How can we begin to process our stories after a life-altering loss? Where can hope be found in the midst of insufferable pain? How do we connect the dots and find God's hand in our lives when suffering overshadows?

For Joan Kelley, those were difficult questions to answer after losing her teenage son, Will, to cancer. Yet, she found healing through looking at her life and the ways God has shown up, even in her worst pain. By going back in her own story, she has since been able to help walk alongside others in theirs by offering a listening ear or spiritual direction. And she has used what pain has taught her to bring hope and healing to those she encounters. While Joan knows she doesn't have all the answers, her journey has brought incredible lessons of faith, endurance, and how God can be trusted even in our darkest seasons.

In this episode, Davey sits down to talk with Joan about how everyone can use their unique wirings to bring hope to the hurting, why we have to make the time for our grief, and how processing your own story is pivotal in whatever healing path you are on.

Whatever the loss, Joan's story reminds us that we can all get to the place in our grief where we can still dare to hope.

It's every parent's worst fear to lose a child. How do you continue to trust God when your experiencing unrelenting pain? The journey after such a tragic loss is never linear and it can be full of chaotic feelings and opposing emotions. Yet God offers us an invitation to meet Him in the messiness of grief.

For Esther Lee, that invitation was often on the cold, dirty hospital bathroom floor where she cried out to the Lord so many times during her young daughter, Ava's, cancer journey. And while her grief began there and continued on well after her devastating loss of sweet Ava, she has learned that the Lord graciously allows for the anger, the questions, the fears and the doubts in the messy middle of our suffering. Esther has walked a long road of first being a parent of a child with life-threatening allergies to later receiving a diagnosis that no parent wants to hear as well as the non-stop rollercoaster of doctors and hospital visits. And while her circumstances have felt impossible and her grief has been messy, God has met her in it all.

Her story doesn't tie up in a neat, tidy bow when it comes to her pain, but instead, it is honest and authentic, one that allows for the raw emotions she feels while leaving room for the truth of God's goodness and kindness as she grapples her way through every parent's greatest fear.

In this moving conversation, Davey sits down with Esther to talk about how vital community can be after experiencing loss, the true wrestlings that can come in regards to God's goodness in our pain, how purpose shows up in small ways, and learning to worship when it feels hard.

No matter your story, you will be able to relate to Esther's wrestlings in the messiness of heartbreak and pain and find comfort in knowing that we serve a God who is not alarmed by it when we do.