Topic: Grief and Trauma Awareness — Key Scripture: Psalm 23:4
There’s a single preposition in Psalm 23 that carries more weight than we usually give it.
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” Through. Not into. Not stopped in. Through. David doesn’t describe setting up camp in the valley. He describes moving through it, with God alongside him the entire way.
That distinction matters more than it might seem at first. Grief, by its nature, makes us want to stop. Pain does that — it’s disorienting, heavy, and every instinct in us resists it. Nobody walks willingly into loss. So when the valley comes — whether through a death, a diagnosis, the end of a marriage, or the quiet collapse of a life we thought we were building — our first response is almost always to freeze. We stop moving because moving hurts, and staying still feels, at least for a moment, like protection.
I understand that instinct. I’ve sat with people in some of the rawest moments of their lives — moments when moving forward felt not just difficult but almost disrespectful to what had been lost, as if grief itself demanded that life pause in place. And there’s real wisdom in slowing down, in not rushing past pain that deserves to be felt. Psalm 23 doesn’t ask us to sprint through the valley or pretend it isn’t dark. It simply says: walk through it. Movement, even slow movement, is still built into the promise.
What I’ve observed, over many years of walking with grieving people, is that stopping in the valley doesn’t actually protect us from the pain. It usually prolongs it. When we refuse to keep moving — through the anniversaries, through the empty chair, through the next hard decision that has to be made — we don’t skip the suffering. We just stay in the rawest part of it longer than we need to. The valley becomes a residence instead of a passage. And a valley was never built to be lived in. It was built to be walked through, on the way to somewhere else.
This isn’t a call to rush anyone’s grief, and I want to be careful here, because there’s a world of difference between healthy grieving and the forced-cheer bypassing of pain. Grief has a legitimate season. Scripture doesn’t rush past lament — the Psalms are full of raw, unresolved sorrow that doesn’t get tidied up in three verses. But even the psalms of lament tend to move somewhere. They don’t just repeat the wound. They walk with it, toward God, toward hope, toward the next verse.
I think about this in terms of the seasons in ministry where I felt most stuck — not stuck because I was still actively grieving something specific, but stuck because staying in the ache had become safer than the uncertain work of moving past it. There’s a strange comfort in a familiar sorrow. It doesn’t ask anything new of you. Moving forward does. It requires facing what life looks like on the other side of the valley, which is its own kind of unknown, and unknowns are frightening.
But here’s what I’ve come to believe deeply: the shadow in Psalm 23 is still a shadow, not a room. Shadows fall across a path. They don’t build walls around it. You can stand in a shadow and eventually walk out of it, because a shadow, by definition, is cast by something and passes as you keep moving. The valley has an other side. David knew that when he wrote the psalm — the very next line moves from the valley straight into a table prepared, an overflowing cup, goodness and mercy following him. The valley isn’t the end of the psalm. It’s the middle of it.
If you’re in a season of loss right now and every part of you wants to stop — I understand that instinct, and I’m not going to tell you to rush. But I do want to gently say: don’t confuse stopping with healing. Sitting still in the valley doesn’t shorten the walk. It only lengthens the time you spend in the dark. Keep walking, even slowly, even through tears, even one small step a day. The valley was never meant to be your address. It’s meant to be your path.
You are not required to walk through grief quickly. You are only asked to keep walking. And you are not walking it alone — the same verse that describes the valley also describes the presence that stays beside you the entire way through.
If this resonates with where you are today, BRKN Soul Care is here. Book a free Introductory Conversation at brknsoulcare.org and take the first step. You don’t have to carry this alone.