BONUS Episode: When Cancer Hits, Children Grieve, and Night Falls: Wrestling through Questions and Finding Jesus in Darkness – Behind the Scenes with Aubrey Sampson

​​Jen: Hey friends, it's Jen and welcome to this bonus episode of Good God Talks. I had the opportunity to interview a new friend a few days ago and we talked about hardship and darkness and pain and God's goodness and beauty and books, all in the midst of this conversation. There was no way that I could put that all in an eight-minute episode and do it justice and so I'm sharing it with you as a bonus behind the scenes episode. My guest is Aubrey Sampson. And before we jump in to the episode, I want to share a little bit more of Aubrey's background with you.

She co planted and serves as a teaching pastor at Renewal Church, which is a multi-ethnic congregation in the area. She is the author of several books, most recently a book called What We Find in the Dark and also a children's picture book called Big Feelings Days, and we talk about both of those. Aubrey is passionate about helping hurting Christians find God's presence in their pain, which I know is going to come through so beautifully in our conversation. I will have links in the show notes for all the places you can connect with Aubrey and find her books.

And so let's jump into that conversation.

Jen: Aubrey, I'm so glad to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for making time to talk with us and to share a little bit more behind the scenes of your life and your writing journey.

Aubrey: Jen, thanks for having me. I'm so honored to be here. Love what you do. Love what you're about. Love the women listeners already, even though I don't know them.
So yeah, I'm really thrilled to be here with you.

Jen: I know you have a recent book that came out, What We Find in the Dark, but actually want to backpedal a little bit and talk about the first book of yours that I read, which I actually read with my boys, Big Feelings Days.

Aubrey: I don't mean to cut you off, but I just, I love my kids' book and I love thinking of moms reading it with their little ones so that you've just like made my entire day. Anyway, go ahead.

Jen: Well, it is a fantastic book to read with our kids also. It was so healing for me as well. Like it's one of those books you also need it if you're a grownup.

Aubrey: Yes. You got it. That is definitely the hidden message it's really a book for the little kid inside of the grownups. Yes.

Jen: Could we talk just for a minute about big feeling days and how that came about?

Aubrey: Yeah. It's, kind of a wild story, Jen.
A few things were happening. My husband and I lead a church in West Chicago where we live called Renewal Church, and there was a very precious family that we're very close to and I'm just going to dive right into hard topics. Here we go. This precious family had a stillbirth. And it was, devastating as you, as a mom know, and any of your listeners who have experienced a miscarriage, a stillbirth, a loss of a child. There's nothing like it. It's horrific, it's sad, it's unexplainable. And what they found was that there were a whole lot of resources for mom and dad.

But the mom called me one day and she said, I cannot find anything for my kids who have lost a sibling, who now have experienced death and disappointment for the very first time, who saw this baby growing in mommy's belly and now like there's no resources for them. So very earnestly, I called my publisher, I called other children's pastors.

I know I'm googling, and my publisher called me back within an hour and she said, Aubrey, we've just had a conversation, and we think you need to write this book. I had already been writing in the grief and lament space, so it wasn't that far off, but I'd never written a kid's book before and I was like, oh, can I, can I write a kid's book? You know? And anyway, Big Feelings Days, a book about hard things, heavy emotions. And Jesus' Love was born. And the crazy part of all of it, Jen, is it became a gift for that family, even for our whole church. But part of my story, it does connect to the book you mentioned, What We Find in the Dark, is that two years ago I lost my very, very best friend, ride or die partner in crime to breast cancer.

And while, oh, this is going to make me cry talking about it. While Jen was on hospice in her last week, the book cover came in and so I got to share it with her.

Jen: Oh, wow.

Aubrey: Yeah, that was just one of those strange gifts in the darkness, you know, a strange treasure in the darkness like Isaiah talks about.

And to have her kind of like blessing and her say she loved it so much was just a weird, strange but lovely thing that God did for me in the midst of a really hard season of losing her. And then I ended up dedicating the book to her widower and their three kids, and now they read it
every month on the anniversary of her passing. And I love that. I hope one day there's a day they don't need to do that anymore. You know? But it's very special to me to think about how God has stewarded that book, both for this precious family in our church, for this precious family that are my best friends and kids that are like my nephews, you know?

Stories come in all the time of moms and dads reading it or grandparents reading it to kids who have known just an unexplainable or unfair loss. Loss of, you know, even a pet loss of a grandma, loss of a parent, loss of a sibling, disappointments. I know the book has meant a lot to their little hearts, and so I'm very, very grateful for it.

