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This verse is at the end of the caravan chapter because I couldn’t think of a more honest or fitting place to put it.

The night before, Mom had been up late watching Lee Evans on her iPad; a few hours later she was gone. That is the bit I still can’t get my head around: somebody can be laughing at Lee Evans until two in the morning, get into bed and by breakfast, the family are standing around a caravan trying to understand a world that has shattered beyond recognition.

There were phones going off, people arriving, Dad outside in pieces and all these practical questions floating about that seemed completely detached from what had actually happened. My Mom had died! Shouldn’t the sky split open, the world collectively pause for a bit or some siren play across the country to warn everyone to tiptoe with respect? At one point, I saw a bloke dragging his fishing gear across the grass towards the lake. I vividly remember thinking it was almost rude that he could just carry on with his day, while our world had been smashed apart.

Of course, he didn’t know Mom. He didn’t know any of us. To him, it was just another morning by the water.

That somehow made it worse.

“Blessed are those who mourn” I didn’t have the pleasure of knowing the Gospel that tragic morning, so it’s not exactly a verse I would have wanted somebody to wheel out in some woeful attempt to comfort me, as my kids shattered before my eyes as their Nan was carried away to some unknown morgue. I would probably have thought, lovely, cheers mate! My mom has just died and now I’m apparently blessed. Have a word with yourself!

Yet I keep coming back to it.

Jesus doen’t try to talk grief out of being grief. He doesn’t offer some neat little answer that turns death into a lesson. The comfort He promises has taken longer than I would have liked to reach me and it hasn’t not arrived in a way that suddenly makes any of what happened that day acceptable.

The sudden and brutal grief that obliterated our world that morning did real damage. Trying to make that sound holy would feel dishonest and disrespectful to my Mom. Her death was disgustingly unexpected; it tore through the life I understood and left parts of me exposed that I’d spent years covering over.

Eventually, cracks appeared in the wreckage. The jokes, distractions and certainty that I’d got life broadly figured out suddenly had very little to say for themselves. Questions I’d kept locked away for years started forcing their way in.

Somehow, God worked through those cracks and found his initially reluctant disciple.

I still can’t tell you why Mom died in that caravan after laughing at Lee Evans until two in the morning. I can’t make that day fit into a tidy Christian explanation - no matter how much Bible I read - and I still picture the fishing bloke by the lake as though he’d wandered into the wrong scene. I’m nowhere near as irrationally angry at him these days though.

Matthew 5:4 has become true for me anyway. Comfort took its time. It came gradually, through the damage grief had caused, until I realised God had found me in the middle of it. He’s been working through those broken places ever since.

Read The Pizza Place Providence

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

Psalm 34:18

This is the Bible verse at the end of Chapter 1.

I chose it because Chapter 1 needed a verse that could sit beside grief without trying to explain it too quickly. Some verses feel like they are trying to put a hand on your shoulder. This is one of them. It sits there quietly, saying something that sounds simple until your own life has been split down the middle.

The context of Psalm 34 matters, because David is writing from a proper mess. He is in danger. He is on the run. He has been humiliated. At one point, he has to pretend to be mad in front of Abimelek just to escape.

That is easy to skim over because Bible stories can sound cleaner than they actually are. You read them in that slightly churchy rhythm and forget how ridiculous and frightening the scene would have been in real life. David - future king, chosen by God, writer of psalms - reduced to acting insane because his life has gone so badly sideways that this has somehow become the best available plan.

Now, obviously, I am not David. I had not been anointed by Samuel, I was not hiding from Saul, and I have never had to dribble down my beard to get out of a tight spot. My problems were more Sutton Coldfield than ancient Israel. More family phone call than Philistine court. More standing in a normal room with my brain refusing to accept a sentence I had just heard.

But that is the point.

The circumstances are wildly different. The human bit is not.

Fear is fear. Grief is grief. Humiliation is humiliation. Survival mode is survival mode, whether you are fleeing a king or standing there after a phone call, trying to work out what normal human beings are supposed to do next.

And from that place, David writes:

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

That word “close” gets me.

Because when grief hits, part of you wants God to become instantly obvious. You want the sort of explanation that would satisfy a tired, suspicious, emotionally battered bloke who suddenly has a full courtroom operating inside his head. Something clear. Something undeniable. Something that makes sense of the room, the phone, the news, the silence afterwards, and the sickening little moment when your body seems to understand what has happened before your mind has caught up.

But Psalm 34 gives you something quieter than that.

Close.

And close is not the same as clear.

That is probably the hardest thing about it. At the time, I doubt I would have recognised closeness as closeness. I was shocked. I was guilty. I was sad. I was trying to be practical in that very male way where you convince yourself that doing admin is basically the same thing as emotional processing. Send the message. Make the call. Check on people. Move something from one side of the room to the other. Look busy enough and maybe nobody will ask the question that makes your face cave in.

Chapter 1 begins in that kind of territory.

A normal night, ordinary surroundings, and the sort of setting that looks completely wrong for the news about to enter it. Then the phone call comes, and suddenly life is divided into before and after.

What struck me afterwards was how insulting ordinary things can look when terrible news arrives. The room does not change for you. The carpet stays the same. The furniture carries on being furniture. Someone probably puts the kettle on, because in this country we seem to believe the correct response to emotional devastation is hot water and a teabag.

And yet something has happened that cannot be undone.

That is where this verse belongs.

Psalm 34:18 comes from a man who knows fear, pressure, humiliation and survival. David is not speaking about pain like it is a topic on a worksheet. He is speaking from inside a life that has become strange, frightening and undignified.

That gives the verse weight.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted” sounds gentle, but it is not weak. There is steel in it. It says that the crushed places are not abandoned places. It says God is present where dignity has gone, where explanations have failed, where you are standing in a room that looks too normal for the news you have just received.

At the start of the book, I did not fully understand that. I was still very much me: overthinking, emotionally chaotic, capable of deep feeling and spectacularly poor coping strategies, sometimes within the same hour. I was not calmly interpreting my life through Scripture like a man with a tidy soul and a sensible filing system. I was just trying to get through the next hour without making everything worse.

But looking back, this verse feels like the right marker for the beginning.

A line placed beside the first crack in the story.

A reminder that when a person is brokenhearted, God is not waiting somewhere clean and distant for them to become presentable again. He is close in the room where the news lands. Close in the silence after the phone call. Close when your spirit is crushed and you have no impressive words left.

Before grief, that verse sounded comforting. After grief, it sounded necessary.

And that is where the book begins.