Clarissa Moll
13 min read ⭑
“The idea that ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ is a lie. We don’t automatically become strong. But as Christians, we can engage in a life of belovedness through the valley of the shadow of death and into a life of joy and satisfaction after loss.”
In July 2019, Clarissa Moll’s life changed forever when her husband passed away in a hiking accident. As a young widow with four children, she had to learn how to navigate the ache of grief while adapting to her new role as a solo parent. Now, as a writer, author and podcast host, she helps others learn to live and flourish again after enduring tragic loss with books like Beyond the Darkness (and its corresponding devotional), Hurt Help Hope and her latest, a children’s book titled Hope Comes to Stay.
In today’s conversation, Clarissa discusses how she explores grief through her work as producer of Christianity Today’s flagship news podcast, “The Bulletin,” and the books that helped her heal after the loss of her husband. She also dives into why gardening is essential for a traveler-at-heart like herself, how grief has changed her approach to spiritual discipline and her weakness for cliché Hallmark movies.
The following is a transcript of a live interview. Responses have been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
Food is always about more than food; it’s also about home and people and love. So how does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?
My favorite restaurant is a little Cambodian cafe about 30 minutes from where I live here in the Boston area. I had never had Cambodian food before, but I had a goal a couple of years back to eat five new cuisines every single year. In my bullet journal, I kept a list of restaurants I wanted to try that had cuisines from different ethnicities. This Cambodian cafe is one of the places I discovered on that journey.
Cambodia is special to me because my husband used to work for World Vision. He traveled to Cambodia in the early 2010s on a vision trip to see the work World Vision was doing there in antitrafficking. So when I think about Cambodia, I think about his humanitarian travels there. I think about the work he did as a journalist. As his widow now, six years later after his death, I find remembering him in little ways, like through food, to be a special connection with his memory.
What I like best about this Cambodian restaurant is that I can’t read a word of the menu. I never know exactly what I’m ordering. I can’t pronounce anything I am ordering, so I order by number. I like this because I’m an adventurous person. I like to try new things. I don’t mind jumping in before I have all of the details. Rarely am I surprised in a negative way if I have done a little bit of homework in advance. This restaurant had lots of good ratings, so I trust that when I show up, just about anything on the menu is going to be tasty. That is exactly the case.
The folks who run this restaurant are immigrants to the United States. That’s also special to me because I am proud to say I’m an immigrant. My paternal grandfather arrived here at age 13, not knowing a lick of English. I am the granddaughter of immigrants. I am the realization of his American dream. I love to support entrepreneurs and small business owners in my community who are living that dream, too. So for me, this Cambodian cafe symbolizes a lot of things — connection with the past, connection with my family of origin and my history, and a really deep connection to who I am, what excites me and what makes me come alive.
Yuri Antonenko; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
What “nonspiritual” activity have you found to be quite spiritual, after all? What quirky proclivity, out-of-the-way interest or unexpected pursuit refreshes your soul?
Considering how much I love adventure and my insatiable wanderlust, it might surprise you to learn that one of the nonspiritual activities that engages my heart, mind and body is gardening. Putting down roots seems the antithesis of an adventurous life, but it’s essential for my spiritual renewal.
I began gardening as a spiritual practice, as something that would help me feel less antsy and more grounded. When you have a big garden, you can’t just go away for the weekend on a whim. You may arrive to find that everything’s wilted because you forgot to water, or all of the beans have grown too big because nobody picked them. So gardening not only was the outgrowth of my love of plants, keeping things alive and nurturing my spirit, but it also became a discipline of engaging in space and becoming satisfied with long, steady and slow growth. It teaches me to release control over things that I didn’t have control over in the first place, like the sun and the rain. It’s about looking for the fruit of a long obedience, as Eugene Peterson puts it. I have to plant that seed in the spring, right after the frost here in New England, and perhaps wait all the way until September to actually have my plants bear fruit.
For somebody who likes a road trip more than anything and gets antsy on a Friday afternoon with a desire to bust out of town, gardening has been a surprise and a delight to me.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness; every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you confront its power?
I’m kind of embarrassed to share this because I feel like I should be more intellectual or erudite than this, but my kryptonite is the Hallmark Channel. I can’t get past it. I absolutely love a Hallmark movie. I know they’re cliché. I know they present a narrative of true love that always resolves itself in 90 minutes, and that it’s not a clear picture of how life truly is, but I think we need fairy tales. I’m convinced that, as C.S. Lewis said, we need fairy tales where dragons are slain and kings triumph. In a silly kind of way, I really love the Hallmark Channel because every movie writes itself in the end. The girl gets the guy. The problems are solved. Everybody walks into the sunset happily.
