Showing results by publisher "Christian Audio" in Death & Grief

Framed around the nighttime prayer of Compline, Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, explores themes of human vulnerability, suffering, and God's seeming absence. Where do we find comfort when we lie awake worrying or weeping in the night? This book offers a prayerful and frank approach to the difficulties in our ordinary lives at work, at home, and in a world filled with uncertainty.

Lament is how we bring our sorrow to God - but it is a neglected dimension of the Christian life for many Christians today. We need to recover the practice of honest spiritual struggle that gives us permission to vocalize our pain and wrestle with our sorrow. Lament avoids trite answers and quick solutions, progressively moving us toward deeper worship and trust.

While grief is a universal experience, there are no clear rules or roadmaps for getting to the other side. And yet God is on this journey with us, holding us up and leading us to restoration. Amy Kulbok is a professional trauma therapist and a Christian whose own life was upended by heartbreaking tragedy. Sharing both therapeutic insights and hard-won wisdom, In the Valley of the Shadow combines personal, biblical, and evidence-based perspectives to explore the complexities of grief, faith, and suffering.

Caleb Wilde, author of the acclaimed memoir Confessions of a Funeral Director, was a skeptic. The baffling stories people told him—deathbed visions of long-dead parents, visits from the other side—must be hallucinations or wishful thinking, he thought. But the more stories he heard, and the more he learned about non-Western understandings of body and spirit, the less sure he was.

A cancer diagnosis changes everything. Fear, uncertainty, and suffering become daily realities—not just for patients but also for families, friends, and caregivers. Where is God in this? In God Meets Us in Our Suffering, three pastors who journeyed through cancer together share their deeply personal stories.

Accidental injury is the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of forty-five. From fatal traffic accidents to firearms injuries to casualties of war to a deadly virus passed to an elderly loved one, accidental harm dates back almost as far as our human stories go. When these accidents occur, they pose profound and agonizing questions. Rooted in research on moral injury, religious rituals of confession and cleansing, and psychology, Accidental explores the complicated reality of accidental death and injury and offers companionship to those affected by these tragedies.

No grief is quite like the grief that follows pregnancy loss. But true hope and redemption are available, even in the heartbreak of miscarriage and stillbirth.

When you suffer a loss, you enter the realm of "used to be." You used to be married. You used to be employed. You used to be pregnant, secure, healthy, sober, thin. You used to be a son or daughter, a brother or sister, a mother or father. And in that used-to-be space there is deep emptiness, loneliness, and sorrow. It's a place we all dwell for a while. But it's not a place in which we are meant to remain. The path forward includes exploring the unseen elements of grief. With this book, pastor Chuck Elliott and counselor Ashley Elliott light the way to a better future.

It takes time and space to grieve well, but often our culture doesn't afford us these things. Drawing from her own experience with grief, Natasha Smith invites us into a reflection on what it means to grieve and how to cling to hope even in our darkest moments. Instead of providing quick-fix solutions, this book creates space for us to take time to just sit and grieve, learn, and heal in healthy ways.

Death and the treatment of the dead body loom large in our collective cultural consciousness. The authors explore the materiality and meaning of the dead body and the living's relationship to it. All the biggest questions facing the planetary human community relate in one way or another to the corpse. Surprisingly, Christian communities are largely missing in the discussion of the dead, having abdicated the historic role in care for the dead to the funeral industry.

Grief is all-consuming. Shattering. After the death of a loved one, we ask questions about the meaning of life, the whys of death, and how to carry our sorrow. The Spirituality of Grief honors the complex nature of grief and offers simple comfort: we are not alone, and there is no one right way to grieve.

When a woman becomes pregnant, miscarriage is usually the furthest thing from her mind. Her time is spent dreaming of the day she will finally cradle her newborn baby in her arms. Such was the case for Jessalyn Hutto when she became pregnant with her first baby. But as is all too common, the precious life she carried came to an abrupt end before those dreams ever became a reality.

The American church avoids lament. But lament is a missing, essential component of Christian faith. Lament recognizes struggles and suffering, that the world is not as it ought to be. Lament challenges the status quo and cries out for justice against existing injustices. Soong-Chan Rah's prophetic exposition of the book of Lamentations provides a biblical and theological lens for examining the church's relationship with a suffering world. It critiques our success-centered triumphalism and calls us to repent of our hubris. And it opens up new ways to encounter the other.

What do you do when you are suddenly navigating a life you didn't sign up for? You never saw this pain coming, and you're facing a future you'd pass up if you could. Lisa Appelo understands deeply. She has experienced the raw emotions and uncertainty that come when everything falls apart. Lisa went to bed married and woke up a widow and single mom to seven children. She wrestled with impossible questions about her future—and then found life-changing answers that gave her the strength to move forward with true joy.

A mother's death can make a shambles of schedules, priorities, agendas, commitments, and, sometimes, even our most important relationships. A mother's last breath inevitably changes us. Drawing on his own experience of loss, as well as those of others, Harold Ivan Smith guides listeners through their grief, from the process of dying through the acts of remembering and honoring a mother after her death.

"Albert," the neighbor said, "your mom needs you to come home." That's how it began for Albert Hsu when his father died. Anyone who has lost a loved one to suicide experiences tremendous shock and trauma. What follows is a confusing mix of emotions - anger, guilt, grief, and despair.

When your baby dies, you find yourself in a life you never expected. And even though pregnancy and infant loss are common, they're not common to you. Instead, you feel like a stranger in your own body, surrounded by well-meaning people who often don't know how to support you. In Unexpecting, bereaved mom Rachel Lewis is the friend you never knew you'd need, walking you through the unique grief of baby loss. When nothing about life after loss makes sense...this book will.

In Companions in the Darkness, Diana Gruver looks back into church history and finds depression in the lives of some of our most beloved saints, including Martin Luther, Charles Spurgeon, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Without trying to diagnose these figures from a distance, Gruver tells their stories in fresh ways, taking from each a particular lesson that can encourage or guide those who suffer today. Drawing on her own experience with depression, Gruver offers a wealth of practical wisdom both for those in the darkness and those who care for them.

Though suffering often leaves us feeling isolated, God invites us into the community of the Trinity and offers us many companions in scripture. We experience loneliness alongside the exiled Israelites. We journey with David as he pleads to God for rescue. With Asaph we confess our unbelief. With Job we learn to lament. With Mary and Martha we learn to wait. In God's community, there is sweet fellowship, even in the hardest of circumstances. Journey in this book with Wendy Alsup through her story of suffering, and more importantly, with the God who walks with us in the wilderness.

Can any good come from thinking about death? Our natural tendency is to answer that question no! But what if our meditation on death was informed by a theological understanding of death, a recognition of the comfort Jesus's death affords Christians, and ethical guidance for dealing with death in these complicated days of modern medical developments? Rather than being morbidly unhelpful, authors Joel R. Beeke and Christopher W. Bogosh contend that meditating on dying and death can be profitable, even necessary, for us. Are you prepared to say that your death will be "gain" (Phil. 1:21)?