Tag Archives: Christian grief blog

What Not to Say to Someone Who is Grieving (And What Actually Helps)

The grief nobody names

Before we get to the phrases, I want to pause and say something that does not get said enough.

Not all grief is grief over death.

Some of the deepest grief I have ever witnessed — in my own life and in the lives of women around me — has been over things that are still technically alive. A child who is estranged. A marriage that is ending. A friendship that betrayed you. A season of infertility. A vision for your life that is not going to happen the way you planned.

These losses are real. The grief is real. And yet so often the people carrying them feel they have no right to grieve — because nobody died, because things could be worse, because at least you still have your health or your job or your faith or your kids.

Can I say this clearly? You have the right to grieve anything you have lost.

Grief is not a competition. It does not require a death certificate to be legitimate. It is simply the cost of having loved something — a person, a dream, a version of your life — and finding it gone.

If that is where you are today, this post is for you too.

What not to say – and why it lands the way it does

“They went to sleep.” “They passed away.” “We lost them.”

These phrases feel softer. Gentler. Like they protect the grieving person from the sharpness of the word died.

But euphemisms create distance from the truth — and grieving people are already living the truth. They do not need it softened. They need it named.

For children especially, these phrases cause real confusion. A child told someone went to sleep may be afraid to go to sleep themselves. A child told you lost someone may wonder why you have not gone to look for them.

Use the words died and death. Gently. Honestly. They are not cruel words. They are true words. And truth held with love is the most merciful thing you can offer.

“They are in a better place.”

This one is true. I believe it completely. Madison Joy is with Jesus. Lucy Grace is with Jesus.

But on its own, without anything else, this phrase can feel like it is asking the grieving person to skip straight to the good ending. Like the hope cancels out the devastation.

It does not.

If you want to use this phrase, pair it with permission: “They are safe with Jesus — and it is completely okay to miss them.” That small addition changes everything. It holds the hope and the grief at the same time — and that is exactly where most grieving people actually live.

“God needed another angel.”

This comes from a tender place. The people who said it to me meant it with love.

But it is not theologically accurate. People do not become angels when they die. And for a grieving person — or a grieving child — this phrase can quietly plant a seed of anger toward God. He took them because He needed them. That is a hard thing to sit with when you needed them too.

Keep the focus on the truth instead: they are with Jesus, known and loved and held. That is enough — and it is the right kind of enough.

“Be strong.” “Don’t cry.” “You need to be brave.”

We say these things because we want the people we love to be okay. And sometimes we say them because we do not know how to sit with someone in the not-okay.

But grief needs room. It needs to be felt, not managed. Telling someone to be strong — even with the most loving intent — teaches them that their sadness is something to push through rather than something to move through.

What helps instead: “It is okay to cry. I am here. You do not have to hold it together right now.”

That is it. Permission and presence. It is the whole thing.

“Everything happens for a reason.”

This one was said to me more than once after losing Lucy Grace. And every time I heard it, something in me went quiet and closed.

I do not believe that God authored my daughter’s death as a plot point in a plan. I believe He is sovereign over a broken world and that He can redeem anything — including the worst things. Those are not the same.

For a grieving person, this phrase raises more questions than it answers. What is the reason? Could I have prevented it? Did God choose this?

Better to sit in the mystery honestly: “I don’t know why this happened. But I know God loves you. And I am not going anywhere.”

“At least…”

At least you have other children. At least you had time together. At least you know what happened. At least it was not worse.

Every version of this phrase does the same thing — it asks the grieving person to measure their loss against something else and find it smaller. To be grateful rather than devastated.

Grief does not work that way. A grieving person is not comforted by the knowledge that things could be worse. They are standing in the ruins of what is. Meet them there.

“I know exactly how you feel.”

You probably do not. Even if you have experienced a similar loss — even if you have walked through something that looks identical from the outside — grief is deeply personal. The relationship, the circumstances, the history, the faith journey — all of it shapes the experience in ways no one else can fully know.

