Some endings are obvious: a death, a divorce, a diagnosis, a caregiving crisis that changes the shape of your days overnight, a door that closes and won’t open again. When that happens, it’s hard to know how to rebuild your life after loss.
Everything familiar evaporates. Suddenly, the life you knew no longer works and forward movement feels impossible.
The routines you leaned on no longer steady you. The plans you trusted no longer tell you what comes next. The version of yourself who knew how to move through that life no longer feels equipped for this one. Even the way you prayed no longer seems to reach heaven.
That’s when “stuck” can feel like a verdict.
It’s how I felt after Reggie’s passing.
Six months earlier, I quit my corporate job and transitioned to our ministry, A Cord of Blue, full-time. Our ministry served couples transitioning from singleness to marriage. Then Reggie died, and I lost my teammate—my partner in serving those couples and in building the life we had imagined.
Without Reggie, I questioned my future, especially regarding A Cord of Blue. As familiar as my surroundings were—our home—I’d lost my sense of purpose and motivation. I didn’t want to continue without him. As I wrote in When Your World Ends, “My life turned into one big, wild, unproductive mess. Total tohu.”
Before you can figure out how to rebuild your life after loss, you may need language for what changed.
What Rebuilding Your Life After Loss Looks Like
When Reggie died, everyone advised me not to make any life-changing decisions unless it was necessary. The prevailing thought was that Reggie’s death had already disrupted my life enough. I didn’t need to add the stress of any unnecessary changes. My job in this season was to grieve.
Once I healed, I’d have plenty of time to rebuild and make the decisions that come with it.
Rebuilding is a process, and every process has a starting point. Often, feeling stuck is a part of that beginning—when something has changed your life enough that life as you knew it has ended. Your life may have changed faster than your heart, body, or mind can make sense of it. You don’t have to force the next step before you have language for the loss.
In When Your World Ends, I call this process God’s Creative Process. It moves through seven steps that, as a Restoration Architect, I call Rooms. And it starts where the Bible starts, in the creation story.
Genesis Begins with the Mess
God’s Creative Process begins in Genesis 1:1–2. One thing I find remarkable is that Scripture doesn’t rush past the earth’s condition to get to what God created first. Instead, Genesis tells us what the earth was like: formless, void, and dark.
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters."
~Genesis 1:1-2 (NKJV)
The Hebrew words Moses used in Genesis are tohu, bohu, and khoshek. Tohu means unproductive, a wilderness. Bohu means empty, barren. Khoshek means darkness, confusion. Together, they give us language for a world that doesn’t yet look like the one God is about to form. As I wrote in When Your World Ends, “God wants us to know what the world was like before he started to create.”
Rather than begin the creation story denying the mess or rushing past it, Scripture describes it to us. Sometimes, before you know where you’re going, you need language for where you are.
In the book, I call these unproductive, empty, and dark moments signs that it’s just the beginning.
What This Looks Like in Ordinary Life
You may never use the words tohu, bohu, or khoshek to describe your week, but may know exactly how they feel.
While studying Genesis 1:2 for When Your World Ends, I realized these three conditions connect to three parts of who we are: the will, the emotions, and the mind.
First, tohu maps to your will. You feel unproductive. You know what needs to be done, but you can’t seem to get started. Plans stall. Motivation disappears. Things that once came easily now feel heavy.
Bohu settles in the emotions. You feel drained, disconnected, or hollow. Your tears may have stopped, but the emptiness hasn’t. You’re worn out and dry, like a well with nothing left to draw from.
Then, there’s khoshek, which fills your mind. Your thoughts are foggy, and you can’t see what the next season looks like. Decisions that once seemed simple take more effort. You struggle to picture the future.
Sometimes one sign is loudest. If you’re like me, all three show up at once. If you recognize any of them, or all three, you’re at the starting line of God’s Creative Process.
A Practice for This Week
Before you make another plan, take five quiet minutes with a pen and paper.
Start by naming the signs you recognize. Where does life feel unproductive? Where does it feel empty? Where does it feel dark? It may be all three.
Then, answer one question as honestly as you can:
What changed in my world that altered the plan I thought I was living?
Don’t judge yourself for what you write. For these five minutes, simply tell the truth about where you are. Leave the solving and the planning for later.
Continue the Conversation
If you’re reading this with a friend or small group…
- Recognition: Looking at your energy, thoughts, and emotions this week, which sign do you recognize most: unproductive, empty, or dark?
- Release: What’s one plan you’ve been rushing to make that you can set down for now?
- Reframe: What changes if God was already there?
A Blessing for the Beginning
May God meet you in the quiet before the answers come.
May He remind you that your empty hands aren’t a disappointment to Him.
May He hold what feels unproductive, empty, and dark in your life, and remind you that none of those conditions place you beyond His care.
May you release the pressure to hurry your healing, force a solution, or manufacture a future you can’t yet see. And may you bask in the truth that this isn’t the end of your story.
Rest in His presence today, and remember: these are signs it’s just the beginning.
Find Your Room
If you recognize yourself in any of these signs, you don’t have to guess where you are in the rebuilding process.
God’s Creative Process has seven Rooms, each with a different invitation and next faithful step.
Take the 3-minute God’s Creative Process quiz to discover your Room and get language for where you are right now. It shows you which Room you’re in, so your next faithful step fits where you are.
