What do you do when life changes in an instant—and you’re left holding grief while still caring for others?

In this deeply compassionate episode of the Collide Podcast, we sit down with Clarissa Moll, grief advocate, author, and widow, to talk honestly about loss, parenting through grief, and finding hope when the future feels unrecognizable. After the sudden death of her husband while raising four young children, Clarissa learned firsthand how isolating grief can be—and how essential community, faith, and honesty are in the healing process.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• Why grief is not something we “get over,” but something we learn to carry
• How children experience and re-experience grief at different stages of life
• The difference between healthy and unhealthy compartmentalization in parenting
• Why fixing grief doesn’t help—but presence does
• How to support grieving children without overwhelming them
• What it looks like to ask for help when you’re exhausted and hurting
• How faith can survive honest questions, anger, and lament
• Why hope isn’t found in pretending pain doesn’t exist—but in trusting God within it

Clarissa also shares powerful insights on memory sharing, community support, and how grief and joy can coexist—reminding us that suffering does not get the final word.

If you’re navigating loss, walking alongside a grieving child, or wrestling with faith after heartbreak, this episode will remind you that you are not alone—and that healing doesn’t mean forgetting, but learning how to live again.

About Our Guest:

Clarissa Moll is a grief advocate, speaker, and author who specializes in helping individuals and families find hope after loss. She is the author of four books on grief and faith and has created bereavement resources for parents and children navigating loss together. Clarissa is passionate about helping people move from survival to flourishing—without minimizing their pain.

How This Episode Will Encourage You

This episode offers compassionate grief support, practical tools for parenting through grief, and faith-filled hope for anyone navigating the loss of a loved one. You’ll walk away feeling seen, equipped, and reminded that even in deep sorrow, God meets us with tenderness, truth, and healing.

Connect with Clarissa - Website | Instagram | Substack

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Hey there. Welcome to the Collide Podcast. So glad you hopped on.

We have so much going on for you to check out, so make sure you go to our website at wecollide.net if you want to hear about our latest conferences, our counseling program, or any of the resources that we have. If you love this podcast and, and you keep finding yourself coming back to it, make sure that you join the community of people who subscribe to it.

It will be in your inbox every single Wednesday and you and I can hang out. I would love that so much. Today we are talking about grief.

Don't fast forward because I said that, because it sounds like a bummer and a downer, because I promise you, this was one of the most uplifting conversations I've ever had about grief.

And the truth is, is that we all go through hard times and we all, whether it's a death, whether it's the loss of a friendship with the loss of a dream or a career and whatever it may be. And we had this amazing grief expert on today, and I'm going to hand you her interview.

Her name's Clarissa Mole and she has done so much grief advocacy.

She shares so authentically her own story of grief, how she lost her husband and she was a single mom of four kids, and what it looked like to attend to her own grief and her children's grief. And I promise you, if you have anyone, if you're not currently grieving but you, you have anyone in your life that is.

She dropped so many gems of wisdom. Check it out. Clarissa, so fun to have you on the Clyde podcast today.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. You have become a grief advocate and you specialize in helping individuals find hope and healing after loss.

And I think that's so interesting because as little girls, you know, we don't go. You know what? I really dreamed to grow up and be a grief advocate because I had a lot of experience with grief.

So how did you find yourself becoming sort of like this? Maybe you don't call yourself this, but a grief expert helping other people through grief?

Well, I think you're right that nobody signs up to experience suffering or sorrow in their lives. In fact, if we could, we would avoid it at all costs. Oh, yes.

I had complicated feelings about going back to church after my loss, but I knew that I needed it. And so as I began to grow and integrate my own grief into the life I was building without my husband, I thought, hey, you know what?

I'm sure that there are other people like me who are asking questions about their lives, about their futures, about their faith. And so I stepped into that space hoping that there would be others who desired that kind of community. And I was right.

I mean, it's been kind of amazing over the last six years to see the group of people that have come together to talk honestly about grief and loss, to talk about dying and how to prepare for it well as a person of faith, and then also how to flourish. Because nobody wants to just hang on and survive. We all want to thrive. And so that's a big thrust of the work that I do today, too.

I have so many things I want to ask you about grief that will help our listeners, but I just, like, want to stop for a moment and just recognize that you lost your husband and had four children. And what a. I mean, what a. Just huge loss, a huge dent. I mean, take us back to that time in your life. I mean, was it a surprise? Did you.