What you can say instead: “I don’t know exactly what this feels like for you. But I want to. Tell me about them.”

That question — tell me about them — is one of the most generous things you can offer a grieving person. It says: the person you lost mattered. I want to know who they were. Their name is not a wound I am afraid to touch.

The grief nobody shows up for

Here is what I want to say to the person sitting in the quieter kind of loss.

The marriage that is ending. The child who walked away. The dream that died slowly over years. The friendship that fell apart without warning. The diagnosis that changed the whole plan. The season of waiting that never resolved the way you prayed.

Nobody brings casseroles for these. Nobody says I am so sorry for your loss. The world keeps moving and you are standing still. You’re not even sure you are allowed to call this grief. You are.

Some of these I have lived myself. Others I know from standing beside someone I love while they carried something I could not carry for them.

The absence of a funeral does not make the loss less real. The absence of a death certificate does not mean your heart is not broken. And the absence of sympathy cards does not mean you are not allowed to need someone to sit with you in it.

If you are in that kind of grief today — the kind that does not have a name or a ritual or a casserole — I want you to know that you are seen here. This space is for you too.

We do not suffer well.

Not most of us. Not naturally.

When grief arrives — in whatever form it takes — our first instinct is to understand it. To explain it. To find the reason, the lesson, the silver lining. To fix it for the people we love or to fix it in ourselves. To get to the other side of it as quickly as possible so we can go back to being okay.

And so we say everything happens for a reason because we cannot bear to sit in the mystery. We say be strong because we do not know how to be present with pain. We say at least because we are trying to build a ladder out of the hole before the person has even had a chance to look around and understand where they are.

We are not bad people for doing this. We are people who were never taught how to suffer.

But there is another way.

What if grief — all of it, every kind — was not a problem to be solved but an invitation to trust? Not to understand why. Not to find the reason. Not to get to the other side. But to go through it with your hand in the hand of a God who has been to the other side of death and come back.

That is what the peace that passes understanding actually is. It is not the absence of pain. It is not the explanation you were looking for. It is the presence of God in the middle of something that does not make sense — and the slow, quiet discovery that He is enough. That He was always enough. That even this — even the worst thing — cannot separate you from His love.

That is not something you arrive at quickly. It is not something anyone can hand you in a phrase at a funeral.

It is something you find on your knees. In the dark. When the casseroles have stopped coming and the world has moved on and you are still in the middle of it.

And it is there — I promise you it is there — that God does His deepest work.

Not in spite of the grief. Through it.

So what do you actually say?

You say less than you think you need to.

You show up. You bring food. You sit on the couch and you do not try to fix it. You say their name — or the name of what was lost — out loud, because the thing grieving people fear most is not that someone will bring it up. It is that everyone will forget.

Say I am so sorry. Say I loved them too. Say tell me about them. Say I am here and I am not going anywhere. Say their name.

And then stay.

That is what our pastor and his wife did for us after we lost Lucy Grace. They showed up at our door one evening with ice cream. They stayed ten minutes. They did not explain it or fix it or find the silver lining. They just showed up.

It was everything.

A note for parents talking to grieving children

If you are a parent walking a child through any kind of loss — the death of someone they loved, a family change, something that shifted their world — the same principles apply.

Children need honest, concrete language. They need permission to feel what they feel. They need to know that the missing is not something wrong with them. They need you to say the name — of the person, of the loss, of whatever it is that is gone.

If you are looking for a resource to help you have those conversations about death specifically, I wrote a children’s book for exactly that moment. Mommy, Is Madison Sleeping? is a faith-based picture book for families navigating the death of a loved one with young children. It is for any loss — a grandparent, a sibling, a parent, a friend.

Because grief is not something to overcome. It is a love that has not stopped.

And God is not finished with your story.

If this post helped you, share it with someone who is walking alongside a friend in grief. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do it learn how to show up well.