I'll say one more thing about it, Jen, and then I'll stop talking 'cause I know I love it. I love it so much. I also have a friend who is a college professor. She teaches on emotions. She has every semester like a little kid day where she has her college students bring Capri Suns and picnic lunches and they sit on the floor and she reads it to them and she says, every time they're all sobbing.
And I, so that's just not something I would've expected God to do.

Jen: I want to borrow that idea. I feel like there's so many spaces as adults where we push ourselves into the adulting and we ignore that inner child inside

Aubrey: yeah. Still needs

Jen: love and tenderness. That's right. And healing. So if anyone who's listening and you're like, I think I need to do this, go get Big Feelings Days. Get yourself a Capri Sun. Sit down, read it with Jesus. Yes. I love it. In the big feelings. Yes. So good. Yeah. That's so good.

And I came across it really because we were navigating a hard season like that in our family. My mom passed away, as our listeners know in January of 2023 from breast cancer, that was a recurrence. She had conquered it earlier, like 20 years prior and it came back.

And I was looking for resources to talk with our boys about their big feelings and about how Jesus meets us and how he was there for grandma when she passed. And so it was a godsend in that season. There's so many things in our life that can prompt big feelings and that can prompt grief.

Like we're talking quite a bit about death today. Also, there's a lot of different areas where we, we experience grief and loss, and you talk about that even in big feelings like the anger and the sadness and when you have all of these mixed feelings all on the same day and how Jesus is strong enough for them.

And so I love that that was my introduction to you. I have never before, brought over a tissue box to my podcasting desk prior to an interview. Your heart comes through so beautifully and so vulnerably in What We Find in the Dark. Like there's, a way that you write about your journey that just repeatedly made me feel, seen and understood. And grief is so messy, and there's so much in grief that we don't understand, that we can't understand. But to feel understood in my lack of understanding was such a gift. So could we move a little bit more to talking more about What We Find in the Dark and how that book came to be?
Aubrey: Yeah. I would love to, first of all, I'm sorry for your loss. Jen and I feel the rage at cancer with you. Yes. It just a, it's a monster man. It is it is a monster. But I'm glad you've been able to share that with your audience so you're not carrying it alone. It makes me, deeply honored that Big Feelings Days has been a resource for your kiddos. So thank you for sharing that with me. What We Find in the Dark as I was losing Jen I had a friend say to me you need to be writing, because I couldn't sleep. I knew that Jen was going to pass. My Jen was going to pass.

And so it was like that anticipatory grief or pre grieving that you do, even though the whole time I was praying for healing and eradication from cancer, believing God was going to heal her. I also knew this reality that, stage four cancer's terminal, when we got the news that she was on hospice. I stopped sleeping. It was really. It was pretty terrible. But I had a friend at the time who was up nursing two, uh, two babies, twins. She would text me in the middle of the night and are you sleeping? And I'd be like, no, I'm wide awake. And she's like, me too, I have nursing. And she just said to me regularly, you need to be writing.
God told me you need to be writing. And so literally and figuratively, I wrote this book in the dark—spiritual darkness of grief and actual like, wrote it throughout the hours of the night. And you know, a lot of wisdom, especially in publishing would say, don't write a book while you're in the middle of it.

You know, you write a book like from perspective, you're looking back on it, but I felt like I was praying with my fingertips as they were typing, like I was sorting out all of my very conflicting. Theological wrestlings at my keyboard. And so to write became a lifeline in like the deepest, darkest grief I've ever walked through.

And then I continued writing after Jen passed and just processing all of the emotions from there. What I didn't realize is that this would become a book for other people in grief. This was just kind of me and Jesus, like this was not meant for an audience at all.

But as time went on, I began to realize there might be something for people who are walking with fresh grief and feel like, like you just said, they aren't seen or it's so dark, they don't know how to, even move forward in the teensiest bit or maybe, like I know for me if someone else can put words to what I'm experiencing, it's so healing for me. And so I began to just want to do that for the hurting reader. How can I give you some language from my own pain that can reach into yours, so you feel like you're not alone?

And maybe together we can find some hope in this horrible thing called loss.

