Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture invites you into transformative conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Each episode, host Joshua Johnson engages guests who challenge conventional thinking and inspire fresh perspectives for embodying faith in today's complex world. If you're curious about how cultural shifts impact your faith journey and passionate about living purposefully, join us as we explore deeper ways to follow Jesus in everyday life.
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Shifting Culture
Ep. 330 Clarissa Moll - Hope Has Legs: Grief, Lament, and the Slow Work of Healing After Loss
When Clarissa Moll’s husband died suddenly, she was thrust into a new reality one shaped by deep grief, single parenting, and the quiet work of guiding her four children through unimaginable loss. In this episode, Clarissa shares hard-won wisdom about how children grieve, how adults can walk alongside them with care and presence, and how grief doesn’t need to be fixed it needs to be witnessed. We talk about building a grief-literate community, the sacred role of lament, and how the church can hold space for sorrow and hope at the same time. Clarissa offers powerful insight into what it means to be beloved in the midst of pain and how the slow work of healing happens in community, in story, and in the soil of everyday life. This is an honest, hope-filled conversation for anyone navigating loss or walking with someone who is.
Clarissa Moll is an award-winning writer and podcaster who helps bereaved people find flourishing after loss. Clarissa’s writing appears in Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, RELEVANT, Modern Loss, Grief Digest and more. She co-hosted Christianity Today’s “Surprised by Grief” podcast and produces Christianity Today's flagship news podcast, "The Bulletin." Clarissa’s debut book, Beyond the Darkness: A Gentle Guide for Living with Grief and Thriving After Loss, was a best-selling new release in 2022. She is the author of the Beyond the Darkness Devotional, Hurt Help Hope: A Real Conversation about Teen Grief and Life after Loss, and Hope Comes to Stay. Clarissa is a remarried widow and lives with her large blended family in the Boston area.
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And gosh, does the church root us, not only in the truth of our brokenness, but in the hope of Jesus, and it holds for us those tensions that we see in the psalms of lament in such a beautiful way that I think, wow, it takes a village to raise a grieving person from death to life again. You Joshua,
Joshua Johnson:hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus, I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, grief changes the shape of everything, and when children are involved, it becomes even more tender, more complex and more vital to hold with care after the sudden death of her husband, Clarissa mall found herself not only grieving the loss of a partner, but becoming the guide her four children needed through their own sorrow. In this conversation, Clarissa shares what it means to parent through loss with presence, vulnerability and honesty. We explore how children process grief over time, how they need language, silence, play and story to make sense of their pain and how adults can become safe places rather than fixers. Clarissa offers practical wisdom and hard won insight for anyone walking alongside a grieving child or carrying their own unspoken ache. We also talk about what the church can do to become a place of comfort instead of pressure, how community helps us rehearse the truths we can't always speak ourselves, and how hope looks like staying when it would be easier to leave. So join us for a conversation about grief, resilience, belovedness and the long patient work of walking each other toward healing. Here is my conversation with Clarissa. Mall. Clarissa, welcome to shifting culture. Thank you so much for joining me. Excited to have you. Thanks for having me. You have helped a lot of people navigate grief and loss and pain. You've been familiar with grief, so tell me your story about how you became familiar with grief, and then why you've decided not just to go through it yourself, but to help others navigate grief as well. Well,
Clarissa Moll:I think, like most listeners, I would have preferred to never have come into contact with loss, but it's inevitable in one way or another. During your lifetime, the older you get, the more you lose loved ones, the more you suffer disappointments and and realize, in big ways, the suffering and brokenness of the world in 2019 my husband Rob died in an accident on our family vacation, leaving me a widow with four kids to raise on my own. And Rob had been a journalist, he had actually been a hospice volunteer and had worked the night shift at a funeral home. So even though his death was a surprise to me and really shattered, not only the way that we lived as a family, but the way I perceived the world to work in many ways, we had already been having these conversations for almost a decade in our marriage, as he would sit with folks who were dying on the weekends, as he would interact with grieving families on the Night shift there at the funeral home, answering questions, offering basic support as they were processing their goodbyes. And so these conversations, even though I didn't want to have them, we had little kids running around our ankles at that point, they created a really strong foundation for this most difficult experience these last six years of now rebuilding and living our lives without him. I don't think that you can ever really prepare for grief or the sorrow that is going to blindside you at one point or another in your life, but you can have conversations about the mechanics, the logistics, the desires around endings, because even though we want to avoid those kind of conversations. Becoming equipped has made all the difference for me and for my kids.
