Hello, God's beloved.

Welcome to a time of being still and being loved.

Today, I want to invite you to try something perhaps new and allow Jesus to love you in the midst of some grief that you

might be experiencing.

We were not created to live in a world filled with loss and trauma.

We were created to be in intimate, loving relationships that last forever.

We were created for health and wholeness in our mind, body, and spirit as we live in

perfect union with God and one another.

Yet ever since the fall, recorded in Genesis 3,

humanity has been grieving the loss of our relationship with God,

separation from one another and from ourselves.

Sin created and continues to create loss and grief,

and we need to process it.

We need to allow God to love us in the middle of it.

Whether obvious or ambiguous, large or small, all losses affect us.

No loss is insignificant. Some losses, like the death of a loved one or the loss of a

material thing, is obvious and definitive. We can also lose status and identity. But other losses are more ambiguous.

There's no clear end or closure.

There can even be loss in grieving over something when the decision we made was our own,

leading us to a good thing.

Changing jobs, grieving our old job or coworkers, choosing to move to a new city and missing our old

neighbors and friends, grieving the loss of our old hangouts and spaces we loved in our previous

...