Did you know it was coming? Had you had any experience with deep grief? Did you have any tools in your tool belt?

Because finding that out has to be like, you can't prepare for something like that. That's right.

That's so true. And, you know, my husband died in the middle of our family vacation.

He fell to his death in the backcountry on a hiking trip with a hiking partner of his. And so I learned of his death from two police chaplains who arrived at my campsite to tell me that he wasn' home and that this was our new reality.

And so you're right.

You know, there is nothing that can prepare you for the delivery of that kind of news, for the depth of grief, the rawness and tenderness of losing someone that you love.

But I will say that I had kind of a unique experience because 10 years before my husband Rob had died, he had written a book called the Art of Dying Living Fully into the Life to Come that was based out of his experience as a journalist and as a hospice volunteer and working in a funeral home on the night shift, which, again, not anybody's ideal dream job, but that was his. He was inquisitive about modern death and dying. He wanted to understand how people of faith could do it.

In a way that was both integrative in terms of advancements in medical care, but also their faith. And so he started doing research, and that book came out of that period of his life, of our family life.

And so, you know, 10 years before he died, we were having conversations about death and dying. Like, hey, babe, what do you want when you die? Do you want a gravestone? Do you want to be cremated? Certainly not. One and done conversations.

We were in our early 30s. We thought these would be conversations we saved to activate when we were in our 80s.

But we got comfortable talking about death and dying in our house.

And by comfortable, I say, we became conversant in it, because I don't think that the conversations about death and dying are really ever very comfortable. But I will say that when he died, there were things that I knew to do based on those conversations. It didn't make the grief any easier.

It didn't make the loss any easier, but it did make the mechanics of bereavement a lot easier. Decisions. I knew what he wanted. Decisions about funerals and our life and our children. We had talked about all of those things.

And so even though his death was sudden and unexpected, he did give me that last gift of love in those conversations. Hmm.

That's incredible.

And very rare, because I'm just thinking about friends in their 40s who we were just with, friends who were like, they still don't have, you know, a will or instructions for what to do with their children if they were to pass.

I mean, people kind of put off those conversations until they're like, oh, maybe in our 50s or our 60s, or when we, quote, unquote, are older or something. So it's really incredible that you guys were talking about these things so early.

I think what's striking to me about your story is that you were going through incredible grief, but you had four kids that were also going through incredible grief. And I'm sorry. So curious how you made space, held space for your own grief while helping them through theirs. How do you do that?

Yeah, it requires a healthy kind of compartmentalization. And I think those two words are really important, compartmentalization. Because some stuff isn't appropriate for kids to know or to hear.

And we know through research that children who are brought into adult difficulties through the death of a parent, through any kind of other household trauma, they struggle later in life because of the adult responsibilities that have been placed on them. And so it was necessary that I found other people to talk to about certain things, that difficult decisions I had to make.

I didn't weigh in with my kids as though they were my peers on those kind of things. And yet that compartmentalization had to be healthy because in reality, we were a team.

We were a disrupted kind of family unit with now one leader instead of two. And so. So the whole way we operated had to change.

It couldn't be the typical two parents make a decision in a back room and just present it to the kids. I needed to have a lot more buy in now than I had for all kinds of decisions.

And so that healthy compartmentalization was an important recognition that not only had the shape of my family changed, but there were also, in that changed family, some things that did remain the same, and as many things as I could allow to remain the same. That was going to be something that would bear fruit in the years to come for my kids.

Such wisdom. I'm curious, when you talk about healthy compartmentalization, could you give us examples of what unhealthy compartmentalization could look like?

Never letting your kids see you cry. You know, that's a. That's a perfect example. I don't want my kids to feel any worse, so I'm going to hold it in.

I don't want them to feel like mom's coming unwound, so I'm not going to let them into that place.

The problem is that what we're inadvertently doing when we compartmentalize in those unhealthy kind of ways is we teach kids that when hard things come, we just suck it up and move on, that we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, that big boys don't cry. And those are the kind of messages that our culture gives over and over again.

And they're really not helpful to our children because they're teaching them ways of grieving that are actually going to truncate the process and complicate it as they grow older.

One thing we know about children is that they regrieve at every new developmental milestone, that it's not a six stages of grief, seven stages of grief, and then you're finished with a certificate of completion at the end, they're going to hit that grief over and over again in fresh, raw ways. When they graduate from high school, when they get their license, when they hit puberty, any number of developmental milestones.