Joshua Johnson:Being equipped is really important. But as you're looking at navigating those questions early before his death, you're looking at death that is expected, right? That you could navigate a loss where this is a slow dying process. And you can, you know, pray over. You could, you know, you could recite some some liturgies, and you could talk about the past and what you're looking forward to in the future. And you can say your goodbyes, and you can say, I love you. What's the difference then in sudden loss. And how's, how does that hurt in ways where, maybe even, I mean, navigating long term losses is is really difficult, and, you know, we've done that and but what is sudden loss? Like, yeah,
Clarissa Moll:that's a good question. I think it's, it's something that. Folks say, I can't even imagine what it's like to stand and have police chaplains tell you in a single sentence that your husband has died, that you're never going to see his body, that this is over and it's it is really like the curtain dropping suddenly in the middle of a show that you thought would last for at least another hour, if not you know another 20 to 30 years and and sudden loss has that very disorienting kind of effect on your life. Shock is really normal to come after learning something as disorienting as a sudden loss can be, and it comes with it all of these physical parts of the grief experience that we often don't talk a whole lot about, sleepless nights, changes in appetite, libido, relational changes, all of these kinds of things. Brain fog, you know, the sense of like, I'd be driving my kids to school and be at a stoplight and think I don't know where to go. Where am I? Where am I going? You know, just the sense of living outside of your own body and your own life, that's how disorienting sudden loss can be. And because of that, our culture, you know, doesn't sort of know what to do. I'm a real unicorn, a young mom who's raised four kids on my own. Woke up one morning a wife and went to sleep the next a widow and and so we don't know how to deal with those kinds of losses because they are so unexpected, and we don't have a culture or a language around talking about or preparing for those things when
Joshua Johnson:you're navigating that. I mean, I, my wife and I were in the Middle East for for many years. We worked with war refugees, and so we were navigating loss all over the place, loss of homes, of lives, and, you know, children trying to cope with with the loss, and moving really into a new country and having a sudden change. It's not an easy thing. And there's, you know, a lot of things that we could do with trauma. How did you navigate a place of dealing with your grief and then helping walk your kids through grief and being there for them and with them? Is that even possible? Do you need other people? What does that look like?
Clarissa Moll:Well, I think it's it's both, and yes, it's possible. And yes, you can't do it by yourself, navigating loss in a shared experience like we had. It's kind of like being a short order cook, you know, I'm making a different meal for everybody at every point in the day, because one person's grief is not serving up the same kind of symptoms and experience as somebody else's kind of grief. And if I try to feed everybody the same meal, somebody's gonna go hungry and somebody's gonna get a belly ache because they ate the wrong thing. And so really, so much of dealing with shared loss is about becoming students of one another, becoming listeners in a way that, for me as a parent, was kind of a culture shift. I mean, I'm supposed to have all the answers, right? As the mom I'm supposed to be the leader, my kids looked to me as the new leader. Folks in my community began to look to me as the new leader. And yet, within our four walls, we were all stumbling. And so one of the early conversations we had together as a family, my youngest had just turned seven, my oldest was on the verge of turning 14, and I remember sitting down and being like guys, we're a team now, and I may be the team captain, but I'm also playing on the field with you, and so we're going to have to really improve our communication. Be listening to one another, be watching for another, one another. We had a rule in our house, no one cries alone unless they want to, which implies that you're not going to do this by yourself unless you're communicating that that's what your need is right now. And so that really shifts the ways that you interact with loss, because even in as much as grief is universal, you know, I can't understand your experience, you can't step into mine, but we do share this burden of brokenness. It's also very unique, and it can cause a lot of conflict when families or communities who are experiencing a shared loss aren't able to really create and provide the kind of space that's required for that uniqueness to exist.
