There is a season in every garden that looks like death.
The flowers are gone. The ground is hard. What was green and alive is now brown and still. To the untrained eye, it looks like failure. To the gardener, it looks like rest.
Grief is like that.
We live in a culture that is deeply uncomfortable with grief. We want to move through it quickly, to find the silver lining, to get back to okay. But grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a season to be lived.
Lament is one of the most underused spiritual practices in the modern church. The Psalms are full of it — raw, honest, sometimes angry prayers that don't resolve neatly. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is not a crisis of faith. It is faith, crying out in the dark.
If you are grieving something right now — a person, a dream, a version of your life you thought you'd have — I want you to know: you are allowed to grieve. You don't have to rush toward okay. You don't have to perform hope you don't feel.
God meets us in the dark soil. He is not absent from the winter seasons. He is there, tending what we cannot see, preparing what we cannot yet imagine.
Some seasons are for dying. And that is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the next one.