Topic: Grief and Trauma Awareness   —   Key Scripture: The Psalms We know what to do with certain kinds of grief. When someone dies, there are rituals for it. A funeral, a gathering, people who bring food and say the right things and acknowledge, formally and publicly, that a loss has occurred. The grief has a name. It has a date. It has a context that the people around you understand and respond to. This kind of grief is devastating. But it is, in some ways, the kind of grief that gets the most support. Because it is obvious and expected.…

Topic: Grief and Trauma Awareness   —   Key Scripture: Psalm 23 There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has no clean name. It is not the tiredness that comes from a hard week or a late night or a demanding project. Those are recoverable. A good night’s sleep, a quiet weekend, some time away from the demands — and the ordinary weariness lifts. The exhaustion that caregivers carry is different. It is the specific, bone-deep weariness that accumulates when a person has been oriented entirely toward the needs of another human being — their body, their comfort, their fear, their…

Topic: Grief and Trauma Awareness   —   Key Scriptures: Psalm 139:1-6 There is a phrase that functions almost like a reflex in most of our lives. “I’m fine.” We say it without thinking. To coworkers, to family members, to the person who asks how we are in passing. We say it in church lobbies and ministry meetings and on the phone with people who love us. We say it so many times, so automatically, that sometimes we lose track of whether it is actually true. For some people, the performance of okayness is so practiced, so deeply embedded in how they…