New Hope Grief Journey
Joining the Journey
When you participate in a New Hope Grief Journey care group, you will find two things you will find to be important: words to guide you and a connection with others, who like you, are seeking new hope. It may be hard to imagine that there is such a thing. But we believe that there is a hope, firm and secure, that gives you an anchor to begin to understand and even be transformed by your experience of grief.
Each of the six week sessions are from our work to understand grief in both academic settings and personal study, the experience of grief in our own lives and conversations shared with hundreds of individuals who have experienced the unexpected and unimaginable.
Will these weeks be easy? Honestly, we know much of it will be very hard. But we also know that you will be with others who like you are willing to face and experience the hard things trusting the One who is already with you in this journey.
The New Hope Grief Journey includes a six week participant study guide along with two companion booklets, “Faith and Grief: Questions You’re Asking” and “Lament”. Each stands alone in offering a unique element to your experience. Together, they provide guidance, understanding, perspective and encouragement for these current days as well as future ones.
Each week you will be invited to look at an aspect of grief that you will be able to identify with from your own experience. Each experience will be seen through the lens of biblical truth and stories that intersect with a clinically based aspect of grief. You will also find tools to guide you in the days between each group meeting and beyond.
WEEK 1 | Grief Begins
We explore how grief may first be experienced and the spiritual practice of lament.
WEEK 2 | Grief Shouts
We recognize and respond to the harsh ways of grief and use the spiritual practice of “quiet reading”.
WEEK 3 | Grief Pushes
We begin to navigate necessary changes and learn the spiritual practice of “being present in prayer”.
WEEK 4 | Grief Invitations
We grapple with the possibility of moving forward and the necessity of the spiritual practice of self-care.
WEEK 5 | Grief Remembers
We integrate the unresolved and unfinished to remember with less pain and find rest in the spiritual practice of Sabbath.
WEEK 6 | Grief Finds New Hope
We lean into God’s promise of a new hope, firm, and secure and make it our own.
Faith and Grief: Questions You’re Asking
Because you are grieving there is a real possibility that everything you have believed about life and how it work has been turned upside down and inside out. You are learning to navigate your days after the death of someone you have loved. Unending questions and feeling that begin when you wake up and stay with you until the end of the day.
This companion book to the New Hope Grief Journey looks to the questions surrounding faith and grief that have been asked and wrestled with by philosophers, faith leaders and those in the secular world. What is offered here is not the complete and final word on any of these questions but is just the beginning.
Maybe you are asking:
God is with me? God loves me? God is in control? God heals? Tell me about heaven. God’s listening? Anger and guilt in grief? What about suicide?
A Lament for Your Loved One
Grief exposes how we construct false control and safety in our weak hands and shows us things about ourselves like no other. We mostly live with the false notion that there is a “proper” way to grieve as we think we can self-guide and control our way through it. Very quickly we discover that grief is messy, unique and mostly very private. You are responsible for the brutal work of grieving. No one can do that for you.
But you don’t do it alone.
God knows that grief is indeed brutal work and has shown us a way to grieve and mourn loudly, even to wail. The thought of “lament’ is a scary one but it is also a gracious gift that God invites us to do freely. This small book is a guidepost to “lament” as we turn towards God, with an unfiltered response to our pain and suffering. We go to God in lament because we believe that He is the only One who can help us.
To know more about “Faith and Grief: Questions You’re Asking” and “Lament” contact jacky@newhopegriefcare.org or stacey@newhopegriefcare.org.