After living through a lot of loss, I have realized that engaging in those kinds of narratives can make me forget the troubles that exist. I’ve had to confront that as I’ve engaged with these fictional movies after loss. But I’m still convinced that we long as humans for something that is good and true and beautiful. We know that every good story with a happy resolution is just a glimmer of the gospel that we can experience in full in Jesus.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
In my day job, I’m the producer and moderator of Christianity Today’s flagship news podcast, “The Bulletin.” If you had told me 15 years ago that I would spend my days knee deep in reading the headlines, diving deep into topics that are often tragic, I would have said you were talking to the wrong person. Why? I was a therapist almost 20 years ago, saying, Hey, Clarissa, you need to stop reading the news. It’s not good for your psyche. So I took a long break from engaging with headlines, politics and all the messiness we see in the media until I came to this work at Christianity Today.
Loss has transformed the way I think about the news. The death of my husband in 2019 has given me new eyes to see hurting people in the world. When I look at the world, there are many hurting people behind the headlines, people who need to be loved, people who need to be acknowledged. I come to the news, as I come to all of my writing, with my advocacy, digging into why people do the things that they do and how the gospel intersects with our experiences.
My four books, “Beyond the Darkness,” “Hurt Help Hope,” “Beyond the Darkness Devotional” and my children’s book, “Hope Comes to Stay,” are the outgrowth of my curiosity in how humans engage with the hardest of hard things, like the death of a loved one, and how they learn to live again. Not just in a practical sense, through support in helpful behaviors after loss, but also in how Jesus’ presence makes all the difference. I believe that when it comes to bereavement advocacy — and when it comes to deadlines, too — Jesus always matters. He matters in every square life.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Whether we’re cashiers or CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need God’s love flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
I wish that I could know more clearly when the Holy Spirit is invigorating my work in the moment. More often than not, it’s something I notice when I reflect on what God has done in my life. That’s how I know that it’s God — because I can sit back and look at how God has worked in my life.
Every week, I receive many emails from grieving folks who tell me, “I felt alone, and then I read your book, and I felt like there was somebody who understood what it meant to lose a loved one. To walk through grief alone, to experience the holidays without a loved one, to go through changes like selling a house or disruptions in sleep or eating. Now I feel like I’m not alone.”
As a writer, you do a lot of work in the quiet cell of your own space. It’s you and your laptop, so when you send your words out into the world, it’s hard to know how the Holy Spirit will use them in someone’s life. So those interactions remind me that all good writing is a connection between the author and the reader. It’s a back-and-forth conversation facilitated by the Holy Spirit. The emails I get from folks who tell me about their experience of belonging and being found in the work that I write remind me that the Holy Spirit is working in quiet ways to develop connections, to give people a sense of community, to remind them that, even in their darkest moments in life, they are not alone and are loved beyond measure.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?
Bible study used to be a core spiritual practice in my life. But since my husband’s death, Bible study, memory and reading retention have become very difficult for me. This is a normal experience among grieving people. Sometimes people regain the capacity in their brains to be able to memorize again or engage in deep study and remember content for a long time, and sometimes, like in my case, they don’t.
One of the things I’ve had to reckon with is the question, “What does my spiritual practice look like if deep study doesn’t work for me the same way it used to?” Practicing the presence of God, as writers like Brother Lawrence have referred to, has been a source of comfort and spiritual practice in this particular loss. I focus on breath prayers and continual prayer while I am washing the dishes, driving to get my kids, gardening or even taking a break in a writing assignment. These kinds of rhythms of prayer — the ones that happen every day and are woven into the rhythms of my life — have been very nourishing and a comfort in my relationship with God.
I’ve been blessed to spend time with God and really connect with him as a father. When I think about God as a father, he’s not somebody that you date. He’s somebody you talk to all the time. That truth has relieved me of internal pressure to set a particular time to dive in deep and have a deep conversation. Instead, I think about my communication with God more as a child talks to a parent. If you’re a parent, you’ve likely ridden in a van with a child babbling in the backseat. I think God often feels that way about me, that I’m babbling throughout the day to him or sometimes sitting and staring out the window and enjoying the company of his presence. That kind of prayer, woven into my daily life, has become rich, and it has encouraged my heart with the continuing remembrance of God’s presence.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and changed your heart?