Joshua Johnson:Well, especially you're navigating a culture in America where you surprised of independence, of like I could do this on my own, and you're talking about about kids speaking up for what they're feeling and when you're navigating those emotions. I mean, I don't know, I'm I don't know if I've ever gotten in touch with my full emotions in my body, and I'm still trying to figure out, what am I actually feeling? How do you help kids navigate their own emotions so that they could speak up for what they need in the moment? I
Clarissa Moll:think a lot of it is just getting quiet. You know, for kids, so much of their lives are highly structured. They get a lot of. Input coming in all day long, from school to sports and after school activities, they're doing video games. They're on screens. They've got so much coming in, and it can be hard to know yourself in the midst of all of that noise and activity. And we, you know, nature abhors a vacuum. We hate silence. My kids hate riding in the car in silence, but there are points where silence is the very best gift that you can offer to a child, to allow them to get in touch with their emotions, not sitting in a room all by themselves and like go off and think for a little while, Johnny, but giving them age appropriate activities that provide a little brain space. Because I think when we're asking kids to access their emotions, they know their emotions intuitively, but beginning to express them verbally requires a different kind of skill building, and it's something that the adults in their lives have to be ready to not even coach them, but perhaps facilitate for them, because this is something that kids can learn to do really well. I've watched my kids do it. I've watched other kids do it, but it's not a given. They've got to have a village of support to help them do it.
Joshua Johnson:You just said that word facilitate. So then what is facilitation look like? How could we be better facilitators?
Clarissa Moll:That's that's a really good question, and I appreciate you asking, because I think that as adults, we assume we're coming into this game with a whole lot of skills we got to share and and really, what our kids need when they're grieving, honestly, what everybody needs when they're grieving is not a fixer. I mean, it doesn't take you long in experiencing a divorce, a family estrangement, a job loss, some great disappointment to realize there are things you come up against in life that cannot be fixed by human hands, that through effort and intuition, through, you know, sticking, you know, getting your hands dirty, you just can't do it. But what everybody needs is somebody who will say three things to them, I love you, I'm sorry, and I'll stick around as long as it takes. And I think, for a child who's trying to figure out how to grapple with big feelings around a loss, for the adults who are looking to support them, those are the three best things you could ever say, Hey Johnny, I love you. I'm super sorry that your life has interacted with so much brokenness. This is not as it should be, and I'm going to stick around with you as long as it takes. Maybe all I'm going to have to say is I love you and I'm sorry over and over again. But those words are adequate, because they acknowledge the things that can't be fixed easily.
Joshua Johnson:You know, I remember, it was a year and a half ago, my, my mother in law, passed away. She lived with us. So my son, who's just turned eight, he knew life with her. She lived with us. New life with her, only with her until she passed away, and she she died. And I remember in this room that that we renovated now is my podcast studio office. There was a broken chair in this corner, and when we were starting to renovate, it was about it was almost a year after she passed away, and he just sat with that chair, and for the first time, he broke down and he wept. He didn't cry ever before that. And that was a year later where a an object reminds, you know, my son of his grandma, that she played with him this, you know, this airplane game with with that chair, and it said, I'm never going to be able to play that again. And and he just wept. How do we navigate long term grief with kids when we know that you never know what's going to come up, and when the grief is overwhelming and overflows, and it's not just a one time thing, it happens over and over again in our lives,
Clarissa Moll:that's right? And Joshua, your your example is so perfect, because that child was grieving from the day that the news was announced, it just took a different form, right? And so for adults, it is that attentiveness to Okay. I know this is happening. It's simmering underground, if there are rumbles of it, but it's not showing up in particular ways. And children grieve differently than adults do. They do that sort of popcorn grieving, where everything seems fine, and then they they get a bad grade on a test, and then it suddenly becomes about grandma dying, and you think, Whoa, where did how did your brain connect those two things? Well, they're intimately connected, because even if a child isn't expressing their grief in a ways that are adult, like they're still processing it. And we know through research that children do what's called regrieving, that they interact with their loss again at every new developmental milestone, with the growing understanding that comes with age and maturity. Right? So the little child who loses a loved one at age seven or eight understands it with a seven or eight year old mind, but when he or she gets to prom, to a first boyfriend or girlfriend, to graduation, to receiving a degree, whatever you know it any, any number of myriad milestones that loss comes back and can hit in a brand new way, almost sometimes more raw and tender than that inciting incident. And why is that? It's not because the child hasn't been processing all the time. They've been metabolizing their loss and integrating it into their lives as they grow and change. They just haven't had the same kind of understanding of the weight of that loss until that moment. And so that picture, you know, of I just imagine this little boy in a chair, and I think to myself, yeah, that's how grief is. And then they get up and go play, and that moment in the chair matters. And the going off and playing matters. And to us as adults, we're sort of looking for a narrative that makes sense, but that's not how childhood grief works at all.
Joshua Johnson:Then what changed as you were navigating your grief? What did you learn in the discovery process and then the research process that now helps you? You have more tools. What are some of the tools that you picked up?
