him at all.

We laugh often with some of the things to kind of argue about who's going to get to tell him what's going on down here when we get to heaven, because he will not be amused that he has a book written about him at all. So, yeah, he had his faults and he had his insecurities, but he really was just a wonderful, wonderful person. And I miss him an awful lot. He was a great big brother. He was such a good big brother.

I travel a fair bit. And whenever I was on the road, Nick would always get in touch with Aileen. Even once he was down at college, he would get in touch with her and make sure she was doing okay, give her a call every day. Really? Every day?

Every day. He had a real compassionate heart, especially for Mom. He was so dutiful. So, if he felt like that was the right thing to do, he would do it. He would be the only guy at the prayer meetings at his school sometimes, but he would still pray because he felt that's what he was supposed to do. So, he had that high sense of duty.

But I'm just starting to travel again. And so, Aileen still finds herself on those days when I'm gone waiting for that phone call that now doesn't come. And so, there are these little reminders, little tripwires we come across in life where we just still sense that loss and where it still just seems so unbelievable that he's gone. But I'm sure if Nick would want to be remembered for anything, it would simply be as a forgiven sinner who loved the Lord and received His forgiveness and truly, in his own way, wanted to live for His glory.

He was a sinner saved by grace. And you started writing, blogging, really, the day he died, the day after? Yeah, the evening Nick passed away, we were on a plane heading south, and I just started to write then. And partly that was because word was getting out.

I needed to just say something on my website to let people know what had happened. And so, that was the first thing I wrote. But then just sort of jotting down just other notes, other pieces of information as they came to mind. And then just in the days that followed, I had to write an obituary, of course, and had to write some of my own thoughts.

I had to write a little speech for the memorial service that was held on campus. So, it was very immediate. And really, the entire book is written in real time through that first year. And probably never intending it to be a book. No, not until it was well underway. These were meditations for me or for the readers of my blog, just kind of telling them what was going on.

But no, there's no thought of it being a book for quite some time. Yeah, walk us through the grief journey as a parent and maybe even as a married couple. Because I watched my mom. My mom and dad were divorced. So, I was really with my mom and I watched her. And watching the different approaches that people take toward grief is interesting. Because my mom was sort of, let's not talk about it.

Let's sort of just keep it quiet. My dad was differently, but he wasn't around. So, just walk through, what was your journey like? We learned that people process grief very differently. Sort of like you just said. If we talk about love languages as we do, we can talk about grief languages, I think, where we just process things very differently. And some need to externalize it all. That's how they work through it. And some do that through the written page.

Some do that through just speaking. Some people process entirely internally. Some people want to read vast amounts of literature on it and just try and put the pieces together in that theoretical sense. I had somebody write me recently who lost a child and she said she's read 22 books on grief since her child died.

I know many other people who would never pick up a book on grief again in their lives. And so, we all process it differently. And then we found out that a lot of it is related to roles. So, a dad is going to process grief different from a mom or a man differently from a woman or a brother than a sister.

And so, all of that makes sense. But I think the challenge comes, you've got to be careful you're not expecting everyone to process it in the same way you're processing it. As if this is the objectively right way to do it.

And if you do it differently, there must be something wrong with you. And I think we encountered that a few times where we just had to give the other person a lot of room to grieve in their way. That was probably the best piece of advice that we got very, very early on. We had a dad who wrote you a letter in the very beginning. And he laid out a lot of those things that you need to give your wife space because she's going to take a lot longer than you will to grieve this. And you're going to just grieve it very differently.

And that was the one thing that stuck out a ton right in the very beginning and was so helpful to us in our marriage. Because then we could look and say, okay, it isn't that he doesn't care anymore. Because that's the temptation when he's not moved on, but just moved forward faster than you as a wife. That it feels like he doesn't care anymore. And to realize that, no, he's just different than I am.

And I have to give him that space and it isn't that he doesn't care. And that was super important for me just to remember. What did that look like for you, Alene? Because, Tim, you're writing. And that's helpful for you. Did you like that he was writing about it? So, I knew that that was how he was going to process this. And that's how Tim's processed his entire life is through the written word and through the blog.

He always says he doesn't know what he thinks about something until he writes about it. And so, I very much knew that that was the case. I struggled a little bit in the beginning with the book only because it felt like it was one story. It wasn't the entire story.

