Seasons of Sorrow
Affiliate links below; an easy way to support my work at no additional cost to you.
Between my first son and my twin boys, I had two miscarriages. I knew miscarriages happened, but I never imagined such grief would come for me. With my first son, I drove an hour to the hospital with tears burning my eyes believing I was miscarrying. Hours later of pacing in a hospital waiting room, I sat in an examination room where I saw and heard my firstborn son on a monitor.
When my second pregnancy came along and bleeding happened, I felt pretty confident that my little one was okay.
But she wasn’t. There was no heartbeat.
The doctor told me I was miscarrying, and would repeat the same words to me several months later with my third pregnancy.
Grief left me empty, aching, lonely, and fearful. Suddenly, life was much more fragile than I had realized. God’s sovereignty loomed over me. I trembled before him.
In that time, I needed to know not just God’s sovereignty, but the comfort of his goodness too. I also needed the stories of others who had walked these roads before to come alongside me, wrap their arms around me, and whisper over my neck, “You’ll come through this. He’ll carry you through.”
In Tim Challies’ book, Seasons of Sorrow, he does all this and more.
In November of 2020, Tim lost his twenty-year-old son to a sudden, unexpected death. In this book, Tim walks us through the first year—fall, winter, spring, and summer—of his grief. While he clings to his faith without wavering (and God carries him through), he gives us a raw glimpse into his grappling with God’s sovereignty and goodness. This book does not coldly call grieving Christians to simply move on and trust God’s will, but rather shows them why God’s sovereignty and goodness together make him trustworthy in our grief.
This book is not a linear line upward of grief getting easier and easier, but rather a more realistic picture of how grief moves in waves, and the honest reality that deep grief and trauma may never fully leave us. Yet in this pain, Tim draws our eyes to Christ and our hope in God’s promises of salvation through short, beautifully written chapters.
I have never wept more when reading a book. However, this book bolstered my faith more than most. Not long after the loss of our two unborn babies, we went through a dark season of trial after trial. Through that suffering, I found myself growing harder to God’s sovereignty and doubting his care for me. Yet reading Tim’s story reminded me that God’s sovereignty and goodness aren’t like a toggle switch—when one is working, the other is off—but, instead, both are always fully active as he orchestrates our lives. As I read the stories of how God provided in the midst of Tim’s grief, I likewise remembered the many graces God provided us when we suffered too.
Seasons of Sorrow never paints suffering or grief as simply a hill we climb with a bit of self-will and fortitude. Rather, it takes us on the up and down, continual journey of grief through the life of someone who loves God and has learned what it means to suffer faithfully. I know this will be a book I return to often, and one I will put in the hands of many without the slightest hesitation.