Clarissa Moll:I think the number one thing as it relates to children and teenagers is that we got to start having these conversations early. We can't wait until the moment. We can't wait until after the fact. You know, my I've got two headed to college this year, and so we've been through the college application process and thinking through writing that college essay, and my goodness, I'm sure glad I didn't teach them their ABCs in the last 18 months, because it would have made those college application essays a whole lot harder, right? We teach our kids vocabulary. We teach them ABCs long before they're ever going to need to write that college essay. Why? Because we want to equip them. We don't want them to be stressed. We want them to be able to express themselves fully, and we want to do the same thing with our kids around tough topics, sexuality and grief and loss and so really, you know, when I think about my research, about my own lived experience, about the investment of my husband's work and legacy in our lives, it's start the conversation early. Talk about the leaves in the fall dying and waiting through winter for something to rise again in the spring, talk about the pet that dies. Talk about a news headline in age appropriate language. Talk about a school shooting that's happened in a community next to yours, and kind of parse that out. Use any opportunity to talk about the fragility of life with your kid in age appropriate language, because you're giving them the building blocks for a vocabulary that's going to benefit them for the rest of their lives.
Joshua Johnson:Because your kids were growing up you you were out in nature a lot. You know, I was in the Pacific Northwest there. I grew up there. As you're looking at nature, one of the things that you do see is, is this process of death and new life and rebirth, and even under the ground, things are are growing. How do we look at what is happening in the natural world to help us navigate transitions and changes of seasons and new life, and hold on to some hope, knowing that even in the darkness of winter, where everything seems like there's no life, there's only death, there is a spring coming, there is something that is going to shoot up from the ground, where we see some new sprigs of life.
Clarissa Moll:Yeah, I'm an avid gardener. I've become that in the last few years especially, and there are a lot of things I've learned from my time in the soil. The first one is that you never know what's going to thrive and what's going to fail. And the job of the gardener is not that end result. The job of the gardener is faithfulness. And so in our experience of teaching our kids about grief. It's less about outcomes and far more about process. It is about helping our kids understand that the seeds we sow in being honest about our grief, using real language around death and loss, talking to people, expressing ourselves, all of those seeds are going to bear fruit in some ways, but you don't know which ones and in what ways. So a good gardener doesn't sow one seed in the field. A good gardener sows a lot of seeds, and interacting with your grief, engaging with it, takes a lot of work. But then there's also this beautiful season of waiting that is essential for a gardener to understand. You can put in the work, but then you just gotta sit and wait for the sun to come out. You gotta wait for the rain. You know you could, you can turn on that sprinkler, but there is a lot that is beyond your control. And you know when you're experiencing loss, when you're experiencing uncertainty, especially for children. In the waiting period can be super hard, and as parents, we want to hurry that along press the fast forward button. We want to save them from the discomfort of the waiting. We want to hurry them up to a solution. We want to take away anything else hard that could happen to them. But there is essential work that is happening in the waiting, in all those seeds of investment that you have planted in integrating your grief and doing the hard work of grieving in a healthy way. You are waiting for God to work. You're waiting for your community to have time to catch their breath and come around you. You're waiting for your own heart to be ready for whatever God is calling you to next. Because the reality is, after loss, you don't want to just survive. You want to thrive again. And thriving takes a lot of work, but it also takes seasons of waiting and rest. And I think kids can see that, you know, you get a pack of radish seeds from the local hardware store, plant them in a paper cup and set them on your windowsill, and you got that object lesson right there about the kind of work that needs to be just a normal. Part of the warp and woof of living with grief and loss
Joshua Johnson:is waiting, and waiting is not fun, especially in the culture that we live in now. We want to rush past grief. We want to get things done. We want to be productive like we're a productive society and so productivity, we see ourselves as machines and not humans. So how do we become more grief literate within our communities? And how do we help people wait and be people that Wait. Wait for God to act. Wait for God to come around us. Wait for community to be with us. How could we become more grief literate as community? I
