Our family has been walking through a season of loss this year that arrived without the courtesy of warning. I am not going to lay out every detail here — some of it belongs only to the people living it, and grief that is still tender deserves privacy, not an audience.
What I can say is that the shortest verse in the Bible has become one of the largest to me this year: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). He wept at a grave He was about to reverse minutes later. He was not withholding tears until He knew the outcome would be sad forever. Grief, apparently, does not require permanent loss to be real. It only requires real love meeting real absence, even briefly.
I have found comfort less in explanations for why hard things happen and more in the promise that God is near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18) — not distant while we sort ourselves out, but near in the actual mess of it. Faith, in this season, has looked less like certainty and more like staying close to God while I do not have all the answers.
If you are in a season like this yourself, I am not going to hand you a tidy conclusion, because I do not have one yet. I will only say: He is near. That has been enough some days, and other days it has been all I had.