The holidays arrive with lights, music, and tables set for family, yet for many they also arrive carrying absence. Tragedy does not check the calendar. I read recently about a young woman killed in a car crash just after Thanksgiving. Her husband had died four years earlier. Their daughter was three, now left without a mother or father. Those stories land harder in December. They echo my own. My brother was taken in a terrible crash in 1965, a loss that never fully loosens its grip. My father, whose birthday fell on Christmas Eve, died unexpectedly in early December of 1989. For many families, the season is pierced by memories of loved ones taken far too soon, and the joy comes braided with ache.
When grief hits, it rarely comes with tidy explanations. Questions fall like pouring rain. How could a good God allow this? Why now? Why them? Houses fill with tear-stained eyes, and even the kindest voices struggle to find words that help. In those moments, faith is not polished or public. It slips away, kneels alone, and breathes out honest pain. That is where belief often lives, not as certainty, but as resolve. “I didn’t understand, but I still believed.” Belief sounds like falling to your knees and crying out, “God, how could this be?” It sounds like silence stretching long enough for a whisper to be heard, quiet but steady from the Lord’s lips to your heart, “You can still trust in Me.”
Loss also leaves so much unfinished. There is more love to give, more laughter that should have happened, more words that never found their way into the room. During holiday gatherings, we feel those gaps sharply. We hold pieces of what used to be and wonder how to keep going when the weight will not lift. Yet grief does not cancel love. It proves it. The ache is the evidence that something mattered deeply, that a life intersected ours in a way that changed us. In that sense, mourning is not a weakness. It is the cost of loving well, and the cost is high because the gift was real. Herein is the encouragement worth carrying into the season.
While their lives were not perfect, none of ours are. While our time with them was not perfect, love is. The love in your heart for them is complete, and nothing can take that from you. Their memory lives on through the gentler words you now choose, the truth you still stand for, and the grace you extend because of what you learned from them. Hope abides, even here. One day, we will see them again. Until then, when your world goes dark and your heart struggles to breathe, fall to your knees if you must. Listen for the whisper in the silence. You may not understand, but you can still believe. Psalm 34:18 says, “The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves such as have a contrite spirit.” Lean into that faith and carry the flame of the gift of eternal life from our Savior who brings this Joy and Goodness.