And so the patterns that we display before our kids, the habits that we teach them, these are foundational for them. They're going to be going back to these year after year into adulthood. And so we want to start off on the right Foot.

That's so interesting. Kids regrieve. I can 100% understand why is that not true for adults?

Well, it's different for children because they have a growing understanding of what death means in their lives. So for example, a six year old who loses grandma just thinks she's kind of disappeared. There's a very concrete view of life at that age.

And so grandma's here or she's not here, we go to visit her at the cemetery. But there's not really a conception of like what's happening there. The questions about, like, is grandma underground? How can she breathe?

You know, these are very concrete questions that little kids ask.

But if your child was really close to her grandmother when she gets, gets to be 16 and gets her license, there's a whole new realization of this person's absence in her life. Wow, if grandma were here, I could drive over and show her my license all on my own.

And there's a fresh and new experience of loss that a child has because their understanding of the world and a loss's impact on their world has changed.

Now certainly adults feel that to some extent, you know, we, when my first grandbaby arrives, Lord willing, someday I will grieve the loss of my husband, new and fresh again, that he's not there to see his first grandchild. But my understanding of life really hasn't changed from the age of 40 something to say, 70.

I've gained wisdom over time, but I haven't learned new foundational concepts about grief that I would as a child.

Hmm.

So interesting when, when I think about people listening who are steeped in grief and they're concerned about their kids grief and grief, I would imagine, and maybe you can help us understand this comes in the form of all sorts of losses, not just death. So can you define that for us before I ask you some more questions about kids and grief?

Like what are some other losses that we need to kind of perk up and go, you know, this is a loss and my kid might be grieving.

Yeah, a move can be a loss. A change of a parent's employment can be a loss, particularly if that parent is talking a lot about it at the dinner table.

That can give a child a sense of being ill at ease, like unsteady or unsure. And they can manifest that as feelings of loss.

A change in church, a change in school, even the changes of school that are natural, like leaving elementary to go to junior high. A child can experience that as a significant loss. And so really it's less about what constitutes loss.

And it's more about how does my child perceive loss? You know, a lot of people will say, when a pet dies, well, we'll get another one, we'll get another puppy.

But anybody who has loved an animal knows they feel like part of the.

And so it's less about the perception, it's less about which losses are more important or less important than others, but about how the person responds to that loss. Some kids will go through a move with an area of care they plug right into new school and neighborhood communities.

And other kids will really struggle because that loss is a significant weight in their lives.

And so for us as parents, it's about learning to be a, a student of that child, paying attention to particular changes in behavior or attitudes, listening to their needs, asking them questions and not providing quick and easy answers.

These are things that all of us can do, whether we are parents or grandparents, school teachers, coaches, we can all take that posture of a curious student and really learn from our children what's most important to them.

That's awesome. You just listed out some helpful things because I was going to ask you, what do kids need?

And on the counter, what do kids not need when they're going through grief? What would you say to that?

They definitely don't need fixers. And that is our impulse as adults.

You know, we are older, we're wiser, we've had more life experience, and we look at their problems and say, I know how to fix that. And you know, rather than say, that's a really bad instinct. I think it's a God given instinct. God's a fixer. He's a creator.

I mean, he's in the business of making all things new. So it makes sense that the people he made out of dust to image him are also fixers at heart.

We are conscribed into service, as it were, to join him in the renewal of all things to fix. And so I'm okay with that impulse. It's just how is it directed and how is it used?

A lot of times coming alongside a child in grief means acknowledging the things that simply can't be fixed, fixed. And that goes a long way that when we begin with saying, hey, you know, I know I can't make this better for you.

I know I can't fix the hurt or fix the difficulty you have going to bed at night, fix your lack of appetite, what do you think we could do to partner together to figure this out and invite the child into the problem solving process? I find that children respond really well to that acknowledgement of the things that can be controlled and the things that can't.

It's interesting when you talk about this idea of wanting to fix it. I think it's so hard just as a mom of two kids. My kids are young adults now.

But I'm just thinking over the years, it's so hard to watch your kids go through pain and be sad. And so you wanna make it better somehow. So you're, like, constantly grasping for like.

And it can be for small things, not for big things that entail grief, but just like, oh, like, you know, you had a bad day at school, like, how can I, like, cheer you up or something? I think we do that on all these different levels.

