15 Study Guides
Grief & Loss
Walk with one another through sorrow, suffering, and the questions that come with it. These guides help groups sit with loss honestly, hold on to hope, and care well for the people who are hurting.
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering
by Timothy Keller
Timothy Keller's Walking with God through Pain and Suffering (2013) is one of the most thorough and pastorally sensitive Christian treatments of the problem of suffering written in a generation. Drawing on philosophy, theology, literature, and the lived stories of real people, Keller argues that neither secular optimism nor shallow religious comfort is adequate for the darkness of real suffering — but that the Christian vision of a God who entered suffering in the person of Jesus Christ offers resources no other worldview can match. The book is structured in three movements: first, an unflinching examination of how every worldview (secular and religious alike) must reckon with suffering; second, a theological account of why suffering exists and what God may be doing through it; and third, a deeply practical guide to walking through suffering with faith, community, prayer, and hope.
View Discussion GuideA Grief Observed
by C.S. Lewis
A Grief Observed is not a book about grief in the abstract — it is grief itself, written in real time. When C. S. Lewis's wife, Joy Davidman, died of cancer in 1960, Lewis found several blank notebooks in his house and began writing in them — not to publish, not to teach, but simply to survive. What emerged was a raw, unsettling, and ultimately redemptive record of a man's soul being unmade and remade by loss. Lewis — the great Christian apologist who had written so confidently about pain in The Problem of Pain — found himself on the other side of the argument, not as a thinker but as a sufferer. The result is one of the most honest documents of faith under pressure ever written.
View Discussion GuideWhere Is God When It Hurts?
by Philip Yancey
Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts? is one of the most honest and searching books ever written about pain and suffering from a Christian perspective. First published in 1977, it does not offer easy answers or tidy formulas. Instead, Yancey walks alongside the reader through some of the hardest questions human beings ever ask: Why does a good God allow suffering? Is pain a punishment? Can faith survive the worst that life brings? Drawing on medical science, personal stories, theology, and Scripture, Yancey argues that pain is not God's enemy — it is, in a strange and difficult way, one of his most important gifts — and that the real question is not "Why do I hurt?" but "What do I do with this hurt, and where is God in the middle of it?"
View Discussion GuideRedeeming Love
by Francine Rivers
Francine Rivers's Redeeming Love is a powerful retelling of the biblical book of Hosea, transposed from ancient Israel to the California Gold Rush of 1850. At its heart, the novel asks a single, searching question: Can a love that is unconditional, relentless, and entirely unearned actually change a person? Angel — born Sarah, sold into prostitution as a child, and convinced she is worthless and unlovable — is Rivers's Gomer. Michael Hosea is a farmer who hears God's call to pursue and marry her, not despite what she is, but knowing exactly who she is. Their story is not merely a romance; it is a sustained meditation on grace — the kind that pursues, waits, suffers, and refuses to give up even when it is rejected again and again. Like the original Hosea narrative, the book insists that God's love for us looks something like madness to the world, and that receiving it requires a transformation we cannot manufacture for ourselves.
View Discussion GuideDark Clouds, Deep Mercy
by Mark Vroegop
Mark Vroegop's Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy opens with a simple but countercultural claim: lament is not a failure of faith — it is an expression of it. Drawing from the psalms of lament and the book of Lamentations, Vroegop argues that the church has largely lost the art of honest, God-directed grief, and that this loss costs us dearly. When suffering arrives — a miscarriage, a broken relationship, a diagnosis, a season of spiritual darkness — we tend either to suppress our pain with forced positivity or to vent it in ways that lead away from God. Lament offers a third way: a structured, biblical practice of bringing raw sorrow before the Lord, wrestling honestly, and being carried — not to easy answers — but to deeper worship and renewed trust in his mercy.
View Discussion GuideA Grace Disguised
by Jerry Sittser
Jerry Sittser's A Grace Disguised is one of the most honest and ultimately hopeful books ever written about catastrophic loss. In September 1991, Sittser lost his mother, his wife Lynda, and his young daughter Diana Jane in a single car accident caused by a drunk driver. Rather than offering easy comfort or a tidy theology of suffering, Sittser invites readers into the full darkness of grief — and discovers there, slowly and painfully, a God who does not remove sorrow but transforms it. The book's central thesis is both counterintuitive and profoundly Christian: the soul can grow larger through loss, not despite it, and the life that emerges on the other side of catastrophic grief can be richer, deeper, and more compassionate than the life that came before. Sittser does not promise that grief ends; he promises that it can become a teacher.