But Tim's been so gracious throughout the whole thing to make that very clear to everybody that this is his experience of it. And so, that's where, yeah, it was fine after that. Well, how did you process it? So, I wouldn't say that I've processed it completely. I talked a little bit about how I look at it very on the peripheral. Yeah, what does that mean? I don't face it straight on.

Oh. I can't. I find that if I dwell on it too much, it consumes me. You're overwhelmed. So, I need to glance at it and then go on my way and do the rest of life and then come back to it again.

So, I'm processing it in tiny little increments where Tim just poured it all out in a year. It's just a very different way of dealing with it. I just know myself well enough to know that if I were to do that, I don't know that I would recover.

I totally agree. When my sister passed away, she's my best friend. She was 45. I was 39. And I'm still a mom. I still have life to do, and I think that I would have been so overwhelmed, exactly, that I'm afraid that I couldn't have even gone on because you get swallowed up in your grief.

And so, it's that same kind of idea of there's little chunks of it at a time. And I found worship felt so overwhelming. It was so beautiful, but it felt like it was coming head on, exposing my soul and exposing the pain. I couldn't sing. I could listen, but I couldn't get words out. I think that's very typical.

You do. We've talked to a fair number of people now, and music, for whatever reason, speaks to your soul in ways that other things don't. And that was the hardest and continues at times to be the hardest part of church for us, is certain songs and certain types of worship. Really, we battle through that.

Not battle. I mean, it's a good thing, but it's just a hard thing. You feel that too, Tim? We have all these wonderful songs that we sing as Christians, and the best of our songs tell a story. So many of the great hymns of the faith, they begin with our sin, and they move to our salvation, and then they speak of the glories to come and the blessed, joyful reunions we're going to experience. Now, it's one thing to sing those songs when you've never had a grievous loss. It's another thing to sing those songs when you're not just this abstract reunion, but it's a reunion with your child, a reunion with your spouse, a reunion with your sister. And so I found I could sing the first two or three stanzas of a song just fine, but as it progresses into those truths, the joy of heaven, the joy of reunion, that's where I would so often break down. And so I just learned to cry in worship, cry in singing, and it just has to be okay. And I think there's something just deep and worshipful, even about that expression of emotion. That's healing.

I think there's a healing in that as well. Yeah, I know that when Anne was walking through her sister's death, I'm pastoring, and I played in the band, so I'd be on stage playing the worship. But I remember the first time I wasn't in the band, I was standing beside Anne, and I was like, oh my goodness, she is weeping.

And I was always participating, so I didn't experience it like that. I'm like, it is an emotional, like you said, the lyric and the music and the art just digs deeper. And when you're walking through grief, it's so interesting, isn't it?

I don't know what happens. It's like God is able to prick your soul. It's just it comes alive, and you feel everything magnified.

Is that what you're saying? Yeah, and that's the power of music, because music is taking truths, but wrapping them in this packaging that just engages the whole person in a different way. And that's why music can be used so well and so poorly, because you can use music to really manipulate people and manipulate them through their emotions. But also when you're combining the greatest truths with just powerful lyrics, wonderful music, that is just a great packaging. And it makes sense when you look at the glories of what's to come in the book of Revelation, how much of it is about singing, right? How much is this great heavenly choir?

It makes sense. Yeah, it's beautiful. I remember one day I was preaching at one of our campuses at church, and my son was preaching at a different campus, so I got done earlier, and I came and snuck in the back to hear my son preach. And I'll never forget this moment as they went into a worship song after the message. I saw this couple 20 rows ahead of me who were pretty cold it looked like. For some reason, my eyes caught them.

I'm like, ah, they're struggling. Anne and I do marriage stuff and conferences, so I caught this. And as this song continued, I saw his arm go around her, and they embraced during this worship song, and I thought, none of that happened in the message. But in that moment of music and ascribing worth to God, something that the spoken word couldn't do did.

And I'm guessing that's what you're saying, and grief especially, when you're feeling you need God's comfort, it sort of hits you that way? Yeah, and I would say to broaden it even a little bit more, a well-constructed worship service from beginning to end tells its own story. And so you begin with, let's say, a call to worship.

You're telling people you've been living in this world. Let's just block off this hour and a half, and we're just going to focus on the Lord. So you're calling people to worship, and then you start to sing, and then maybe you're confessing your sins together, and you're receiving God's forgiveness together, and you're singing some more, and then there's this truth poured out through the message.