Jen: You do that so beautifully and I think that there's something that feels so precious as a reader to know that you're navigating this too. I agree with you. Generally speaking, it's like, oh, maybe write it, put it on a shelf and come back to it, which you did. That's true. Yes. But it comes through so much in the shared journey in the shared pain, even in the language you use. I'm a big word nerd, and so I resonate with the way you depict the struggle. And so thank you not only for sharing. Those areas of grief.

And I'm sorry that you've walked through them but thank you for sharing them in the way that you shared them because there's something that's so rich in the way that you go about that.

So I'm gonna probably quote you a lot to you in this

Aubrey: conversation,

Jen: so I'm like, okay, you said this, this was beautiful.
This was really impactful. You talked about grief as something that we can carry in our lungs and our limbs and our adrenal system. And then later on you start talking about how nighttime tends to be a beacon for anxiety. And to me, those concepts were so closely tied together not only when it comes to grief, but in the worst-case scenarios, in the anxieties about tomorrow in the worries about what happened today.

Can you talk a little bit about how you experienced that and how really you started connecting the dots to nighttime and darkness?

Aubrey: Yeah. I would say I don't, you know, I've been through loss before. Like I said, I've even written about loss before, but I have never lost someone so close to me until Jen, I have had other losses since Jen, but I don't think I realized how physical grief is.

Grief, as you know, will make you nauseous. It will make your joints hurt, it will make you so either physically tired or wide awake. It makes you forgetful. Like I can vividly remember taking a shower one time and being like, what steps am I supposed to take in the shower?

Like there's a shampoo bottle there. I'm supposed to do something with it. And it seems so basic, but that's the power of grief. It can just impact so much of not just your emotions, but your physical realities.

And I felt like that was important to name, because I think sometimes, we don't realize that people who are grieving around us are not who they once were.

You know, they're not functioning at the same capacity they were and they're not able to do the things or really, do they care to do the things they once did? And in some ways, I think that allows us, if we're walking with people who are grieving, to give them some grace and some space and some time to be where they are.

You know, part of that is that for me at least, the not sleeping and it's interesting. I recently lost someone very, very close to me, and I've had the opposite reaction. I couldn't get out of bed. I'm in a better season now, but the first few weeks I was like, I can only sleep.

So I'm like, grief is not formulaic in one loss. Mm-hmm. I couldn't sleep in another loss all I can do is sleep. I don't know, I just know grief is hard, you know? Yeah. But the connection to nighttime. Yeah. And this is true, whether you deal with chronic anxiety or not, something about nighttime just makes us feel vulnerable and tired, and our brains are, able to focus on our financial woes, our worries for our kids if we have them. Concerns for parents, concerns for the future. Thoughts of death. I mean, I know that sounds crazy, but that's when you realize your limitedness when you're lying there in bed.

And in one sense that can make nighttime kind of scary. But in another sense, it's like, well, what if there's an invitation then to invite God into those really hard, scary questions 'cause that's really where like we need Jesus to show up. yes, It's to get through our tasks during the day, but it's also to deal with the underneath layers of what we're really afraid of and really hurting. And that's the place where God wants to meet us.

So though the nighttime is so vulnerable, I also think that vulnerability allows us to be like exposed before God in a way that he can bring deep, deep transformation and freedom if we're willing to process those things with him.
Jen: There are so many questions that come out in those dark places. Yeah. And it's so important to bring those to God, but at the same time, it can feel so hard to know how to

Aubrey: Yeah.

Jen: And so can we talk a little bit more about that? Yeah.
Aubrey: Yeah. I'm so glad you brought that up. Questions the essence of those is the spiritual practice in spiritual language of lament. My second book is a book called The Louder Song, listening for Hope in the Midst of Lament.
So this was even before my loss of Jen, but I was exploring what it is to ask God those really, and they're like rageful questions. They're raw questions. They're scary questions because they won't necessarily have an answer. And because we're not sure if it's okay to talk to God like that. A lot of us have not been formed to talk to God like that.

But lament is deeply biblical. Of course there's the Book of Lamentations. There's Psalms of Lament, Jesus lamented. I think they're a forgotten, very important theological practice, at least in the western evangelical church. And those questions actually are an act of worship.

Scripture calls lament an impolite plea. So The understanding is that you are literally being rude to God. And again, we're like, no, we can't, we can't do that. But the reality is this is the best way I can think about lament and asking God our hard questions. Are you married Jen? I am.

How long have you been married?

Jen: fif—oh gosh. 16 years. Okay. 16.