View Discussion GuideThe Promise of Heaven
by David Jeremiah
Heaven is not a vague, cloud-filled dream — it is a real place, promised by a faithful God, described in the pages of Scripture, and intended to transform the way you live today. In The Promise of Heaven, Dr. David Jeremiah draws on decades of pastoral ministry and deep biblical study to walk readers through what the Bible actually says about eternity. Across 31 short, hope-filled chapters, he answers the questions people carry quietly in their hearts — questions about reunions, children who die too soon, the nature of our resurrection bodies, and what "forever" will feel like — and he does so not with speculation but with the steady confidence of God's own Word. The book's central thesis is simple and powerful: when your heart is genuinely set on heaven, everything about your life here changes. Worry loosens its grip. Grief softens. Joy returns. And you begin to live with the kind of quiet, unshakeable confidence that only comes from knowing something far better is ahead.
View Discussion GuideSuffering Is Never for Nothing
by Elisabeth Elliot
Elisabeth Elliot knew suffering from the inside out. Her first husband, Jim Elliot, was speared to death by the Waodani (Auca) people of Ecuador in January 1956 — a man who had given everything to bring the gospel to those who had never heard it. Her second husband, Addison Leitch, died of cancer. Yet out of those valleys came one of the most honest, unsentimental, and ultimately hopeful voices on the subject of human pain that the church has ever produced. In Suffering Is Never for Nothing, Elliot argues that suffering is not a random accident to be explained away, nor a wound to be numbed, but raw material in the hands of a sovereign and loving God. Pain, she insists, is always purposeful — not because we can always see the purpose, but because the One who holds it is trustworthy. Her central conviction is captured in a single sentence she returned to again and again: "Whatever is in the cup that God is offering to me, whether it be pain and sorrow and suffering and grief along with the many more joys, I'm willing to take it because I trust Him."
View Discussion GuideForgiving What You Can't Forget
by Lysa TerKeurst
In Forgiving What You Can't Forget, Lysa TerKeurst writes from inside one of the most painful seasons of her life — the near-collapse and eventual dissolution of her marriage — to answer a question most of us have quietly carried for years: How do you forgive someone who never says they're sorry, and who may never change? Drawing on over 1,000 hours of theological study, honest conversations with her therapist, and the raw material of her own suffering, Lysa argues that forgiveness is not a feeling we wait for or a verdict we render on someone else — it is a decision we make, step by step, for our own healing and for the sake of our relationship with God. The book moves readers from stuck and resentful to genuinely free, not by minimizing what was done to them, but by showing them what the Bible actually teaches about forgiveness and why living it out is possible even when it feels impossibly hard.
View Discussion GuideSame Kind of Different as Me
by Ron Hall & Denver Moore
Same Kind of Different As Me is the remarkable true story of two men who should never have met — Ron Hall, a wealthy international art dealer living in a world of million-dollar transactions and celebrity friendships, and Denver Moore, a man who grew up in conditions resembling slavery on a Louisiana plantation before spending nearly two decades as a homeless drifter on the streets of Fort Worth and Dallas. What brings them together is a woman named Deborah Hall, Ron's wife, whose vision for serving the poor at the Fort Worth Union Gospel Mission plants a seed that grows into one of the most unlikely and transformative friendships ever told. At its heart, the book asks a deceptively simple question: what does it actually cost to love someone you would never otherwise choose — and what do you receive when you do?
View Discussion GuideThe Broken Way
by Ann Voskamp
Ann Voskamp's The Broken Way is a deeply personal and luminous book about what happens when we stop running from brokenness and begin to see it as the very path into abundance. Drawing on her own story of childhood trauma, self-harm, and the slow, costly work of healing, Voskamp argues that the broken way — the way of the cross, of koinonia suffering, of giving yourself away — is not a detour from the good life but the very road that leads there. The book's central image is eucharist: bread broken and given, a life broken and poured out. Voskamp weaves together memoir, theology, Scripture, and letters from a Syrian refugee family she visits in order to press home one radical claim: that the wounds we carry can become the places through which grace most freely flows, and that the only way to receive more of God is to give more of ourselves away.