And then those final songs are always the most glorious of all, because it's just the culmination of everything. It's a response, yeah. The response, and now you're just being sent out back into the world for another week, and there's a promise, we'll be back here again next week, and we'll do this thing again. There's the pastor in you coming out right there. There you go.

There you go. But worship is such an important way of recovering from loss. We've said so often, how could we have done this without the local church? How could we have gone through this, endured what we've endured without the church? And that's the people of the church.

It's all these good things, all these ways the church cares for you, but it's the worship of the church that we needed so badly. Yeah, how did you walk through your journey with Community? How was Community a part of that? It was COVID.

Oh my goodness, you're right. In Canada. In Canada means? It was different than the experience if you live south of the border, and then depending on your state, very, very different experience. So when Nick passed away, we had to come home and we had to quarantine for two weeks, and that meant nobody passed our doorstep.

Wow. So we were essentially by ourselves for two weeks, then we could have his funeral. So we did two weeks at home, had his funeral, and then the next day we made the decision to fly out to Banff, Alberta. Could anyone go to the funeral?

Actually, the day of his funeral was the day a new law came in where you could not have more than 50 people at a funeral. So we talked to the funeral home and we said, well, we're hosting it at a church. If you would be willing to just leave the property, then we can call it a church service, which means we can have a thousand people in this building. So can you just leave? And they said, well, that's not what we do.

We bring the casket to the church and we stay with it. I said, well, just leave. And so they left, and that meant we could call it a worship service and we could have people. But after that point, they wouldn't have done that again, and so we would have had 50 people there. And did a lot come?

Yeah, yeah. I don't know how many, but the room was full. That's sweet. They all had to be socially distanced and separated, so there was no receiving line and all that other stuff. You asked about community, and I want to say two things. First, the Christian community, both our local church community and the wider Christian community were absolutely incredible. We benefited so much from their love and their care, and they surrounded us, they prayed for us. More than anything, they prayed for us, and sometimes we just really felt upheld by prayer, and that was absolutely wonderful. I do want to say as well that our local community, not Christians in our community, but just our neighbors, were every bit as helpful and engaging.

So they were praying for us, but they were caring for our needs and going to the store for us and bringing us food, and it was just lovely to see a local community come together as well, not just a Christian community, but just people being lovely, being helpful, giving. And was that something that was helpful for you as a husband and wife? I mean, as you walk through this, you're not walking through it, we already said, alone, and you're processing it differently.

How did it impact your marriage? One of the things we've learned about grief is that it is, in a lot of ways, very lonely. And a lot of that is because it's something you just have to kind of do on your own because everybody's so unique and individual.

And that's one thing we hear about a ton is people talk about how lonely grief is. In terms of our marriage, I think we've done well, but we've definitely processed it separately. I don't know that we've processed it together.

And a lot of that is, some of that's personality, some of that's my inability to face it flat on and stare it down the way Tim has. But I think our marriage is still strong coming out of it, but I don't know that we've, would you say we've processed it together? We haven't gone to a grief retreat with the two of us and just really confronted it in that way.

Neither do we really feel the need for it. I think we've processed it together in the sense that we're married and we've lived through it together and we've talked about it lots and all of that. But I agree with what you say about the loneliness of grief. And I think a lot of that is because you simply can't express so much of what's going on inside and that you realize that death is a stranger in this world, that your mind, your heart just don't have the capacity to really understand it and to make sense of it.

We weren't created by God's design to experience loss. And so it's really beyond us. And so when it comes time to say, somebody will say, how are you feeling?

I don't know. I can't. I just don't have the words. I work with words all day and I don't have the words to express what's really going on in my heart. So of course it's going to be lonely if I can't really express it. They can't really bring comfort.

It's just the nature of it. And yet when I was reading, these are your words, it's too much today. It's too heavy, too sad, too sorrowful. I'm drowning. I'm overwhelmed. I'm going under.

I need an angel to come and minister to me in this garden of grief. And it goes on, but I remember reading that. And I think if you've experienced grief, everybody resonates with that, of just the authenticity and rawness of those feelings. I can't imagine for you, Aileen, if even you probably knew how Tim was doing through reading his writing. Or did you read it? No, I did read some things that came out, but often I just simply couldn't.

