Love, Loss, and What Remains. Sometimes, for reasons I don’t always understand, life doesn’t just disappoint—it crashes. Not the hardship we expect or prepare for, but the kind that divides everything into before and after. A moment arrives—a phone call, a diagnosis, a goodbye you didn’t know was final—and life as you knew it vanishes.
What follows is not noise but silence. A black silence. Thought escapes us. The mind, so capable of solving problems and navigating difficulty, simply stops. It has been struck too hard, too suddenly, too completely. There is no immediate path forward, no reason to rise—only the weight of what cannot be undone.
LOVE
The source of this kind of devastation is almost always love.
We can make sense of physical pain. We can measure it, treat it, and endure it. But when something touches the heart—when love is broken, removed, or lost—the damage is different. Love creates attachment, identity, and meaning. When it is taken away, it is not merely a loss; it is disorientation. The mind searches for resolution, but none is to be found.
I would like to say that we heal over time. Sometimes we do. But sometimes we don’t heal completely; we learn to live with what remains. The greater the love, the greater the pain. Not feeling that pain would mean something far worse: that we had never loved deeply.
The privilege of loving carries the possibility of immense pain.
1 Peter 4:8, “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.”
LOSS
I live with that pain. Fifteen years later, it still brings me to tears.
I never want to become the person who forgets—who buries it so deeply that the heart grows numb to its presence. That experience shaped who I am. At one point in my life, it was a driving light. It changed me and made me better.
Yes, this is mine to carry. It is something I never want to lose. Anything this powerful is meant to be remembered. I want that feeling to keep shaping me, not fade into something distant and harmless. When I feel its weight, I understand others’ pain in a way I never could before. What once seemed like it would destroy me has become a source of connection to the rest of humanity. It remains one of the darkest moments of my life. But I survived—and I continue to live.
If love has the power to break us, it also reveals something deeper about how we were made.
God created us to love and be loved. This is not a minor part of who we are—it is central to our design. It is the essence of Christ’s teaching. Love binds us together, gives meaning to our lives, and drives us toward one another. When directed rightly, it changes lives for the better. When withheld or broken, it leaves damage in its wake.
Psalm 147:3, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”
But that damage does not define our worth.
Love lost has a way of making us feel unworthy of love. That is the lie it tells. If we believe it, it pulls us deeper into despair. But the truth stands in direct opposition to that lie: God’s love is not conditional. It is not withdrawn, and it does not fail as human love sometimes does.
1 John 4:19, “We love because He first loved us.”
He is present in the silence. He is present in the pain. Even when we cannot feel it, we are not alone.
WHAT REMAINS
I have come to see pain differently. Not as something to escape or erase, but as evidence. Evidence that something real existed. Evidence that love once took hold. If I had never loved, I would never have known this depth of feeling. That experience, however costly, would be absent from my life.
I would be less for it.
The pain remains, not as something to be feared but as something to be understood. It is part of what makes us human. And, in a way that is difficult to explain yet impossible to ignore, it is also part of what enables us to truly love again.
1 Corinthians 13, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
The good son—do you even know who I am talking about? Luke 15:11-32 is a parable Jesus taught about a lost, wayward son who finds redemption through a good father. The story is often taught in Sunday school and is the subject of many sermons and commentaries. The focus of most of these teachings is on how the prodigal son squandered his inheritance, was redeemed by a loving father, and was restored to his family. It exemplifies the act of Christ redeeming us back into His family after we have turned our backs on Him.
When hope and depression share the same heart, Christ becomes essential. While I was in Kyrgyzstan, I had a conversation that stayed with me. A woman shared that her mother — a trained psychologist — is battling depression. What makes her situation more complicated is not just the illness itself but also the theology surrounding it. Some in their Christian community believe that a Christian should not experience depression. The reasoning seems straightforward:
God does not waste pain, or why do good people suffer? This isn’t a question born out of curiosity. It’s asked from hospital rooms, gravesides, broken homes, and silent prayers that seem unanswered. It’s not philosophical; it’s personal.
Silence is the medium of loss, rage, disappointment, and resignation. It begins when the heart loses language, and even the most eloquent become wordless in suffering.
The parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30 gives us six great truths. 
While reading recently, I encountered a term that initially sounded academic, almost theoretical: violent innocence. At first, I thought it described others—two people or organizations engaged in passive conflict, each claiming innocence while quietly undermining one another. It seemed like a more refined version of passive-aggressive behavior. But as I reflected on it further, it became more unsettling. Not because it described others so accurately, but because it revealed something inside me.
I see Paul as a role model for living. Not just because he’s passionate about sharing the gospel, but in how he lived his everyday life. It’s easy for me to depend on my past as a guide for my future. This way of thinking assumes there’s a fixed trait or unchanging characteristic in who I was that determines who I can become. It’s the old nature-versus-nurture debate. But look at Paul as an example.
This is a sobering truth about your existence: a few decades after you pass away, no one will remember what you did. Sure, close family members might remember your name, but the core of your achievements will fade over time.