What does it look like to be a parent that invites or makes space for a kid's sadness and doesn't try to fix it? What does that actually look like? Like, in a moment, how do we do that?

I find that it looks like hugs. It looks like treating them like they're normal. Every child wants to feel like he or she is normal, that they're just like their peers.

Pain makes us stand out, and that's really uncomfortable for kids. So inasmuch as we acknowledge the pain, it's helping them to figure out ways of feeling just average. And that sounds so. It sounds so lackluster.

But the reality is that part.

Part of what we're teaching our children when they wrestle with something hard is that you can make it through, that you don't need to shoulder through, that you don't need to run away, that you can slowly pace yourself to learn to adjust to new hard realities.

And so I find that extra snuggle time, you know, hey, let's sit on my bed and watch a movie together, those kind of things that are just the normal parts of a family's life together can be really helpful in seasons of great disruption. Because kids thrive on routine. They thrive on structure.

And when you have a loss enter your life, it suddenly feels like you have very little agency, that there's very little within your control. And reminding them of the normal rhythms of family life can ground them, especially as they're learning to adjust to the disruption in their life.

I totally want to recognize, as you're saying all these things, that doing all of that for your kids while you're going through your own grief is very complex. I mean, and it also feels, and I've seen this to be true, and I'm sure you have too.

But if an adult is going through their own grief and maybe in really unhealthy ways, it tends to sort of. The pain and issues tend to get messing, coming out sideways. And you see it in the children as well.

And so I'm curious, this even in your own story, I mean, it's, it's already hard to come alongside our kids in grief when we're not in grief, but when we're in grief as well, like for our own pain and suffering. And then we have to help them. How do, how does a parent do that?

Like, how does a parent get it together to like, oh, I need to sleep, I need to eat, I need to shower, I need, you know what I mean? Without getting like, oh, I'm gonna take care of my kids.

But while I'm taking care of my kids, I'm getting really unhealthy, which is actually inviting them to be unhealthy in their grief. So how does someone do this?

When I notice that happening in myself, when I notice it happening in others, it tends to be because I or others have chosen to go it alone.

And the antidote to that kind of burnout for parents who are trying to accompany a child through something difficult while also shouldering the burden of grief on their own, is to refuse to do the work alone, to call in the troops wherever you can find them. And for a lot of grieving people, this requires some effort.

You know, we want everyone to show up with meals, with rides for our kids, and we wish that that was intuitive for a lot of people.

But because we're not super good at consolation and grieving together in community, sometimes you may be the first person who's actually reached out and, hey, I'm grieving. I really need some help here. And so it does take a little bit of initiative for the griever, which can be hard to hear.

And yet I will say that initiative is most often met with reception. And so for the parent who says, hey, I feel like I'm maxed out. I need somebody else to drive my kid to youth group.

It may take a couple calls, but chances are you can find someone. And if that person knows you have a need, hopefully they're the kind of person who's going to step up and ask to do it again.

Hey, do they need a ride next week? And this sometimes is incidental. It's a one off and you're looking for other sources of support.

But oftentimes we find new sources of support in places we didn't expect it.

One of the things that's particularly important as our children grow, and we know this just in parenting Is that they need other adults in their lives to speak into their lives, to give them wisdom and truth and guidance. And that kind of starts earlier when you have a grieving child.

You can't wait till they're teenagers to hope that there's a coach who will say the things that mom would say but the child wouldn't listen to.

You're gonna start that earlier when you have a child who is grieving and start to bring in teachers and coaches and youth leaders, grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles, neighbors and friends, to create a community around that child, to give them, literally, a village in which to thrive.

Mm.

It's so interesting because I. I just was talking to a mom, a couple, who has cancer, and she was talking about how there were so many people at the onset of her diagnosis and surgery, and she has an aggressive form of cancer. There were so many people offering to help and be there for her in grief and hardship.

And now they've all kind of like, okay, a month, two months down the road, and they've all gone back to their regular lives.

And so this idea of, like, recognizing, I can't do this on my own, I mean, and that requires a vulnerability when you're tired and exhausted and you kind of wish people would figure it out on their own and be like, oh, hey, the meal that I brought your first month of this is one thing, but now you're really in it, in the trenches on your own. And so what does that look like? I mean, you said, call someone and ask them to give your kid a ride to youth group.

I mean, what else can people do when they feel like they're thinking people should be there for them instinctually? And it's awkward to even have to ask.

Well, I think it's really hard to cast a griever into the role of educator.

