Start Here: 10 Essays for When Someone You Love Just Got Hard News

I imagine you’re here because someone you love just got hard news—a diagnosis, an accident, a phone call she can't unhear. Because you are a dear friend, you went on a search for how to help. You might be holding this page for her, or you might be the one who got the news. Either way: breathe.

I’ve been where you are, and I want to tell you: You don't have to read everything on the internet about how to do this, how to get through today, tomorrow, or the next ten days.

These ten essays are the ones I'd hand a friend, in this order, if I were sitting next to them in the first hard week. They're drawn from eight years of writing through my own undiagnosed disease, near-death surgery, and slow recovery. They're short. They won't lecture. They won't tell you to be stronger. Most of them I wrote from a bed.

Read #1 today. Read the next one tomorrow, or next week, or whenever the day matches the title. There's no rush. Bookmark this page and come back when the time is right. Or skip to the bottom for two other easy-to-use options.

— Soli Deo Gloria, Nicole

1. Acknowledge the Pain For the day when you can't make small talk, can't be brave, and just need someone to say: yes, this hurts, and that’s ok.

2. To Find Hope, First You Need to Lament For when you can’t "stay positive” one minute longer, here’s a permission slip, a how-to, for naming what you've lost out loud.

3. When You Can't Preach the Gospel to Yourself For the moment when your faith feels fragile, and that scares you almost as much as the news did. You don't have to white-knuckle this alone.

4. Choose Your Little Things For when you are finally able to sit up and move forward, here’s a single, tiny practice for noticing one good thing without pretending the rest is okay.

5. How to Choose Joy For when "just choose joy" feels like a demand forcing you to lie. Here’s the honest answer to why it's so hard right now, and how to start anyway—very, very small.

6. The Power of Flowers For the friend who keeps asking what you need: send them this page, and let them bring you flowers. Read it when you can't get out of bed and need to remember a window full of color is also prayer.

7. How Jesus Meets Your Need for Touch For the night when you feel like no one actually knows what your body feels like inside. Read this slowly. God does.

8. It Takes Time for Hearts to Heal For the week when your head knows the truth but your heart hasn’t caught up, and you're feeling like a failure for crying about something you've technically already accepted. Read this and release the pressure to hurry.

9. Stop Imagining a Grace-less Future For the 3 a.m. spiral: what if I can't, what if no one can, what if it gets worse. Here’s the sentence a friend said to me in bed that broke the spiral.

10. Reflections on Eight Years of Bonus Life For the day (that will come) when you lift your head and wonder: has anyone actually walked out the other side? Eight years out, here's what I see from here.

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