Open to Hope Articles

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Questions You May Ask in Your Pain

Posted on November 17, 2023 - by Beth Marshall

During the intense period after the loss of my favorite people, many questions ran through my mind. These are questions you might ask in your pain. Will the tsunami of tears ever end? Why do some people seem to skate through sorrow while I feel isolated and stuck? If my brain is this foggy and I’m contemplating hibernating ’til springtime, am I going crazy? Or is this just what grief looks like? Where are the people who came around in the early days? Do they even care about me? Or about her? I wish I could have seen my mom’s […]

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One Step at a Time: Through the ‘Dark Valley,’

Posted on November 15, 2023 - by Beth Marshall

After months of trying to outrun the ache and sprint toward some imaginary silver lining, I realized that running from the pain can leave you crushed, lonely, and confused. In that desperate season, the Lord gently revealed something I’d never known: The only lasting way to the other side of shattering heartbreak is right through the dark valley, one step at a time. I wish someone had told me the deep sorrow, confusion, and grief-related anxiety would not last forever! Wherever you are on your journey, will you imagine a few possible scenarios with me? What if the pain won’t […]

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‘What Do You Do with All this Pain?’

Posted on November 13, 2023 - by Beth Marshall

Have you ever gotten news that literally took your breath away? I surely have. It was the late-night call that my mom—my healthy, hilarious, newlywed mom—was gone. Nobody could have imagined her happily-ever-after ending so quickly. As weeks marched by, the shock wore off and I was left wondering, what do you do with all this pain? If you’ve ever lost someone you love—whether there was time to prepare, or their death came with no time to brace—you probably realize grief is one of the hardest things we ever face. That’s why I wrote Uncrushed. My hope is that my […]

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Angry At a God I Didn’t Even Know

Posted on November 9, 2023 - by Shannon Harris

Angry at God Bereaved parents become experts on all things grief soon after the death of a child. We research. We read articles, talk to doctors and therapists. And we constantly self-assess, trying to figure out which of the five stages of grief we are in and how long before we get to the next one. We find facebook groups with other suffering parents and silently compare pain, wondering to ourselves, “Am I that bad?” or “How can she be doing that well so soon?” We gather information from all kinds of sources, desperately trying to piece together a new […]

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Writing Helps Bereaved Find Gratitude

Posted on November 9, 2023 - by Beth Marshall

Writing Helps Bereaved Whenever you set out to write a book, an important first step is clearly defining your audience. When I started dreaming about Uncrushed, I assumed it would be primarily to help people navigate the loss of a loved one. That was and still is a big part of the reason for my new book. But something unexpected happened as feedback came in from the Launch Team (35-40 amazing superheroes who read through the book before release day). The comment that surprised me most came from a dear friend who has, thankfully, never lost a super close person, […]

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Violent Deaths Leave Haunted Souls

Posted on October 31, 2023 - by Candace Lynn Talmadge

Violent Deaths Leave Haunted Souls After death and before birth, consciousness (or soul-energy, if you prefer) is so intact that even when the physical body is abruptly destroyed, through accident or murder, for example, the remaining self-awareness often doesn’t realize what has happened. One example of this is the souls of those killed in the airplane crash for which Jana and Candace considered attempting a soul rescue. An undetected wind shear slammed a jumbo jet violently to the ground just north of the airport runway it was approaching to land. Though the physical bodies were removed from the crash site, […]

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Resolving an Abortion Decision

Posted on October 30, 2023 - by Candace Lynn Talmadge

Resolving an Abortion Decision In addition to resolving grief and helping parents-to-be, the afterlife healing circle can be helpful in other difficult circumstances such as miscarriage, abortion, or suicide. Many of us regard such events as the end of a budding life, and even murder. What miscarriage and abortion really mean is delay. In both situations, the soul will opt not to return to a physical body, find another mother and father, or wait until the time is better for the woman who was pregnant. The third option is what happened for a woman we will call Lori Dell. At […]

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Circle Up for Healing

Posted on October 29, 2023 - by Candace Lynn Talmadge

Circle Up for Healing According to the well-known Western European myth of Camelot, King Arthur gathered his knights at a circular table. He chose that particular table configuration to foster a sense of equality among his knights. He wanted to eliminate the head and foot of the more common rectangular table shape. This inevitably produced tension between the ideal of social equality, as embodied in the round table, and the reality of the decidedly nonegalitarian political hierarchy that Arthur led as monarch. Unlike the circle, Camelot did not endure. Today, we love to circle up for healing for the same […]

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‘Soul Senses’ Can Help with Grief

Posted on October 28, 2023 - by Candace Lynn Talmadge

‘Soul Senses’ Can Help with Grief The soul senses are the primary means by which we are able to apply the principles of love, connection, and trust. We need the soul senses to invoke and feel the presence of love-energy. We also require these nonphysical senses to detect the presence of the soul(s) to whom we wish to speak, as that consciousness does not come attached to a physical body. And we need to learn to trust the information we receive through our soul senses, no matter how illogical or strange it may seem. These are the challenges inherent in […]

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Can a Séance be Healing?

Posted on October 27, 2023 - by Candace Lynn Talmadge

Can a Séance be Healing? The séance is probably the most misunderstood and thus abused and debased of all spiritual practices. The very word immediately brings to mind what most of us consider the unreal and therefore absurd notion of “conjuring up spirits.” The séance stereotype certainly was the foundation for that outrageous scene in the film, “The Changling.” A more recent séance-related movie even has that word in the title: “The Conjuring.” Brian Dunning, who writes the Skeptoid blog, sums up the skeptic’s view of séances. “Contacting the dead has never passed any kind of controlled test, has no […]

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