View Discussion GuideImagine Heaven
by John Burke
In Imagine Heaven, bestselling author John Burke does something both rigorous and deeply personal: he gathers more than one hundred near-death experience (NDE) accounts from doctors, professors, children, blind people, and ordinary men and women from cultures around the world, and then holds them up against the light of Scripture. His central thesis is that while no NDE account is authoritative on its own, the remarkable common threads running through thousands of such accounts — brilliant light, a life review, a sense of overwhelming love, reunions with deceased loved ones, a landscape of breathtaking beauty — align with and illuminate the biblical portrait of Heaven in ways that should both excite and challenge every follower of Christ. Burke is not asking readers to build their theology on near-death experiences; he is inviting them to let those experiences spark fresh wonder at what God's Word has already promised.
View Discussion GuideThe Shack
by William Paul Young
The Shack by Wm. Paul Young is a work of religious fiction that has touched tens of millions of readers worldwide with its raw, imaginative exploration of grief, faith, and the nature of God. At its heart, the novel asks one of humanity's most persistent questions: Where is God in a world filled with unspeakable pain? Through the story of Mackenzie "Mack" Phillips — a father shattered by the abduction and murder of his youngest daughter, Missy — Young invites readers into a weekend encounter with God that dismantles religious assumptions, confronts deep wounds, and ultimately offers a vision of love, forgiveness, and relationship that transforms Mack from the inside out. The book does not pretend to answer every theological question neatly; instead, it insists that knowing God personally is more important than understanding God intellectually.
View Discussion GuideTrusting God
by Jerry Bridges
Jerry Bridges wrote Trusting God out of a painful personal conviction: that most Christians say they believe in God's sovereignty, but few of us actually live as though we do. When suffering arrives — illness, loss, shattered plans, unanswered prayer — the gap between our theology and our trust is exposed. Bridges builds his case carefully and biblically, arguing that genuine trust in God is not a feeling we manufacture but a reasoned, faith-filled response to three unshakeable truths about God: He is perfectly sovereign (able to do anything), infinitely wise (knowing what is best), and completely good (working all things for our ultimate good and His glory). The book is both a theological argument and a pastoral companion for anyone in pain, drawing heavily from Scripture and from honest reflection on the trials of real life.
View Discussion GuideWayMaker
by Ann Voskamp
WayMaker by Ann Voskamp is a deeply personal and poetically written exploration of how God carves paths through the impossible terrain of our lives. Drawing on the ancient Hebrew practice of the sacred SACRED pathway—Stop, Attend, Commune, Receive, Enter, De-clutter—Voskamp weaves together her own raw experiences of marital crisis, a prodigal child, grief, and longing with the biblical story of the Israelites' Exodus journey through the wilderness. Her central thesis is as simple as it is radical: God is not a way-pointer or a way-suggester—He is the WayMaker, and the same God who parted the Red Sea is still making a way through every seemingly impassable place in our lives today. The book invites readers not to manage their obstacles but to meet the God who transforms them.
View Discussion GuideGrief & Loss Studies — Questions Leaders Ask
- How many Grief & Loss study guides are there?
- 15 guides right now, listed above, out of 202 in the library. Each one is written for a specific published book: a reading, discussion questions, and a closing prayer for every week of it. Browse the whole library →
- How long does a study take?
- Grief & Loss guides run 6 to 20 weeks, one meeting a week, and each week has its own reading, discussion questions, and closing prayer. Groups that meet every other week or take a break for the holidays simply spread the same weeks further apart. Put your meetings on real dates →
- Can we read part of a guide before we pay?
- Yes. Week 1 of every guide is free — no card and no account. Three of its discussion questions sit right on the guide's page for anyone to read, and the rest of Week 1 opens as soon as you tell us where to send it. Browse the guides →
- What does a guide cost?
- Two ways to pay. This Guide Only is $29 once for the book you pick, and never renews. Leader's Year is $79 a year for every guide in the library — $59 for your first year with code FALL2026, then it renews at $79 a year unless you cancel. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee on the year (with 2 or fewer guides downloaded) and 30 days on a single guide. See both options →
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- We write it. Tell us the title and the author, and the guide is usually ready within about five minutes — we email you the link the moment it is done. Leader's Year includes 3 on-request books a year and $9 for each one after that; This Guide Only covers the single book you name. Ask for a book →
- Can I print the guide or share it with my group?
- Yes. Download the guide as a PDF to print for the table, or send your group a read-only link. One membership covers everyone who shows up — there is no per-person fee and no seat limit.