When I think about the unique faith journey that I have been on since a year or so before my husband Rob died, I think about the writings of Henri Nouwen. All of his writing is centered around this idea that when we come to know our belovedness, we realize who God is and who he is for us. After Rob died, I got “beloved” tattooed on my arm because it’s a word that I wanted to remember. Rob had been memorizing 1 John before he died, and that word is central to the text. I wanted to always be reminded that, in good times and in bad, in the valley of the shadow of death or beside the still waters, I was beloved.
But belovedness isn’t just something for me to receive; it’s something for me to express as well.
When I think about expressing that belovedness, I think about a book I read soon after my loss, called “The Other Side of Sadness” by George Bonanno. It was about how tragedy calls up resilience within us. The idea that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is a lie. We don’t automatically become strong. But as Christians, we can engage in a life of belovedness through the valley of the shadow of death and into a life of joy and satisfaction after loss. A turning point for me has been realizing that, on the other side of sadness, there is a life that is full and rich in which God invites me to enact my belovedness, to live as someone who has a hope and a future, who has that interest in mind. For me, the work of Henri Nouwen — alongside this researcher at Columbia University — created a foundation for me to look forward after loss.
Because I’m a mom and a former homeschooling mom of nine years, I couldn’t think of three resources without adding a children’s book. One of my favorites is “Home in the Woods” by Eliza Wheeler. It’s a gorgeous picture book about a mom who experiences the loss of her husband. She moves her children to a cabin in the woods, and over time, we watch that family renovate the cabin together to create a home they can love. A home that nourishes them and keeps them safe and secure but also extends welcome to others. That is the ultimate picture of inviting others into the belovedness. It’s knowing who you are and whose you are. It’s being able to express that to the world and then invite others into that belovedness with you. Those three resources, woven together, have changed both my reality and my heart.
Certain things can be godsends, helping us survive, even thrive, in our fast-paced world. Does technology ever help you this way? Has an app ever boosted your spiritual growth? If so, how?
I will say no. I’ll be honest about it. More than anything, technology serves to distract me from my spiritual growth. For example, I might rely on AI to do work that eliminates labor and enhances productivity and optimization, where God calls me to slow, self-reliant, temporary growth.
Although some tools like social media are a great people connector and gave me wonderful community resources after my husband died as a young widow, they also serve as a significant distraction and an echo chamber. Social media offers a technological connection, but it also can hold people back from real change and real growth after loss, and it doesn’t always aid in spiritual growth.
If we lived in a perfect world, I’d be a bit more of a Luddite than I am — and far more analog. I find that the slow and simple life that God calls me to — the little life where I work with my hands and mind my own business, which the Apostle Paul calls the early church to in the Epistles — is very hard to experience when you’ve got God in your hands.
QUESTION #8: dream
God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
A couple of years ago, someone I know asked me, “How do you feel about being known as the grief lady?” I had to laugh because everything I do is pinched with grief. Everything I write and every podcast I host or participate in has a thread of grief running through it.
For someone on the outside of my world, I can understand why it would feel kind of constrictive, especially because I have built such a rich and full life since Rob’s death. But something I don’t think is fully awakened yet is a realization that it’s OK for grief to be a marker in my life. It’s OK to always be the grief lady.
I’m not sure what that means for me yet, as I watch my life change. I do know that grief is a companion that walks with you. As I become comfortable with that unwelcome companion, as I learn to turn to it for gifts of wisdom and reordered priorities, I expect that I’ll still be the grief lady in the future. It will manifest in different ways as my own life grows and changes. But God has offered me something hard, and I have learned through it. I think he calls us to steward it well, and that’s what I’m hoping to do.
As Clarissa mentioned earlier, grief is one of the most painful of life’s experiences, and yet even in that darkness, we are unimaginably loved. If you’ve been walking through a season of sorrow, we want to close by sharing with you several biblical promises, each with a short blessing.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matt 5:4, ESV).
May your heart overflow with God’s unwavering truth, renewed joy and lasting comfort, and may hope brighten the path ahead of you.
“God is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18).
May you find rest today in God’s presence, knowing you are his beloved, wrapped in the solace of his wings.
“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).
May the darkness of night never consume you, nor the heat of the day exhaust you. But may the promise of unceasing joy to come give you strength for every step you are called to take.
Amen.
Clarissa Moll is an award-winning writer and podcaster who helps bereaved people find flourishing after loss. Clarissa’s writing appears in Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, RELEVANT, Modern Loss, Grief Digest and more. She co-hosted Christianity Today’s Surprised by Grief podcast and produces Christianity Today’s flagship news podcast, The Bulletin. She is the author of four books and is finishing her first children’s book (forthcoming 2025).