By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — May 17, 2026

For whatever reason, God took my wife away from me after giving me only two years of marriage and joy. I accept that God does what God does, but the truth is, I am not very interested anymore in saying much about Him. If God does what God does, then what more is there to say?

“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

That is about all I have left.

There are times when faith does not feel victorious. It does not feel bright, confident, or full of answers. It feels stripped down to almost nothing. It feels like standing in the ruins of your life with one sentence left in your mouth because everything else has been burned away.

That kind of faith does not look impressive. It does not preach well. It does not fit on church signs or greeting cards. But it may be the most honest faith there is.

People who have not been hit that hard by loss often think grief is supposed to move in a straight line. They think there is a proper timetable for it. They think that after a certain number of months, a grieving person should be calmer, more adjusted, more willing to “move on.” That is not how this works. That is not how love works.

When you lose someone you loved deeply, grief does not leave on schedule. It comes in waves. It rises on ordinary days. It catches you off guard in silence, in memory, in the middle of nothing. A person can be functioning one day and feel wrecked the next. That is not failure. That is not self-indulgence. That is the cost of having loved someone whose absence is now built into every part of your life.

I lost my wife less than a year ago. That is not ancient history. That is not some closed chapter. That is a wound still learning its own shape. So when it hits, it hits. And when it hits, I do not always have some polished spiritual lesson ready to hand people. Sometimes all I have is the truth.

The truth is that grief can leave a person tired of explanations. It can leave a person with very few words for God. Not because God has ceased to matter, but because pain has burned through everything shallow, easy, and rehearsed. What remains is not a performance of belief. What remains is bare endurance.

That is where the Book of Job still speaks with force. Job did not begin with answers. He began with loss. He began with devastation. He began with the kind of suffering that makes language collapse. And still, somehow, out of the wreckage came that sentence: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

That is not the voice of a man who understands everything. It is the voice of a man who has been emptied out and has almost nothing left except the refusal to lie.

There is a kind of spirituality that demands constant brightness. It expects every believer to sound victorious all the time. Frankly, that kind of spirituality does not survive real life very well. Real grief is rougher than that. Real grief is not inspirational on command. Sometimes spiritual honesty means saying that your heart is broken and your words are few.

Sometimes the holiest thing a grieving person can do is tell the truth before God.

I think part of what is hitting me now is not only the loss itself, but the growing realization of where I am in life. Loss has a way of forcing a person to see the road more clearly than they wanted to. It can create a strange longing for home, even when home is complicated, even when home itself is not a place you truly want to stay. Grief makes a person restless. It makes the soul look for shelter, memory, belonging, and orientation all at once.

That does not mean the grieving person is confused beyond reason. It means they are human.

There are days when loss feels like a theological problem. There are other days when it feels more like weather passing through the body. On those days, arguments do not help much. Advice does not help much either. “Move on” is easy to say when the loss belongs to somebody else. It is cheap language when spoken into someone else’s wound.

The better response is kindness. The better response is patience. The better response is to understand that grief is not sickness simply because it lasts. Sometimes grief is love with nowhere to go. Sometimes it is memory refusing to die just because the world expects efficiency. Sometimes it is the soul taking longer than society allows to absorb what has actually been taken from it.

So no, I do not have a grand resolution here. I do not have a tidy ending. I have one sentence from Job and a heart that still hurts. That is where I am. And for now, that will have to be enough.

There are moments when faith says many things. There are other moments when faith says almost nothing at all. In those moments, perhaps the task is not to manufacture more words, but to stand in the truth that remains. To speak the little that can still honestly be spoken. To let sorrow be sorrow. To let God hear it without embellishment.

That may not look strong to the outside world. But there is strength in refusing false comfort. There is strength in telling the truth. There is strength in remaining present inside your own pain without turning it into a performance.

If faith has very little left to say, maybe it can still say this much:

The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

For some days, that is not a beginning. It is not an ending. It is simply what remains.

If this work helps you understand what’s happening, help me keep it going: https://www.patreon.com/cw/WPSNews

This essay is written by Cliff Potts, Editor-in-Chief of WPS News. WPS News has been active in one form or another on the internet since 1998, originally launched during the Y2K era; for more information, visit https://cliffpotts.org.

References

The Holy Bible, King James Version. (1769/2017). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1611)

Job 1:21, Holy Bible, King James Version.

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