Today we're pleased to share with you an audio essay written and read by Nancy Guthrie entitled

Ten Things You Should Know About Grieving People.

Nancy is the author of What Grieving People Wish You Knew About What Really Helps and What Really Harts from Crossway.

Ten Things You Should Know Hertz from Crossway. Ten things you should know about grieving people, written and read by Nancy Guthrie.

Number one, grieving people don't expect you to have words that will fix this, but they do want you to say something. To a person who has

lost someone they love, it is as if a hurdle has been erected between them and everyone else

until the loss is acknowledged in some way. So say something. Of course, oftentimes we don't say something because we're

afraid we'll say the wrong thing. Sometimes we don't say something because we want to say something

meaningful, insightful, or helpful, and we can't come up with anything. But people who are grieving don't expect that you are going to

say something that will make everything okay or that you're going to come up with some spiritual

or emotional insight they haven't thought of to this point. They just want you to say something simple.

Perhaps something like, I'm so sad with you.

Number two, grieving people don't want to hear a story about your own or someone else's loss.

My theory is that in our effort to fill up the awkward silence or in our desire to demonstrate

that we really do get what they're going through, our brains go on a search for a match to the

current situation. That's natural. But when a search result comes up, we don't have to say it out loud. Instead, we can keep the focus on the person who is grieving and how the loss has impacted them. We might think the story of our experience or someone else's will be helpful. It won't be. Their own loss is all they have the

space for in their thoughts, conversation, and hearts right now. So keep the focus on them.

Number three, you don't have to be in the inner circle of a grieving person's friends to be a welcome companion in grief.

Sometimes we stay away from people going through grief because we think they must have closer friends who are coming alongside them during this hard time and that we would just be an unwelcome intrusion. But I have

hardly ever met a grieving person who didn't have at least one story of someone they thought

would be there for them who disappeared. But when I asked these same people, were there some people

who showed up in your grief in

...