If you are in a season of waiting or grief right now, the Old to New Journals were designed for exactly this.

Join the Old to New Creations community and receive new posts, honest stories, and faith resources directly in your inbox.

Thirty-Five Days: The Loss That Started It All

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While many people know the grief of losing someone, there is another kind.

The particular kind of grief of standing beside the ones who are experiencing loss. The sisters. The aunts. The friends. The ones who love the grieving.

I know that grief.

It is the grief of watching someone you love walk through something you cannot fix.

And it changed me just as permanently as anything I have ever experienced firsthand. (Learn more about the origin of Old to New Creations here).

Madison Joy

My niece Madison Joy was born on Christmas morning.

I want you to sit with that for a moment — because it matters. Christmas morning. The morning the whole world celebrates the arrival of a baby who came to bring life and light and hope. And there she was — Madison Joy — arriving on that same morning, full of promise and possibility and that particular joy that only a brand new baby carries.

She was beautiful like her momma.

She was here.

She was loved.

She was ours.

For thirty-five days.

The Call No One Expects

I am going to keep some of the medical details close — they are my sister’s story to tell in full, and I want to honor that. What I will tell you is that Madison Joy suffered a brain bleed. Emergency surgery followed. And then came the waiting — the desperate, faith-filled, on-your-knees waiting that every person who has ever sat in a hospital waiting room knows intimately.

We prayed. Our family prayed. Our church – our community – prayed. People who had never met Madison Joy prayed — because that is what you do when a thirty-five day old baby is fighting for her life and you believe in a God who can intervene.

We had never imagined God wouldn’t save her.

And then He didn’t.

Not the way we asked.

Three years after Madison Joy, our family faced a similar and devastating loss of our own – you can read Lucy Grace’s story here.

Walking Alongside

I want to speak for a moment to everyone reading this who has ever been the one walking alongside.

Because grief has many seats at the table — and not all of them get acknowledged.

Watching my sister and brother-in-law walk through the loss of Madison Joy was one of the most life-changing things I have ever witnessed. I say life-changing deliberately — not as a figure of speech but as a literal truth. The person I was before that season and the person I became on the other side of it are not quite the same.

What I observed in that hospital, and in the months that followed, was something I did not have adequate words for at the time.

My sister — in the middle of the most devastating loss a mother can experience — found what she later described as a peace that passes all understanding.

Not on the other side of it. Not after the grief had softened or the tears had slowed.

Right there. In the hospital. In the middle of the worst moment of her life.

The grief was real — crushing and bottomless and every bit as heavy as you would expect. The pain did not disappear. The tears did not stop. But underneath all of it, arriving as a gift from God Himself, was something steady and unshakeable that had absolutely no business being there, given the circumstances.

That is not a human peace. You cannot manufacture that in yourself. You cannot think your way into it or grieve your way toward it.

It is given. Freely. By a God who does not wait for the storm to pass before He shows up in it.

I recognized it. I had felt it myself in my own hospital room years later.

It is the kind of peace that does not make sense from the outside. The kind that makes people who don’t know Jesus tilt their heads and quietly wonder. The kind that can only come from One place.

I want to be honest though — we each carried a different measure of grace for our role in this. My grief as the sister was real and it was heavy. But it was not the same as my sister’s grief as the mother, or my brother-in-law’s grief as the father. Walking alongside someone through loss does not mean carrying an equal share of it. It means showing up faithfully for whatever portion you are asked to carry — and trusting God to sustain the ones carrying more than you can imagine.

I wrote specifically for the fathers and the men here.

The Hardest Part of All

In the weeks and months after losing Madison Joy, grief did what grief often does —

It uncovered things that were already there.

For my sister. For her husband. For me, in ways I would not fully understand until years later when I faced my own loss.

Grief has a way of stripping away the coping mechanisms we have quietly built over a lifetime. The inner lies we have always managed to keep at bay suddenly have a clear path to the surface. The emotional pain we thought we had dealt with turns out to have only been set aside.