Aubrey: Okay. So I've been married for my husband and actually had got in a fight about this the other day. We've been married for 24 years. I was like, it's 23. He was like, no, it's not. It's 24. It is 24. Okay. In your 15 years of marriage or my 24 years of marriage, if I were to say, or you were to say to your audience, we have never had a fight.

Like, it's so perfect all the time. It is just like rainbows and butterflies and it's just your skillful listeners would either go, wow, that kind of sounds fake, right? Mm-hmm. Like, she's lying, right? Or that sounds like a really shallow relationship. They've never had conflict. They've never worked through conflict.

Like we all know, a healthy marriage or a healthy long-term friendship, a healthy relationship requires conflict and conflict resolution, right?

Jen: Mm-hmm.

Aubrey: And so I think it's like preposterous of us to assume that if we're going to have a deeply intimate relationship with God, the lover of our souls, the one who has married us as his bride, right?

If it's going to be truly intimate, then of course there's going to be moments of worship and awe and adoration and love and affection, and how could you, how dare you. Where are you? We see that all throughout scripture. And the reality is like God would rather us run to him with our angry, hard, ugly questions than walk away in apathy or despair.

And so often that's what happens in grief. We hit that wall and those hard spiritual questions, and we go, oh, well, God's not fitting into the framework I had for him, so I'm out. In that way, we kind of become like Deists rather than going, you know what? I'm actually gonna lean in here. I'm gonna trust that God is not afraid of my questions. I'm gonna trust that I have biblical language and biblical precedents to ask these questions, and I'm gonna wait until God shows up in them.

And then the difficult part of lament is that again, God doesn't always give us these perfect little tidy answers. In fact, he rarely gives us tidy answers, but he does give us himself.

And he gives us his body and he gives us his peace and he gives us his comfort and he gives us future promises that one day there will be a day when he will wipe away every tear and death will be no more. Revelation seven and 21 talk about that. So we find on the other side of asking God those hard questions, that we have a deeper intimacy with God and more hope.

But it's, hard won. I mean, it's, it's Jacob wrestling. It's like, I will not let you go unless you bless me. But that's part of a maturing Christian faith.

Jen: Yeah, it is. And I definitely wanna get back to the wrestling because I love some of the insight you talked about that. But the way you're describing this relates back to what you called a shameless audacity in talking with God.

What you're talking about, part of what God invites us into in relationship, is to break free from the shame that we have felt about having these questions to begin with. Yeah. Because it's not like if I don't ask God the question, the question just goes away. Right. It's not like, oh, I mean me and God are fine, like going back to your analogy.
But he is strong enough and capable enough to meet us in the darkness and to meet us in the hard places and to receive our questions. I think a lot of my background sounds similar to yours. I didn't know I could even have relationship with God for a lot of years in the faith.
Then I didn't know I could talk with him, and I didn't know I could talk with him about these kind of things. Yeah. And so I love that we're talking about this here because Good God talks is all about talking with God. I love that. And asking him questions and hearing for what he would share with us.

But as we're already talking about, that's not a familiar thing to everybody. Yeah. And then you also shared a little bit about working with a spiritual director where he's inviting you to connect with Jesus in your imagination. And yeah, I feel like if you're not familiar with listening prayer and listening for God to respond, you're probably not familiar with engaging with Jesus in your imagination either.

Yeah. And both of those are really beautiful things that we get to walk through as spiritual practices. So can you talk a little bit about the steps you took to start engaging with God that way and the visual he gave you of himself as a lion?

Aubrey: Yeah. I would love to, and I know for some people that can feel kind of weird.

It's okay if that makes you uncomfortable to think about using your imagination, but what I would say is that the Lord has given us imagination. God is a creative God. God created every part of us, and of course we know that. Every part of us also needs to be redeemed by the Holy Spirit and in our sanctification process toward Christ-likeness.

But we do have a sanctified imagination as Christians who walk with the Holy Spirit. And so when we invite Jesus in to meet us, in our imagination, like he will show up and that's what's so amazing. And he'll show up with love. He'll show up in a way that is not in contradiction to the scripture it may be in contradiction to what you know about God, 'cause he is expanding your understanding of who he is, but never, not biblical, I guess is what I would say. So for those of you who love spiritual practices like listening prayer or imagining the scripture coming to life, you'll understand this.

I won't have to explain too much, but I think it's worth giving that kind of caveat. But yeah. So I, I have met with the spiritual director for probably seven years and, this was a new spiritual director that I, in my grief, I felt like I needed, I just needed help. Like I, you know, I was so, so devastated by the loss of Jen and was asking God all of those hard questions, where are you?

