When kingdom journeys do their job, they take you to a place where you see your brokenness and from there, to depend on God. But to get out of brokenness, you need to be able to grieve. Without true grief, mourning the broken part of you before leaving it, you can't move on.

We need to lead people into brokenness, but we need to move them out through the process of grieving.

Ron Walborn helped remind me of the gap a couple of weeks ago. It's what humans do. We lose someone or something we hold dear and then we have to grieve. And grieving is hard work; people need to be shown how to grieve, or maybe how to give themselves permission to grieve. And maybe how to be patient as the grief process does its healing work.

A lot of people are stuck coming to grips with their brokenness. And a lot of folks have never exited those broken places by grieving them.

What does this look like? It looks like Susan. She saw a truth a lot of people find needs grieving when they arrive at brokenness "I lived so long thinking I was ugly and unlovable. For years I shut others out, rejecting them before they rejected me. But the truth is, people did want to love me. I wasted all those years and can never get them back."

Susan was able to move on when she grieved the wasted years. When grief had completed its work, she was freed to move on.

I'm still in the middle of writing this last section of a book about this, so I 'd appreciate any thoughts or illustrations from your own life.