It was too much for me. I'm going to go really quickly back to the concept of loneliness. And I think in some ways in grief, God uses that to have us rely solely on Him. So when you talk about that particular passage and the idea of the angels coming to minister, we saw so many times where God gave us what we needed, the support that we needed in whatever moment that we were really struggling in. And so it wasn't people we were relying on to comfort us in that way. It was really ended up being the Lord and Him giving us what we needed in those moments. And I think that's in part why grief feels so lonely, but that it turns us to God and wanting Him to be the one that's going to give us that comfort. I mean, if there's a married couple listening right now that's gone through a tragedy like this, either one of you, what would you say to them?

How would you speak words to them? I think the first thing we'd want to communicate is you can do it. And that was something someone communicated to us early on. And it was just helpful to have them say that because they were saying, we went through it and you will emerge into something beyond that's still okay. This isn't the end of your life. This isn't the end of your calling. I think the specific words he used were you'll never get over it, but you'll learn to get on with it, which means you'll never, of course, you'll never forget to your child. You'll never fully recover from your loss, but you will get on with life.

There will be a new normal waiting for you eventually, and you'll come to it. And that was just really encouraging. So we'd want people to know you can do this. The Lord will equip you.

He'll bless you. And then I think probably just to be very, very patient and kind to one another, what'd you say? Yeah, that's where I was going to go next, was just to be super patient with yourself. It's okay that you're struggling with this. It's not something that is easy. And I think there's so often you feel like you're not a good Christian because you're battling, feeling this way. And we've learned that we have to walk in tandem. The grief is there and the joy is also there.

And you have to learn to walk with them both present. And you can't assume the days that the grief takes over, that those days are days that you're not a faithful Christian because that's just not true at all. Yeah, the Bible gives us just this wonderful picture of Jesus grieving, right?

Jesus standing outside the tomb of his dear friend Lazarus. And we all know the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. And it's just so comforting to know that Jesus wept. And then we go on reading the New Testament and we find that he can truly sympathize with us because he has been tempted.

He's gone through all the humanity we've been through, all the experiences of humanity. And so we do have a God who's sympathetic and a God who's with us in our grief and who knows what it is to experience loss. Presumably Jesus lost his father somewhere along the way as well.

He lost Joseph, we presume. And so he knows what it is to grieve and it's okay to truly, truly grieve because these things truly are horrendous and truly inconsistent with the way God made this world to be. What a comfort to know and understand that Christ understands that you're not alone in your sorrow and your grief. There's comfort in knowing that you're known in your mourning over whatever it may be, from a huge loss like Tim and Aileen were talking about to smaller ones.

You are known. What an important reminder from two really special guests. I'm Shelby Abbott, and you've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Tim and Aileen Chalies on Family Life Today. Tim and Aileen have written a book called Seasons of Sorrow, The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God. You can pick up a copy at familylifetoday.com or you could give us a call at 800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word today. You know, May is a special time for all of us here at Family Life.

Not only is it springtime, which I personally love, but it's a unique month that God has blessed us with. So go ahead and tell our listener a little bit more about that, Dave. Yeah, we're in the middle of our May match donor campaign where we're inviting people to join our family and become a financial partner with Family Life, which is a recurring monthly gift to Family Life. And some of you have never given before, and we're asking you, come and be a part of our family because we want to impact everyone around us, families, parenting. We all need these resources and you can help us.

And I'm guessing you want to impact your neighbors and family members as well. And I tell you what, I don't know if you understand, this ministry happens because people like you say, I want to be a partner. I want to jump in, not just once a year, but every month. And I don't know if we said this, but it's doubled. Whatever you give is going to be doubled for the next year. And you get some insider stuff. You get a Weekend to Remember gift card.

You can go to the Marriage Getaway or give that away. You get insider emails. You learn about where God's taken this ministry before anybody else. You deserve it. You get a devotional.

There are so many things that you get access to. Come and be a part of it. To find out more, go to familylifetoday.com. Yeah, as Ann said, you can head over to familylifetoday.com or you can give us a call at 800-358-6329. Again, the number is 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And if you'd like, you could feel free to drop us something in the mail.

Our address is Family Life, 100 Lakehart Drive, Orlando, Florida, 32832. Now, tomorrow, Tim and Aileen Challies are going to be with us again to talk about how to take care of someone who is suffering in their grief. How do we give hope for someone's grief?

How do we help them find peace in believing that God is sovereign, that He's good, and He's in control? We'll talk about that tomorrow. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of David and Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.