Where are you, where are you? But I was, felt like I was getting no answer. Like God was just not showing up in the ways I thought God was supposed to show up. And I, that was very difficult for me. So I decided it was time to meet with a spiritual mentor, just to like kind of help, honestly help me. Like I can't do this alone.

And the Christian life isn't meant to be done alone. It's meant to be done in community. So it's so funny, he walked me through this practice, and I won't make this too long, Jen, but where he literally like turned on a CD with Nature sounds and I was so cynical, like I was like, this is dumb. What are you doing?

I didn't say that out loud, but in my heart, I was like, what? You have a CD and you're turning on nature sounds. But he eventually invited me just to imagine that I was on a walk with Jesus. And it took me a minute to be like, close my eyes and be like, okay, Jesus, show me where you are in this. And, you know, the sounds on the CD would change from one sound to the next.

So we'd be on a bridge, or we'd be, you know, in another location. And then soon the sound shifted to like the roar of an ocean. I struggled to experience where Jesus was in my imagination, but I kept trying to be like open hearted about it. In my imagination, I'm walking with Jesus on the beach.

I did get a very clear sense of Jesus showing up as a lion. It was so obvious to me as I was praying and listening that this lion was, just walking at the same pace I was. And that is gonna make me cry too, because I think there was a lie that I believed in grief that I needed to be better than I was, and God was disappointed in me.

But that prayer time with Jesus, I began to realize like, oh, he is not rushing me. Jesus is not rushing me past a finish line of grief. Jesus is not pushing me up some mechanical ladder of spiritual growth right now. He is pacing with me in my sadness, and so I just get to be where I am and trust that Jesus is not going anywhere.

And it was the most beautiful, freeing experience to know like I have a lion and a lion, right? Undomesticated and also big and protective and kind of like in your imagination, kind of warm and cozy, but just right there. So all of these amazing things about God's character, a defender, a shield, a protector, kind of wild, but also very close.

It was a beautiful way that God showed up when I could not sense God's presence. Yeah. Interestingly, Jen back in 2015 when I wrote my book on Lament, I had lost a cousin very tragically, and It was another season where I was struggling to connect with God and I had another spiritual director walk me through a listening prayer exercise, and there God showed up as a swimming lion.
And so I, it's interesting, it is probably very C.S. Lewis or something from Narnia, but God shows up sometimes as a lion in my imagination. And I love that image of God like that.

Jen: Yeah, I love it too. And, I loved how you even talked about it. Like, okay, God, if you're keeping pace with me, I have some thoughts.

It is so freeing. It is so empowering to receive the grace that God gives us. Yeah. To just come to him honestly, and to explore the visuals that he gives us. Yes. Okay. God, why a lion? Yeah. Why this scenery? Why are you moving that way? Why am I moving this way? Yes.

Tell me about what's happening. And he longs to invite us into those moments with him. One of my favorite reminders of God in my day-to-day life is actually just leaves blowing in a tree. And it relates back to this moment I had as a teenager where I'm driving along and I see the wind blowing some tree branches, and I just say it like it was a random moment.

Oh God, how beautiful. And I felt like he said in my spirit, I did that for you. I knew you'd notice. I know it's amazing and it has, it has come up in, many different times. It came up for me this morning as I'm reading your book and I'm praying and I'm crying and I'm talking to God about my loss.

And I look out the window, there wasn't breeze and all of a sudden the leaves start blowing in the breeze.

Aubrey: Come on.

Jen: And, it feels like such this simple, silly little thing

Aubrey: Yeah.

Jen: That I can sometimes look at it too cynically and be like, mm-hmm. Oh, is that really God? That's just circumstance, that's just nature.

That's just whatever.

Aubrey: Right.

Jen: Or I can say, Hey, the God of the universe can show up however he wants to. Amen. Yeah. And he likes to remind me of himself in leaves. Yeah. Or he likes to remind you of himself as a lion and Yes. There's so many, and that's not the only way he ever shows up to us. Right. But there's these shared experiences.

Yeah. These shared moments that we get to have with him that help us remember that he is near and see him in a way that is a little bit more tangible feeling. Mm-hmm. That's more visual than Yeah, that's

Aubrey: Right.

Jen: Than our invisible God.

Aubrey: Yeah. And I mean, is he not sovereign over nature that he could do that?

