Coping with Grief and Loss. I have just finished reviewing a book called Widow for a Season, Finding Your Identity in Christ by Kristine Pappas. This book is all about Kristine's story as a young widow and how she came to know Christ Jesus as her heavenly husband. It is a beautiful telling of her experiences, struggles, griefs and sorrows and how God ultimately turned her mourning into dancing.
In addition to providing a basic overview of the stages of grief and how to cope with grief and loss, she gets to the core of the matter in helping her reader to focus on the importance of understanding their identity in Christ and the specific promises of God for the widow.
The author does not shy away from the hard issues, like "Where is God" and "Trusting God", but tackles them with the grace of God's word. Though this book is written for widows, it is an excellent resource for those women who are what I call "emotional widows". They are the ones who have been forsaken - perhaps still living physically with their husbands, but utterly abandoned emotionally.
Kristine shares very personally, in a down to earth style, with lots of practical application about how she has learned to depend on Christ for everything. Everything runs the gamut of practical day to day issues of managing a household that she once depended on her earthly husband for, to her unique physical and emotional needs as a woman.
I love the way Kristine's book is saturated with the word of God, the best tool for coping with grief and loss. This book would be a great resource for individual or small group study. In the preface, the author includes a study guide to be used with each chapter that will help readers apply these transforming truths to their own lives.
To order Kristine's book got to her website www.widow2widow.net.