That is not a flaw in the grieving process. That is the grieving process doing exactly what it was designed to do — bringing everything to the light so that healing can reach all the way down.

It is painful. It is disorienting. And it is one of the most important things I want you to know if you are in the middle of it right now:

The grief that is uncovering old pain is not punishing you. It is inviting you toward a deeper healing than you have ever had.

Helping a Two Year Old Understand

My nephew was two years old when he lost his baby sister.

Two years old.

Old enough to know something was wrong. Old enough to miss her. Young enough that the concept of death was completely beyond his reach. Helping him understand — or even begin to understand — was one of the most difficult and tender challenges my sister faced in those early months.

And every morning, without fail, he would pad down the hall and find her.

And every morning he would ask the same question.

“Mommy, is Madison sleeping?”

He asked because he didn’t have other words — he had done it so many times before when Mommy was reminding him to keep his voice down because the baby was resting. He asked out of love and out of hope and out of the beautiful, heartbreaking logic of a two year old mind.

And every morning, my sister’s heart caught in her chest.

That question is the reason this blog exists. That question is the reason a book exists. You can read the full story of how it became a book here. And that question is the reason I kept writing long after it would have been easier to stop.

If We Can’t Bring Her Home

Before I close I want to share something my sister said — because it is one of the most faith-filled sentences I have ever heard spoken in the middle of grief.

In the hospital, facing the unsurvivable, my sister and brother-in-law made the decision to donate Madison Joy’s organs.

And my sister’s heart behind that decision was this:

“If we can’t bring our daughter home — maybe our faith can be used by God to make it possible for someone else to bring their child home.”

I have turned that sentence over in my mind hundreds of times since she said it.

In the middle of her own devastation — before the grief had even fully arrived — she was thinking about another mother. Another family. Another child who might live because of hers.

That is not a human instinct. That is the Holy Spirit working through a broken heart that chose, even in the worst moment, to remain open.

Old to new.

Even here. Even this.

For the Ones Walking Alongside

If you found this post because you are not the one who lost someone — but you love someone who did — I want you to know that your grief is real and it matters too.

You do not have to have all the right words. You do not have to fix it. You do not have to be strong every moment.

Show up. Stay. Hold their hand. Sit in the quiet with them when there is nothing left to say.

And trust that God is doing something in you through this season too — something you may not be able to see yet. Something that will matter more than you know.

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” — Psalm 147:3

Next week I want to take you inside the story of how a two year old’s morning question became a children’s book — and why I believe it is a resource every family needs before loss arrives, not just after. Subscribe below so you don’t miss it.

And if Madison Joy’s story touched you today — share it. Her thirty-five days mattered. They still do.

If you are walking alongside a grieving family right now and looking for a tool to help anchor your own faith through uncertainty, the Old to New Journals were designed for exactly this season.

When God Makes Something New Out of the Hardest Thing You’ve Ever Lived

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The story behind Old to New Creations — and why this brand exists

Some of my earliest memories live in the kitchen and at the craft table.

The smell of something baking. The feel of fabric or paper in my hands. The quiet satisfaction of taking something ordinary and turning it into something that hadn’t existed before. I didn’t have a name for it then — I just knew I loved it. The process of taking something old, something plain, something forgotten — and making it into something new. It was a joy that was shared with me by mom and my grandmother.

Some of my earliest memories live in the kitchen and at the craft table.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized God had been doing the same thing in me all along.

I grew up knowing God was in the business of transformation. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” — 2 Corinthians 5:17. I knew that verse. I believed that verse. And for most of my life, I watched it come alive in the people around me — children and adults taking their first tender steps toward faith, lives turning slowly and then all at once toward something better and truer and more whole.

Old to new. I had seen it happen. I believed it was real.

And then I came face to face with loss — and I had to learn what it meant all over again.

The Collision of Two Opposite Thoughts

I want to be honest with you about something, because I think it matters.