The whole scripture is God showing up with power over nature, you know, authority over nature and appearing in a burning bush. Why not in leaves for his daughter that he loves so deeply? And I do think it, does require a childlike faith to say, yes, this is God, but why not? Like I would so much rather have that childlike faith and believe that God is coming towards me with love than see it all as just like rational and cynical. But I'm with you. You have to like fight the cynicism a little bit.

Jen: Yeah. So what, which I think is good. Yeah. To even just recognize about ourselves. Mm-hmm. Like we are humans. That's not a bad thing. God wasn't like, oops, I made them human. Right. We, have minds and thoughts and reason that we get to use, and those are also being sanctified, and those are also part of how God's created us to connect with him.

Aubrey: Yeah.

Jen: Okay, so I'm gonna quote you a little bit more to yourself, continuing in the child likeness of how we can come to God but also in the willingness to wrestle with him. And so you talk a little bit about, Jacob and Rachel and how they each wrestled with God and how you would like, I would point my finger in his face, or I would hammer my fist against his chest and demand some answers.

And also there's a tender part, the underneath part that longs for God and our wrestling to delicately grab my wrists and pull me close. Hug me tightly and quiet my spirit. You say, God, we need you small and we need you near, but we also need you strong because we cannot walk this dark path on our feet. We need to be held. And I just wanted to say yes to all of that.

Aubrey: You're like making me cry with my own words right

Jen: now. Isn't that cool how like God's like, here I'm gonna stir this in your heart again. Yeah. There is so much, I think, especially in the Western Church, that we've misunderstood about God's willingness to go into the dark places with us.

Aubrey: Yeah.

Jen: The perspective I grew up with was wrestling is bad,
not wrestling is something that God could actually be the one initiating,

Aubrey: right?

Jen: So, I have so many questions about that. But you, pose a question and I'll start here.

You say, but what if God intentionally incites us to doubt, to struggle, to question our faith? And what if God has a good reason for it?

Aubrey: I wrote those words because I'm reading Genesis 32 where Jacob is wrestling with God and, earlier passages Rachel was wrestling with God and I'm like.
God started the fight with Jacob, like literally the story is that this weird, mysterious being. Like, almost like toes him away. Like, Hey you, we got some stuff to deal with. And I'm like, wait, I think my whole life I've interpreted that as Jacob started the wrestling, Jacob was wrestling with God. But if you read the scripture, so much of it is told from the vantage point of God inciting the fight and now.

You have to be careful, right? 'cause I know like I don't believe God causes cancer. I don't believe God causes car wrecks. I don't believe God causes evil, period. Right? Like that is not from God. Be very clear about that. But I do sometimes think that God does like shove us into that wrestling place, whether it's doubt, whether it's disillusionment whether it's a dark season because there's stuff he wants to get at.

I mean, like the whole conversation with Jacob is he's like removing this deceiver identity from Jacob and giving him a new name and a new purpose, and God wants to do that with us. And so sometimes like to get to the underneath places. There are real places where we're struggling. God's like, come on, we got to fight a little bit.
And I think the hard part is we can think it's us. Like we get stuck in like, oh, I'm doubting, oh, I'm not spiritually strong. Oh God is not who I thought God was. But if we can sort of refrain that and go, wait, some of this spiritual stuff is coming up. Maybe God is actually inviting me to face it.

Maybe God is actually inviting me to wrestle with him about it, talk to him about it, like yell at him about it. And what I love about that image of wrestling, and I'm not the first person to say this, but I think it really matters. It again, like lament requires closeness. Like Jacob and God wrestling. They were close to each other.

And so for us to wrestle with God, it implies intimacy. The real intimate battle happens in closeness and, so I'm with you. Like I think so many Christians think it's just not okay to go there with God, but God wants all of us, God wants the real us.

God wants to do the transformation in the deep, deep places. And so to be willing to wrestle and be willing to let God remove some of our doubts and disillusionment in the wrestling is actually a really good, healthy thing. The hard part is it can feel like you are going backwards spiritually, or spiritually, like quote, immaturing, because we have this idea that spiritual growth is always linear up into the right or whatever.

It's deepening. I like to think about spiritual growth like the end of a spiral notebook. And so you're going around and around and around and here's an issue you've been struggling with God, right? You think you deal with it and then a few years later, 'cause you're going deeper and deeper on the spiral.