Clarissa Moll:think Scripture gives us this beautiful picture of that in the psalms of lament. You know, throughout the psalms of lament, we see someone who is raging against God, who is asking a lot of questions, expressing despair, anger, frustration, deep sadness and brokenness, and in a sense, being like, hurry up, God, I'm ready whenever you want to take this away. I'm first in line, right? But the sums of lament give us this beautiful picture that says, okay, we can hold that sense of urgency to want to get past the hard thing in the same hand as worship and resting in the Lord. Well, how do you rest in the Lord in the valley of the shadow when you have no idea where the path is going to lead you, when barely the lamp at your feet and the light at your path is giving you more than a couple inches worth of light to go on you do the things that the psalmist does in those psalms of lament. He never explains, really, how he gets from despair to a sense of rest in God's character, all he does is begin reciting it over and over again to his heart the truth that he knows. And I think you know, as we are in that waiting season, as we're trying to figure out what next is, we're trying to jump off the conveyor belt of productivity. It's about rehearsing to ourselves the truths that we know about God, even when it's so dark in our lives we can barely see to discern that they still exist. And for that to happen, you've got to have community to come around you. When my husband first died, the number one place that was hardest to return to was church. It just didn't feel like we fit anymore. A mom with four kids, the gaping space next to me where my husband used to sit in the pew, the happy songs when we didn't feel happy, the noise when we just felt like we had no words and wanted to be silent, the people who were well meaning but reached out, and we didn't know what to do with that kind of care, and you know, we grappled with how to manage that over time. But the one thing that church gave me, that I could find in no other place, was the people who rehearsed the truths of God's character to me when I could no longer say them for myself. I could stand in that congregation on a Sunday morning with no words and tears streaming down my face, and I would hear people sing around me the truths of God. I would hear the words spoken from the front washing over me, the words of God when I couldn't even open my Bible. And so for me, you know, I think about this desire for productivity, our desire to get away from the bad things. And gosh, does the church root us, not only in the truth of our brokenness, but in the hope of Jesus. And it holds for us those tensions that we see in the psalms of lament in such a beautiful way that I think, wow, it takes a village to raise a grieving person from death to life again.
Joshua Johnson:I think that's really important, is to rehearse those truths and rehearse the story of God so that you could know you're here and you're present, and that we, we could have this wash over us, and you don't have to do anything. You have the. Community around you. You know, in your, your children's book, he wrote, it's called hope comes to stay. A lot of people when, when I think of of hope in the midst of of grief, some people might, might say, Well, hope is, is too happy, clappy, it's too much like, is it real? Like, is hope real in the midst of grief. So can you define what hope is and is hope possible in grief?
Clarissa Moll:I think that's the number one thing that I want for kids to understand as they begin to grapple with the brokenness of the world and how grief and loss can intersect with their lives. My number one favorite character in Scripture is Naomi, because she is a class a grump. She loses her husband, she loses her sons, and she has no problem talking about it. She returns to her home and her friends welcome her back, and she's like, call me bitter. I don't even have a name anymore. And what do we see her doing? It's just miraculous how the writer of Ruth describes her transformation. We don't see the inner workings of her heart where she's hashing it out with God. We see her just simply putting one foot in front of the other and doing the next right thing. And at the end of the book of Ruth, she gets this new grandbaby set in her lap, and those same friends who greeted her to her disdain at the beginning now say Naomi has another son. They recognize the growth in her life, and they're able to rejoice with her. And so what is hope? Hope has legs. Hope takes a step forward even when it doesn't seem like it's worth it, even when the light is not there to follow. Hope is Naomi. It's walking forward, entrusting yourself to a God who is wiser and better than you can imagine, and linking arms with a community who will sometimes drag you kicking and streaming toward that hope, but will point your feet toward it. Nonetheless,
Joshua Johnson:if it is one foot in front of the other, if it is it is walking, there's also like Naomi had had companions with her that wouldn't leave so hope isn't just a feeling that it is also an embodied presence with people. How can we, as the body of Christ, as the embodied presence of Jesus, be hope in the midst of grief for people,
Clarissa Moll:I think the number one way is to stick around. So many of us are transient in our relationships. Friends come in and out of our lives. We move and we lose touch with people. Are our relationships with folks, sort of, they disintegrate into text relationships instead of real, embodied relationships. And so really, for the church, it's to do what we have always done best, to say the God who has not left me or forsaken me, tells me that's my job now too for you, I am called to be the hands and feet of Jesus, and I don't have all the answers like he does. I'm still living in that space of mystery alongside of you, but I will do the thing that Jesus has done for me, and that is to stick around I love how Isaiah says that Jesus was a man who was deeply acquainted with grief, and in Hebrew, that word deeply acquainted means friend Jesus was willing to link arms with grief and walk forward with it on our behalf. And I think that's the very best gift that we can offer to our grieving friends, to say, I'm going to link arms with the saddest stuff in your life, and I'm going to stick around and walk with you toward resurrection.
