by A.C. Williams @ACW_Author

When you are walking through a season of intense grief and sadness, the first thing to go will be your creativity. I have heard that a lot in 2025 because this has been one of the most challenging years of my life. More close friends have suffered through unimaginable trouble. More of my relationships have up-ended themselves for whatever reason. And both my mother and grandmother have passed away within six months of each other.

Grief is a real thing. I never doubted it, but I hadn’t ever experienced it like this before. The huge tidal waves of distraction and exhaustion that sap all your energy and focus. The sneak attacks of unrelenting tears that blur your vision. The heavy “I don’t wanna” attitude that settles over every area of your life.

I’m not a fan.

I tried to prepare myself for it. I was blessed in many ways because of the situation I was in; the Lord had laid out a pretty clear path for me. Most of the really heavy stuff from this year wasn’t unexpected. Some of it was, but most I could see coming from a long way off. So it wasn’t a surprise, which is its own grief. So when I still struggled to write, it blindsided me.

[tweet_box design=”default” float=”none” inject=”#Writing #Writinglife #BRMCWC”]Writing Through the Wilderness of Grief by @ACW_Author on @BRMCWC [/tweet_box]

I prepared for this. I was ready for this. I knew this was coming. So why can’t I write?

Close friends and confidants assured me that my creativity would come back with time. Grief is such a heavy burden, it takes all the focus off your words and zooms in on your mental and emotional health.

And it does. I made space to heal. I made time to mourn. I accepted the grace that had been given to me and set aside my writing for a time, and then I came back to it once I felt like it had been long enough. I got back to writing articles. I got back to writing devotions. I got back to writing blog posts, editing manuscripts, composing letters to clients.

But my desire to write fiction had vanished.

It made no sense. Fiction has always been my first love. Even if I couldn’t write anything else, I could write some fantastical piece of sillyness that would make everybody smile. I was born with a story in my mouth and words on my fingertips, but it seemed that gift had dissipated. My words were gone.

That’s a hard pill to swallow when writing fiction has been your safe place for 30+ years. I started telling myself stories when I was nine years old. I didn’t know then that it was my own form of therapy, my way of processing my life and my relationships and why people did what they did and said what they said. Nobody needed to explain it to me. I just wrote stories about it.

I’d love to tell you I accepted it graciously. But I didn’t. I got angry and frustrated and impatient, and I did what I always do when I feel that way: I went to the Lord, and I told Him exactly what was on my mind.

I thought You made me to be a storyteller. Why would You have equipped me to be a communicator if You were just going to take it away? After I spent five years of my life pouring into people who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) acknowledge my sacrifice, how could You take away the one thing I thought would make it worth it?

And the Lord, as He so often does, answered with such kindness. But He was blunt about it. He has to be blunt with me. I’m too Scottish for Him to stop at hints.

I heard His voice in my heart saying, “Before you get mad at Me, maybe you should try spending time with me again. Like you used to.”

Yeah. Ouch. My little temper tantrum and all my puffed-up self-importance deflated like a punctured balloon. Because He was right, of course.

Since the beginning of the year I had stopped spending the morning with Him. I’d been reading through the Bible with Him for an hour every morning, followed by prayer journaling. But when life got to be too much for me to juggle, I stopped. I asked Him for grace for it, because I literally didn’t have the hour to spend with Him at that time. And I knew He understood. He always understands.

But as soon as April hit? Well, I had time. I just didn’t go back to Him.

Sure, I prayed. I went to church. I attended my Bible study. I sang worship songs with the radio. But I had let go of my personal time with God. And in that moment when He whispered to me, I realized with stunning certainty that there was nothing wrong with my creativity; I had just become disconnected from the source that powered it.

I told Him I was sorry. I ran back to Him, and He met me with both arms open. We returned to our regular morning reading and our regular morning conversations, and at the end of a week, guess what happened?

Yup. A story.

And then another one.

And another one.

This isn’t to say that grief isn’t real. It is. And everyone going through it needs to make space to recover and process in a healthy way. But don’t let grief become an excuse either. And if you’ve lost the spark and the joy of creating with God, before you get angry at Him for abandoning you, maybe make sure that you’re the one who hasn’t walked away from Him.

If you have, go back. He’s waiting. He misses you. And He’s ready to get back to the joy of creating with you once again.

A.C. Williams is a coffee-drinking, sushi-eating, story-telling nerd who loves cats, country living, and all things Japanese. Author of more than 20 books, she keeps her fiction readers laughing with wildly imaginative adventures about samurai superheroes, clumsy church secretaries, and goofy malfunctioning androids; her non-fiction readers just laugh at her and the hysterical life experiences she’s survived. If that’s your cup of tea (or coffee), join the fun at www.amycwilliams.com.