You hit it again, but you hit it at a deeper level, in a more intimate place. And so God has more healing to do down deep and you just kind of like move deeper and deeper into Christ likeness. And wrestling is all a part of that.
Jen: So do you have any starter tips for someone who recognizes, Hey, I'm in a dark place and I'm not so good at this wrestling, being close, bringing my questions to God thing.

Aubrey: This is really practical, but I actually think this is helpful. You know, 10 years ago when I first began a lament journey before I even knew I was gonna lose Jen and other folks I actually grabbed a journal. You could do this in your phone notes, journal, whatever you like. You could do voice memos to yourself, but I wrote the word Eicha on it, which in Hebrew is the question “how?”
The book of Lamentations in the Hebrew Bible is actually called Eicha. And the lament question is that question, how long oh Lord. Jeremiah begins lamentations by saying how lonely lies the city, how like a widow she is. And so I wrote in a my how journal every single one of my questions as they popped up.

And there were things 10 years ago, like our son had to have major spinal cord surgery. God, how are you gonna pay for this 'cause our insurance didn't. I already mentioned I lost a cousin. God, how are you gonna make this okay for his mom? How are you gonna make this okay for my family? I was walking through an autoimmune disease at the time. How are you gonna make me and my husband okay 'cause this is a really difficult season. How are you gonna show up?
And of course, you don't have to be literal with how questions, where are you, God, what are you doing? How could you, how dare you? But the point is to ask your lament questions somewhere in a journal, again, in your phone notes, and just start there. And part of that act is simply to go, okay, God, these questions are yours. I can't control things that are out of my control, so I'm just gonna kind of hand them over to you, surrender them to you, and trust that in time you're gonna meet me there. And that's a starter to lament is just start asking very intentionally all of your how questions.

And what's interesting about the spiritual practice of lament is if you read the laments in scripture, they always move to a place of yet. So Psalm 13 would be another starter, like grab Psalm 13 and begin praying that back to God, his own words to himself. David begins that Psalm, how long, oh Lord,

will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? But then he moves to this place of yet. Yet God you're here yet you have unfailing love for me, yet I'm gonna, and every lament has that kind of turn of yet in it. Limitations three is a very famous one. I think what's helpful about that, if you're thinking about starting asking God your questions, is first you just ask all the hard ones, surrender them to God. But then you can begin to ask God to move your heart to that place of yet.

So like even if you don't fix this, even if you don't heal my best friend, even if you don't show up in my grief and pain, move my heart to a place of yet where I believe that you are who you say you are in spite of my circumstances.
And that's a work of the Holy Spirit. That's a work that takes time.

But you can be very intentional to be a person who declares there yet, which is essentially like, okay, even if it doesn't get better, even if I'm in the darkness forever. I believe that Jesus is the prize, and so I'm gonna like put my faith in the ground. I'm gonna like, anchor my faith in the ground and just declare my yet, you know?

That's a powerful act in lament as well. So that's what I would say. I just said a lot but begin asking all those how questions surrender them to God, let him take care of the outcome and then ask the Lord to help move you to that place of yet. And then a third thing would be, read some limits and pray them back to God.

Jen: Oh, I love that. And we'll put some links in we have a few episodes also talking about lament, so I can drop those here in the show notes as well to help out. As we close out, is there any final thoughts that you'd like to leave with our listeners today?

Aubrey: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jen. It's been so good to talk about these hard things. I would just say this, if you are a listener who's walking in darkness you're not alone, you're not crazy. There are spiritual seasons of darkness and God is doing something actually loving in it, believe it or not.

So, hold on. Look for little glimmers of light. 'cause God is coming towards you with love, even when it feels impossible to see. But you do have to kind of train your mind to look for those things. It is okay, like we even started this conversation, God is pacing with you in your grief and your loss and not rushing you past some finish line of pain so you can be right where you are. You can trust that God is very close to you. Psalm 34 says that God is close to the broken hearted and that he is not afraid of the depth of your heartache and longs to meet you in it.
Jen: Friends, I hope you feel as encouraged and filled up as I do from that conversation. I loved getting to talk with Aubrey and share her heart and the messages that God has given her with you.

And so again, there are links in the show notes for all the places you can connect with her, and I encourage you, if there are things that God prompted in your mind or your heart, as you listen to today's episode, talk with him about it.

And as always…

Have a good talk.

And if you've been encouraged by this content, please share it with a friend and help them grow in their conversational relationship with God too!

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