BY REBECCA CARRELL:

Rebecca Carrell has spent over a decade researching, praying through, and teaching on grief and lament. Here she shares a fabulous DTS chapel talk and the beautiful, gut-wrenching piece she wrote after losing a sixteen-year-old girl named Brooklyn. This is your permission to grieve.

REFLECTION BY CHRISTINE CRAWFORD ON THE CHOSEN: Darkness and light have always coexisted. That doesn't make the light less. It actually makes it more. Jesus didn't look away from the dark. He walked into it. He wept in it and over it. He let it be what it was before He did what only He could do.

POEM + REFLECTION BY CHRISTINE M. CRAWFORD: On a rainy Sunday in April, I found myself at the big box store staring at a flat of begonias that nobody wanted. Orphaned, root-bound, reduced to a dollar a pot. I bought all of them, resurrected them, then wrote this poem with dirt still wedged under my fingernails.

POEM BY KAREN ABEYTA:No body breathless or casket to cradle the weight of death. No funeral or tombstone to mark the passing when death dies unseen.