Joshua Johnson:What do we need to do to get rid of the distractions so that we can be present with each other, that we can maybe become human again?
Clarissa Moll:First, use those notifications on your phone to to a good purpose. Get that friend, get that friend's phone number and mark on your calendar, on your phone when their date of loss is, mark that with an alarm. Mark it six months from now. Mark it three months from now. Mark it a year from now, so that when your phone pings you, you can reach out and say, hey, you know what? I know. This is a tough day for you. Just want you to know I'm thinking of you. That's the first one is, get super, super practical. The second one is, while you're working on that, that alarm on your phone, clear your calendar, the presence, the embodied presence that grieving people need most, takes up space and when we are so super busy ourselves, it's really hard to create space for others. So make sure that every yes that you're making is a worthwhile one, because every yes to one thing that seems good is a no to something else. And we always want to make our yeses to people and things that matter. Matter in an eternal perspective, and we want to make sure that our nos are appropriate as well. And so as you're thinking about your calendar, create space for grief to show up and create space to not only grieve yourself, but offer yourself in love to someone else.
Joshua Johnson:In this process, it's been, you know, six years. Where have you found hope? Where does the hope come to stay for you?
Clarissa Moll:You know, I think it's different. On any given day, we're recording this just a few years, few days before the sixth anniversary of my husband's death, we're recording this on a Monday, and in on Saturday, it will be the sixth year. And sometimes I think to myself, gosh, I don't I don't know how I woke up breathing this morning, like, how am I still here? And he's still gone, and in some days, it feels like it's been forever since I saw him, like I can't even remember what it meant to hold his hand or to be held by him. And so I think, for me, hope is is a moment by moment. Remember being remembered by God. My husband was memorizing First John in the months before he died. And you know, one of the words that rises up from First John over and over again is that word Beloved. And I think for me, hope is all about resting in my belovedness. So maybe that is a text from a friend that reminds me of my belovedness a beautiful sunrise on the way to drive one of my kids to an early band practice before school that says, hey, Clarissa, you're not forgotten. Hope shows up in so many different ways, but chances are it's not something that I've been able to drum up myself, and it is fragile. It is fleeting, and that's how I know that there's got to be more coming. CS Lewis says that all the things that we experience now that are joyful are just a foretaste of the thing that is yet to come, that better country. And so I think for us, that blessed hope is it's just an appetizer, but I'll take it knowing that the full meal is still ahead.
Joshua Johnson:What a beautiful thing that the full meal is still ahead, and that we do get foretastes of this. We don't. It's not just hey, it's there. There's just despair and loneliness and horrible things here on Earth. There is some foretaste that we get. We get some, some heaven on earth, which is fantastic. And I thank God that he's there. And so think of like, what are your belovedness? I think that if we see ourselves as beloved children of God, it changes, it changes everything. That's it. It's that we're the beloved of God that changes my orientation of striving towards, you know, trying to make God love me or or whatever, especially in these these processes of loss. What does belovedness do? The to know the truth that you are the beloved child of God that He loves you as his own because you are. I think it means
Clarissa Moll:different things to different people. For me, it has been very much about the father, love of God. It's kind of a funny thing in some ways, because I didn't lose my dad, my kids lost their dad. I lost a spouse, a partner. But what I found over the last six years that I have needed the very most is a father, someone who would let me be small and weak and and so when I think of belovedness and resting in my belovedness, I think of that verse from Zephaniah, where God is delighting over us with His love that he rejoices over us with singing this idea that we are carried by his love into a world that's super difficult, but he's bigger than all of that. And I think for me, in this season, resting in the father, love of God has been the most intimate expression and understanding of that belovedness for me,
Joshua Johnson:I think a lot of people, I agree with you, to let you be small and weak is really important as a parent, of helping kids navigate their grief. I think being small and weak to me feels like, oh, man, I don't know if I'm doing it right. How do we work that out with kids of knowing that, hey, I'm vulnerable, I'm weak, I'm small, like, I need help. I'm not, you know, I'm not everything for you kids. So how do we do that, and how do we do that in a healthy way that doesn't think that you've abandoned kids as well? Like, what? What's the how do we navigate that? I
