When You’re Trapped in Grief

My family is walking through a crisis together, having to say goodbye to him many years, even decades, earlier than we thought we would. None of us could have anticipated that we would lose him so soon.

And I would never have anticipated that I’d return to the place where my heart for the fatherless found its starting point, as one who’d recently become fatherless herself.

The timing of this trip feels very difficult. But, somehow, the Lord moves in especially close during our heart’s most broken moments and does mysterious things. He sets us in places we wouldn’t have expected to go, takes us through circumstances we wouldn’t have predicted, puts us in front of people whom we wouldn’t have imagined meeting—and He, in the way He alone can, reaches down through the cracks of our brokenness, down into our gaping, throbbing places, down into that vulnerable window that sorrow has opened, and He does a deep, deep work.

With my own fatherless wounds still fresh and bleeding, I’m going to look out on the landscape of the nation where my heart was first pierced for the fatherless. And I’m carrying a message in my heart for them (and for myself)—“He can bring you out with singing.”

God can heal. He can infuse hope. He can father. 

For them, for me, for you. For the one who’s lost that one you love, or those years waiting for that dream, or whatever that thing is for you—whatever our loss, grief, or trial—He is able, more than able, to bring us out, and to put a new song in our mouths. One of those songs that can only be forged in trial’s fire. A song that He writes in us as we lean our broken hearts into His hand. A song of His faithfulness. A song of praise.

Yes, desperation and hope meet here. And this hope will not disappoint.

“I waited patiently for the Lord, and He turned to me, and heard my cry. He also brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet on a rock, and established my steps. He has put a new song in my mouth, even praise to our God” (Psalm 40:1-3).

Kinsey Thurlow is a minister at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City. She is an advocate for the fatherless and her husband, Jon is a worship leader and minister at IHOP-KC.