And so I always hesitate to push a person who's grieving and trying to cope with the major disruption of a loss onto the platform behind the podium and say, teach us all how to do this well. And unfortunately, that's what we look for when we are supportive friends. We're looking to that person to say, hey, what do you need?

And that can be a really hard dynamic for a grieving person. It can also be a really hard dynamic for someone who genuinely is supportive.

Like you're describing, somebody who wants to be there and just doesn't know how.

And so, you know, I always advocate practicing small in your church community, in your kids school classroom, start to look for ways to help parents so that you're practicing, the muscles you're going to need, need long term when it comes to helping a grieving friend. Because like this example of a woman that, you know, with cancer, that's a long haul.

She needs people not just in the first three to six months of chemo and radiation. She needs them perhaps a year later. She may need them three years later.

The people who are committing to her are committing to walk with her through the pain of this into a sense of restoration. And. And we don't know how long that takes.

And when it comes to grief, even though the rawness of grief will wear away, that is a companion that will walk with you until Jesus comes again. And so the commitment is for the long haul. But it's really hard to ask somebody to run a marathon when they've never run a 5K.

And so when we can, looking for opportunities to practice that 5K. Hey, you know, I noticed that there is a kid in my son's clothes class whose dad travels a lot. I'm just gonna volunteer to bring their mom a meal.

I mean, she's not sick or anything, but I know how hard it is to single parent. When my husband's gone, I'll bring her a meal.

It's just a little practice for the kinds of attentive behaviors, the kind of intentionality that we're gonna need when we come across someone who says, I literally have no bandwidth to answer the question, let me know how I can help.

Help. Clarissa, you have such wisdom. And I also love your practical examples, the 5K and the marathon. That was really good, lady.

You also have done a lot of work around tools to help families navigate loss together. What are your, like, I don't know, top three tools that you pull out of your tool belt.

Well, I really enjoy memory sharing. You know, it's amazing. The New York Life foundation is. It conducts a very large child bereavement study, and they update their numbers on the yearly.

And it traces children who have lost a loved one through many years of growth and development.

And of the three things that kids said were really instrumental to their growth and to their recovery from the rawest and darkest moments of their grief. They were things like people who treat me like I'm normal or. Or people who remember my person with me.

I love memory sharing because for children whose memories of their person are limited, that's really building a picture of a person that they never came to know in fullness because their life was cut off at a certain point in that child's development. You Know, as a grown woman, I love it when people will email me and share a story about my husband that I have never heard it.

It just makes him come alive to me in a new way. And this is especially true for children. So memory sharing is the first thing, I think.

The second thing is finding ways to be instrumental with our grief.

Grief researchers say that there are two kinds of grievers, really, and they are instrumental grievers, People who start a foundation or they wear an armband when they play soccer in memory of their person. They're people who need to act out their grief by doing something. And some of our kids are like that.

They won't cry very much, but, boy, are they going to play their heart out on that soccer field in memory of their person.

And so we need to look for ways for our kids to instrumentally grieve, to use creativity through the arts, through sports, through music, to express the unexpressible. And then the other kind of griever is the intuitive griever, the person who just needs a big cry every so often.

And so as we're looking at those three tools in the toolkit, it's memory sharing. It's finding ways to act out our grief in really physical ways, ways.

And then finding spaces and people and places where it's safe to let our emotions be. And by emotions, I mean all of them. And that's not just grief and anger or frustration. That's joy, that's peace. That is a sense of contentment.

Because kids have a lot of life still ahead of them, and we don't want to ever compartmentalize their grief into the sort of stereotypical emotions that we tend to associate with the grief. Experience. Experience.

Clarissa, I'm curious for you personally, how you brought your grief to God. What. What did that look like for you to. To grieve with God?

For me, grieving with God meant receiving God as my father in a new way. You know, my kids lost their dad, and I lost my husband. But. But more than anything, grief made me feel fragile. It made me feel defenseless.

It made me feel alone. And more often than not, I just wanted to be able to crawl up in someone's lap and curl up and feel safe again.

Because suddenly the world felt really scary and big and hard.

And receiving God in that season and even into these years later, it has been very much about receiving God as the good father who takes care of his own, who provides with abundance, where I see scarcity, who gives rest to his beloved when I have a sleepless night, this is the God that I needed most in the hours after learning that my husband was dead. And six years later, he's still the God I need.

I think there's a tendency for some of the us, when we experience something hard and painful, to push the father away.