Clarissa Moll:think, for children and for adults as well, it's about learning to understand the sort of circles of intimacy that exist in the lives that we live in in relationship with one another. There's this beautiful image that the illustrator of hope comes to stay has in our book of. Little Leela walking with her mother as she approaches school for the first day after her dad has died, and she's got her little bear there that she's holding on to that's sort of symbolic for her of this loss. And she decides that she doesn't want to bring the bear there, that this is a space where she wants grief to just be quiet. And I think it's okay to teach children that there are varying levels of intimacy that we engage with in our lives with one another. There are varying levels of vulnerability that are appropriate in our relationships with one another. You know, we live in a culture that has these weird polars we overshare on Tiktok and and it's a lot, it's, it's a lot of ugly, ugly cries and dancing that you're probably going to regret in 10 to 15 years. And then on the other side of that, we say, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Come on, man shoulder on. Big Boys, don't cry. And so our kids are, you know, in this pendulum swinging from one end to the next. And really, it's not that extremes are where we want to end up. It's that we want to teach our children to discern in each moment. Okay, is this a person that I can be vulnerable with? How weak can I be with this person? I'm going to throw out some exploratory questions. I'm going to watch to see how they respond to suffering in other people, in a crowd or in a group that I'm in, I'm going to learn to really be a detective when it comes to human relationships, and then I'm going to, little by little, put myself out there, test the waters a little bit. And so we're teaching our kids these relational skills as it relates to vulnerability, so that they're able to do that practicing now within the scaffolding of their family, but do it well when they become teenagers and adults figuring out, okay, who can I explore these hard feelings with and and be weak with, and explore what it means to be my beloved, to explore my belovedness in a really intimate and tender way. And where do I need to say, hey, you know, I don't think this relationship is ready for that yet, or may never be ready for that kind of conversation,
Joshua Johnson:you know, and hope comes to say you're using storytelling to help kids navigate their loss and grief. What is the role then of story and art to help actually navigate these things with us.
Clarissa Moll:Well, for little children, there's something we call parallel play. And if you're a parent, you've seen your kids do it, you invite them over, another family over for a play date, and you expect the kids to play together, and they just sort of sit next to each other, never talking, but playing Legos. And you think, How can this be a play date? Didn't you interact at all? But the reality is that a lot of learning happens through parallel play for kids, that in as much as we there is a didactic nature, a teaching nature to the relationships that they have with one another, and sometimes we see that go awry with their peers, there's also a parallel play kind of learning, and a story gives a really non confrontational, low stress entry point for parallel play, a child getting to watch another child navigate through seasons of loss. So when it comes to children, stories are a really good way to introduce big concepts in a way that kids can watch and not feel like they're put on the spot. But I think the same thing works for us too. You know, there are certain movies or stories that, gosh, I don't know how many times I've seen them, but they bring me to tears every time. And why is that? Because I noticed something parallel in my life that is expressed in that story. There are differences. I can acknowledge those but there's a commonality, a common truth and and that brings me along. It fills in the gaps where the story might be different. And so when I think about stories and art, I think of them as a vital connection for grieving people, because in as much as grief is unique, there's no one who can step into your story or mine, in that way, it's also universal. And so we can come together around those, those expressive pieces, to to find a sense of commonality and understanding.
Joshua Johnson:So after after all of you, you've learned to be more embodied, to be rooted, be in the soil as a gardener, to find hope in the midst of grief. As you're you're producing the bulletin Christianity today, right? And you, you actually have to look at the loss and the grief of the world. You have to say, Okay, now, how do I live faithfully in the midst of all of this suffering all over the world and this crazy culture that they're we're living in. What have you learned through your micro process with your your family to help navigate these larger, systemic and bigger cultural issues of loss and suffering that we have to deal with in the world?
Clarissa Moll:Right? I think the thing that I have hoped for my children and for myself since my husband died was that our loss wouldn't calcify us, it wouldn't harden our hearts, that instead, it would break us open. And I think about what Bob Pierce, a leader at World Vision, a humanitarian organization, said years ago, he said, May my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God. And so when I think about my own experience in loss, when I think about engaging with the headlines, I was just reading about struggles in the Middle East today, even before I came on to talk to you, and I read those headlines now, where I might have read them as politics before, or geopolitics, foreign policy, I read them now, and I just see hurting people, and I say, Lord, let my heart be broken by the things that break your heart. So when I think about my engagement with the news, what grief has taught me about engaging with the world, I just want to have a broken heart. I sometimes I think, Lord, I wish I'd never had to get to know you in this way. But if it had to be this way, keep me tender. And so that's the first thing, I think, the second thing, and we began praying it as a family. We began praying it every single night. We would say the words together as we snuggled in bed, as my kids and I would after story time, we would gather on the floor and then one of their bedrooms to pray. We would end our prayers with Jesus come quickly, because I think that if there's anything we realize about engaging with the loss in the world, it's that we groan with all of creation for all things to be made due. And so in as much as I hope that God continues to break my heart with the things that really matter, that I get the perspective and the value shift that grief can bring, gosh, I hope he comes soon. There is that increased longing for the kingdom of God to be made manifest, for the new creation, for that day when all tears are wiped away and the healing of the nations comes like revelation. Says, I look forward to that more than I ever did before I lost Rob.
