Finding God
When Your Story Breaks

A space for those living with grief, doubt, church wounds, and the slow work of holding on.

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Selected Reading

The Bronze Medal Nobody Dreams Of

No child dreams of the third-place game. Everyone imagines the final. A reflection on doing well at a life that isn't the one you pictured, on grieving the game you never got to play, and on finding God present in the one you actually got.

The Work Nobody Sees You Doing

Unemployment feels like nothing because most of it is invisible. The despair you did not hand your family. The conviction you manufactured for the two hundredth application. Genesis gives Joseph two forgotten years in a single sentence. He was in there for all of them.

They Are Not Rejecting You

When someone you love pulls away, the instinct is to read it as a verdict on you. Often it is something else entirely: love submerged to survive an environment, not love examined and discarded.

The Skin Does Not Grow Back the Same

A doctor once told me that when the body heals a deep wound, it does not replace the original tissue. It produces something new. That observation changed the way I understand what God is doing in a wounded life.

Cure and Healing Are Not the Same

A cure is the removal of the problem. Healing is the slow restoration of the whole person. The church has used these words as if they meant the same thing. They do not, and the confusion is doing real damage.

When You Are Angry at God

You probably will not say it out loud. You may not have said it to yourself yet. You have only felt it. Anger. At God. And you were raised, somewhere along the way, to believe this is the one emotion Christians are not allowed to have.
A watercolor painting of a small wooden raft floating on a dark, choppy sea at night, with a single lit lantern casting a warm glow on the water and a dark, vertical structure to the left.

What the Church needs to know about Mental Health

Someone in your congregation is carrying something they have never told anyone. This series takes one condition at a time, naming what it actually is, where the church gets it wrong, and what Scripture honestly gives us, so the people in the same seat each week can finally tell the truth and still belong.  

Part 1 - Depression
Part 2 - Anxiety
Part 3 - Bipolar Disorder
Part 4 - Schizophrenia
Part 5 - OCD
Part 6 - PTSD
Part 7 - Psychosis

A slow walk through Psalm 88

Psalm 88 is the only psalm in the Psalter that does not turn. It begins in the dark and stays there. No yet, no but, no light at the end. Over the next four reflections, we walk slowly through it — what it means that the canon contains a prayer with no resolution, and what it gives the believer who is also without one.

Part 1 - Darkness is my closest Friend
Part 2 - The Psalm that does not Resolve
Part 3 - The Anger that keeps Praying
Part 4 - When the Community Steps Back

The scar tissue is not the wound.
It is the evidence that the wound was survived.

The Book

Wounded Hope: Finding God when your Story Breaks is written for the believer who has done everything right and still found themselves in the wreckage of a story that did not hold. It is not a recovery program.

It is not a roadmap back to the faith you had before. It is a companion for the long road — honest about the wound, serious about grace, and written for the person who is still in the middle of it.

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A book cover titled "Wounded Hope: Finding God When Your Story Breaks" by David Mercer, featuring a watercolor illustration of two cupped, scarred hands being held by another pair of hands against a light, neutral background.