Like, you did this, or you didn't stop this, or you didn't answer my prayers, or the story didn't go the way that I wanted it to go, and I thought you were good. What's your advice to someone who's in that space?

Well, any good parent is willing to listen to those complaints from a child. And.

And they're real and they're honest, and God is far more interested in who you actually are than any sort of painted perception of who you wish to be. CS Lewis says that in so many words, that God far prefers that we bring ourselves to him fully.

And so, you know, I think when we feel those hard feelings, when we ask those hard questions that are reflected in the psalms of Lament, that are reflected even in Jesus's cries, you know, God, why have you forsaken me? Take this cup from me. Like, could you please change the way this story is playing out?

We see throughout Scripture that faithful people who desired a relationship with God, asked those kind of questions, said those kind of things boldly to God, and that they weren't turned away, they were received. And even though it feels vulnerable, I think that we can, with boldness, do the same.

That's right.

Six years. Six years. And how are your kiddos doing?

They're doing really well. I've got two in college. I'm a remarried widow now, so I have a blended family of nine with three dogs and a cat.

There's never a quiet moment, never a dull moment, Right? And, you know, it's amazing because six years later, it feels like a lifetime ago.

And yet there are moments where it's so real and fresh that I can hardly believe I still breathe without him. And I say that all with the joy of the life that I've built around me. And to me, that's not a testimony to my weakness or to God, God's weakness.

It's really a testimony to the life that God has called each of us to live in a broken world that he's asked us to entrust, hold joy and sorrow in the same hand, to both believe that he is good and take an honest look at the world around us and see all the bad that exists there. And I think all of that is only possible because of the cross, because of what Jesus did for us in his death and resurrection.

He assures us that the most horrible things that ever happened to us are not the final word. And we carry that hope with us, and it is the anchor for our souls. But, you know, I live about eight miles from the ocean.

I see a lot of boats on anchor in the summertime. And, you know, a boat can drift pretty far on its mooring even though its anchor is rooted securely in the ocean floor.

And so, you know, I think that that's the same for us, that even as we are anchored with that truth, sometimes it's harder to believe some days than others. And God in his goodness knows that. He knows, as the psalms say, that we are dust and he receives us nonetheless.

And that to me, is one of the greatest discoveries in my experience of grief.

Clarissa, I absolutely love that you have chosen because I believe it's a choice choice. You have chosen to allow your pain and grief to not go wasted, but instead to go.

I want to purpose this to help other people in their pain and their grief. And I think that's such a beautiful thing.

And I know that there's people listening who want to learn more from you, hear more about your story, get a hold of the books that you've written and all the things. So how can they do?

Yeah, you can reach out to me at clarissamall like dollmall.com and you can learn about my four books there about this group of bereavement support resources that I've developed for families and individuals. I'm on Instagram and substack.

I love to connect with listeners and readers because it's such an honor to be able to walk with someone through grief to flourishing and to help them realize that even in their very darkest moments, that valley of the shadow, that they're never alone.

Thank you so much for reminding us that today.

Thank you.

Friend. I hope that you enjoyed that time with Clarissa.

I know that I was taking some mad notes just thinking about what it looks like to not only only attend to my own grief, but really thinking in this season, I'm personally in what does it look like to better attend to other people in theirs? And she had so much wisdom for how we can do that.

And if you're going through something where you've lost something and you're trying to get over it or move on or not cry in front of others or try to do it alone, I hope that you heard her when she said, you cannot do that. This alone. You can't. No one can. You're not stronger than you're expected to be. We're made to do life together.

I hope that that will give you the oomph or the push, or the bravery or the vulnerability. You need to simply text or call anyone, someone and say, I need help. I need support. I need a place to process, process.

I need help with feeding my kids. I don't know what it is for you, but I hope you heard that. I also hope you heard her remind you that this is not the end of the story.

Sometimes we experience a hard chapter, dark chapter, and we think that the story is over. But the story is not over. Because with Jesus the story is never over. We think it ends in death, but it always ends in resurrection.

By being a person of faith, you are claiming that to be true. Even right now in this hard chapter. This is not the end of the story. Lord Jesus, resurrect and redeem and bring hope.

My prayer for you this week is that you would collide with the one who is writing a beautiful story. He writes beautiful stories out of the the most painful chapters and I pray that you would entrust your story to him this week. Keep colliding friend.

We'll catch you next week.