Joshua Johnson:I know that as we're waiting and we're praying, Jesus comes soon and make all things new, we have the privilege to actually join Jesus in restoring and reconciling all things and trying to and making things new. Here with us. How can we be foretaste of this coming Kingdom of the consummation that will come and make all things new as we live in this broken world.
Unknown:That's a tough question. That's a really tough question.
Clarissa Moll:I think that there is a word from one of Paul's epistles, and the location slips me now where he says, endeavor to live a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands. And when I think about the many ways that I long for the inbreaking of God's kingdom and I want to be a part of that, that verse reminds me that I've got to have my priorities straight, and I've got to keep the eternal things in eternal perspective. I got to keep the temporal things in temporal perspective that there are times where the best way for me to engage in the inbreaking of the kingdom is to close my mouth and just start getting my hands dirty. There's a time to speak and a time to be silent and and the very best way that I can be attuned to the Spirit's work, to the spirits calling in my life to participate in that work, is to have my priorities rightly ordered. And I think Paul wouldn't have given those instructions. I hope it's Paul that I'm quoting here if he didn't realize that that posture happens on a very granular level. We want to think about it as big and romantic, but no for most of us, following God's calling on our life to participate in the good work of redemption that he's doing means a very granular day by day kind of obedience.
Joshua Johnson:And if you are obedient, and you show up, and you're present, and you're the body presence where you're at, and you're actually present with people, and that's going to make a huge difference in this world. And if we could all do that, and we could actually look out for our neighbors, each one of us, man, the world would be a better place and a incredible place. So it doesn't take much. It just takes a lot of us,
Clarissa Moll:that's right, many hands make light work
Joshua Johnson:exactly, exactly. What hope do you have for the people who pick up this book? Hope comes to stay. What is What do you hope this book does for for people?
Clarissa Moll:I hope the kids will talk to their parents about what it means to die, what it means to live life fully, what it means to experience joy and hold sorrow in the same hand. I have found that my kids are super smart. They're smarter than I am sometimes, and so I hope that that this book is a T. Moment, not only for the kids who pick it up, but perhaps for the adults in whom those kids, you know, where those kids are sitting in laps. That's
Joshua Johnson:good couple of questions. One, Clarissa, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Clarissa Moll:I would say life is short. Live it well. Live it well. Don't worry about finances and career ambitions. Love people because that's what
Joshua Johnson:lasts. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend I am
Clarissa Moll:reading. I'm reading a book called Rising from the plains by John McPhee. He was a geologist, and he writes about a section of Wyoming where my husband and I used to travel. We used to road trip and camp out there. And not only am I totally a rocks nerd and I am interested in geology, reading McPhee is writing just brings me back to a really sweet time in our marriage and and brings back a lot of of sweet memories about our life together. How
Joshua Johnson:can people go out get hope comes to stay. Is there anywhere else you'd like to point people to? How can they connect with you?
Clarissa Moll:Sure you can find more about me@clarissamall.com and it's where all four of my books are available through that website, or wherever books are sold. I hang out on substack and Instagram as well. Love to connect with listeners and readers as you walk your own path toward flourishing.
Joshua Johnson:Excellent. Well. Clarissa, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for opening up the grief of your life to help us navigate the grief in our life so that we could hold each other, be present with one another, and we can know that God is with us, that there is a persistent hope, that there is a hope that looks like walking with one another, that there's companioning as presence, that God is with us in the valley of the shadow of death, that his rod and his staff will comfort us. Thank you for navigating this and thank you for just walking us and holding our hands to help others really navigate grief and loss in ways that are healthy and that they could grow with a place where there is going to be some hope and there's some new life at the end, even though there's pain and sorrow and thank you that there is a community that can walk with us through this pain and loss. So Clarissa was a fantastic conversation. I loved it. Thank you. Thank you. You.
