Welcome to Comfort the Brokenhearted! 

Thank you for taking time to spend here with me.  This is a blog about processing loss and grief.  It is about starting over.  It is about adjusting course and then adjusting it again in trying to find a way.  It is about repeatedly picking up the pieces of a shattered life with much help from God and the wonderful people He placed around me to help.  It is about learning to live again.  Learning to get up one more time.  Yes, learning to thrive again in the face of adversity.  It is about finding myself in God and God in my life.  My hope is that you, reader will find something here that will help you get up one more time and have the strength to pick up the pieces.  I hope you will above all find God in your life and your life in God.  

Job has become someone with whom, I have a great deal in common. Who is Job?  Well, he was a very good man.  Even God called him a man of integrity.  He was a devout believer in God. The God who blessed Job greatly for that faith and obedience.  God had given Job a wealth in servants, real estate, flocks, and a huge loving family.  He is also a man who suffered great loss and tragedy through no fault of his own.  Each and every one of those blessings was removed from Job’s life in an brutally short time. His flocks were violently stolen or destroyed .   His servants were murdered by raiders or killed in weird weather.  Every single one of his 10 children were killed at one time in a terrible building collapse.  He even lost his own health with a miserable, painful skin infection that would not be merciful and let him die.   His life was in complete devastation.  The grief was so severe he just sat —no movement nor speech— for days in sack cloth and ashes.  If the losses weren’t enough, his life was then dissected by those very people who were supposed to be his support system.  His friends gave speeches on his life looking for fault to blame Job and explain the reason for the tragic situations.  His own wife in her grief encourage him to curse God and just die already.  He was a guy that had reason by society views to curse God and everything around him.  Job did not curse anyone.  Yes, he cried, wailed, had pity parties, and wished he had never been born.  He had conversations with God and found new sides to God in a way he never would have before.  Jobs continued steadfast in his devotion to God before, during and after his losses.  God blessed Job with even greater blessings for his faith during it all.  

Whom am I and how do I stack up to Job?  Let’s start by checking off who I am not.  I am not a self help guru/product salesperson.   I am not a psychologist/psychiatrist.  I am not a preacher/minister.  I am not a Bible teacher/theologian.  I am a woman, who from 2014 to 2019 suffered her most tragic losses and adversities.  Like Job the losses came one after another and I was not sure they were going to stop.  I was not sure I was going to survive or if I even wanted to survive at some points.  I was afraid to ask “Can it get any worse?” because I was certain it would.  

I am like Job in that I have always been a devout believer.  I am not saying my faith has not been shaken at times. I chose to continue to believe as I had never been failed by the God that loves me. I believe in a God that set the foundations of the world and is able take care of me. I believed in God’s Son, my Savior that came from heaven, was born in a very human form, and lived a human life. I believed that sinless Savior died for me. I believe that because He was God made flesh and sinless, He fulfilled the law and completely defeated death, hell, and the grave. I believe He set me and anyone that truly believes in Him free from sin to live a life in relationship with Him. I believe he went to prepare a place for me and the other believers and that He is planning to return. I believe he will set His plans for the world into place in his time.

Like Job, I, too had been blessed.  I had a very good life by most standards.  I had a loving though very flawed extended family.  I was the first in my family to attend a university. I married, just out of college, a man of faith.  He worked in church music in addition to having an engineering career.  We were blessed with a beautiful daughter and moved to a lovely home in the country.  I built a career in the medical field and was excelling there.  We had a terrific church and supportive church family.   My life was very blessed.  Yes, there had been wonderful ups and tragic downs along the way as expected in any life.  None were as devastating nor consecutive  as the ones I will discuss here.  I hope to share lessons learned, insight gained, and faith strengthened  with you, Dear Reader.  There are events I will write about as I am led.  One will be about the untimely and unexpected loss of a sister to a battle with cancer. Caring for an elderly mother and her unexpected passing.  Another  will be about a divorce I did not ever think could really happen.  I may even venture into discussing the challenges of starting over in midlife and finding who you really are at the halftime.  I may not be able to write on a topic each week, but will do my best.  Sometimes these areas may overlap as it all happened in a whirlwind of 5 years.   I only hope that my experiences will help you find support, validation, encouragement, and God as you read.