When tragedy arrived in my life — and it arrived more than once — I didn’t immediately land in a place of peace and theological clarity. I landed in a place of collision. Two thoughts that seemed impossible to hold at the same time:

God is powerful enough to stop this.

And yet — He didn’t.

I have wrestled with that. I suspect you have too.

Here is where I landed, after a lot of sitting in the hard middle of it: I don’t believe God selfishly orchestrates suffering for His own purposes. I also don’t believe He is a passive bystander, wringing His hands at the brokenness of this world. What I believe — what I have had to learn to believe through lived experience rather than just theology — is that it is precisely through His deep love for us and His absolute faithfulness that He walks with us through the brokenness. He doesn’t stand outside of it. He enters it. And somehow, in His supernatural wisdom, He allows the broken places to shape us — not to harm us, but to form us into something more and deeper and truer than we could have become without them.

That is not a cliche. That is the hardest and most beautiful thing I know.

And it is the heartbeat of everything Old to New Creations is about.

The Moment Everything Changed

The moment this brand grew into something deeper — something I could no longer keep just for myself — was the moment my sister and brother-in-law received the news that no parent should ever have to hear.

My sweet niece, Madison Joy, had suffered a brain bleed. Emergency brain surgery followed. And then, thirty-five days after she came into this world full of life and promise and all the hope a new baby carries — the doctors told them she no longer had brain activity. (Read her story here).

She was here.

And then she wasn’t.

I watched my sister walk into the darkest valley I had ever witnessed someone I loved enter. I watched her grieve with a rawness that only a mother who has lost a child can know. I watched my brother-in-law stand beside her. I listened as she told the story day after day of my two-year-old nephew pad down the hall, looking for his baby sister, asking the question that would eventually become a book —

“Mommy, is Madison sleeping?”

We all felt a longing for Heaven like never before. But… we watched God show up.

Not by fixing it. Not by reversing it. Not by answering our prayers the way we desperately wanted Him to.

But by being present in the most unshakeable, undeniable way — in the middle of something that could not be fixed or reversed or explained away.

That was the moment I understood — really understood — that Old to New is not just a craft philosophy or a brand aesthetic. It is a theology. It is a way of living. It is the defiant joy, hope-filled conviction that God is not finished with any story — no matter how broken the middle looks.

What This Space Is For

Old to New Creations exists for anyone who has ever sat in the hard middle of something and needed to be reminded that the story isn’t over.

It is for the grieving mother who doesn’t know how to explain death to her toddler. It is for the father who is grieving quietly and doesn’t know where to put it. It is for the woman who has lost someone and is trying to figure out how to keep believing in a God who could have stopped it. It is for anyone who has ever held something broken in their hands and wondered if it could ever be made new.

This is not a space where grief gets wrapped up neatly with a bow. This is a space where we sit in the hard questions together. Where we tell the truth. Where we hold onto the Biblical hope that has held us — even on the days we barely held onto it ourselves.

Because Old to New isn’t just something God does once.

It is something He does over and over and over again.

In crafting tables and kitchen counters. In hospital rooms in the middle of the night. In the lives of people who had every reason to walk away from faith and chose — slowly, painfully, stubbornly — to stay.

A Note Before We Go Further

In the weeks ahead I am going to share more of this story with you — the full story of Madison Joy, and the story of my own daughter Lucy Grace, who I delivered still three years later.

I am going to share the book that grew out of both of those losses — Mommy, Is Madison Sleeping? — a children’s book for families navigating grief with their little ones, rooted in Biblical truth and written from the inside of the hardest thing I have ever lived.

And I am going to share the tools, the journals, the Scripture, and the community that have helped me — and that I hope will help you — move from the old thing to the new thing.

However long that takes. However hard the middle gets.

God is still at work.

“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” — Isaiah 43:19

If this resonated with you — share it with someone who needs it today. And if you are in the middle of your own hard season, I would love to hear your story. Leave a comment below or reach out directly. You are not alone here.