Why am I passionate about this?
I have been to hell and back over the years. After experiencing childhood abuse, I lived through a succession of traumas with my family including fraud, painful experiences in church ministry, a death threat, and a catastrophic house fire accidentally started by my mother-in-law. While I was helped by counseling, prayer, and caring friends and mentors, something was still missing. I needed to process all that pain and loss but didn’t know how. I had to learn how to grieve. Over years of rebuilding, I’ve lived the lessons of lament and know the healing that is possible when pain is metabolized.
Terra's book list on grieving without getting overwhelmed by despair
Why did Terra love this book?
Like Opelt, I believed I was well equipped to grieve well before suffering found me. Like her, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Her book was solace because it refused to shy away from the complexity and sometimes downright strangeness of grief. Her exploration of historical rituals for processing grief in community sparked my imagination for more ways of restoring lost practices and finding new ones for engaging loss, remembering well, and honoring life with those I love.
1 author picked A Hole in the World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
When Amanda Held Opelt suffered a season of loss-including three miscarriages and the unexpected death of her sister, New York Times bestselling writer Rachel Held Evans-she was confronted with sorrow she didn't know to how face. Opelt struggled to process her grief and accept the reality of the pain in the world. She also wrestled with some unexpectedly difficult questions: What does it mean to truly grieve and to grieve well? Why is it so hard to move on? Why didn't my faith prepare me for this kind of pain? And what am I supposed to do now?
Her search…