The Work that Found Me

I didn’t set out to work in grief.

If you had asked me twenty years ago what I thought my life would look like, I might have given you something tidy. Something with clearer edges. The former teacher in me would definitely appreciate a plan with milestones you could point to and say, there—progress!

But grief doesn’t follow plans. And neither, it turns out, does the work of the soul.

It began quietly, the way most meaningful things do.

A conversation here and a loss there. Sitting beside someone in a moment that felt too heavy for words. I didn’t have training yet, or language for what I was doing. I only knew how to stay...how to listen...how to not turn away when things got uncomfortable.

There were times I questioned it. Times I wondered if I was doing enough, saying enough, being enough. Grief has a way of humbling you like that. It strips away performance. It asks you to come as you are, without scripts or certainty.

And over time, I began to trust that.

To trust that presence is powerful and that listening is an offering.

That light doesn’t always arrive as a blaze, it can comes as a small, steady glow that says, stay… you’re not alone here.

Looking back now, I can see the thread.

Every conversation and every moment of sitting beside someone in the unknown, it was all leading here. Not to a destination, but to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human with one another, and to see God working in your life.

This work is not about guiding people out of grief.

It’s about walking with them inside it.

It’s about honoring that love and loss are forever intertwined, and that the presence of one is evidence of the other.

And it’s about holding a quiet belief (sometimes on behalf of someone else) that even here, especially here, light lives.

Order Light Lives Here: Finding Hope in the Valley of Grief HERE.