This has been a heavy week in the life of our extended Good Shepherd community.
Many of you know Kayla Meredith, who led our Gladstone campus and served on staff at Good Shepherd for many years. On Saturday night, Kayla’s youngest son, Nate, died in an e-bike accident.
Many of us are also grieving the death of Brooke Albracht, who died after a battle with cancer. Brooke was only 28 years old and grew up in our church.
A son. A daughter. A friend. Lives still unfolding.
Some of you will feel these losses very personally. Some of you know their families. Others may be hearing these names for the first time. But moments like this affect the wider community. They remind us how fragile life is, how much we love the people close to us, and how much we need one another.
And when loss comes like this, it does more than make us sad. It shakes something deep inside of us. It reaches down into the hopes we carry, the fears we try to ignore, and the fragile illusion that we can keep everyone we love safe if we just try hard enough.
For me, when I heard the news, I felt that deep instinct to gather my family close and protect them from a world where things like this can happen. Maybe you know that feeling too. The urge to hold tighter. To protect more fiercely. To find some way to build a life untouched by pain.
That feeling is human. It is what love does when love feels threatened.
But as much as we want to protect the people we love, we eventually come face to face with a painful truth: we cannot shield one another from every sorrow. We cannot control every outcome. We cannot love people deeply and avoid all risk. To love anyone is to become vulnerable to grief.
And that is where faith matters—not because faith gives us easy answers, but because faith gives us somewhere to bring the questions.
Our faith does not ask us to pretend that death is acceptable or that tragedy makes sense. The Bible gives us prayers of lament. It gives us people crying out, “How long, O Lord?” It gives us Jesus standing at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, not explaining grief away, but red faced crying and weeping.
And I do believe God meets us in the heartbreak—through prayer, through the quiet presence of people who love us, through a community that helps carry what is too heavy to carry alone, and through the hope of resurrection that tells us death does not get the final word.
So maybe the faithful response in moments like this is not to rush toward answers. Maybe it is to pray. To grieve. To sit with one another. To tell the truth about our fear and still choose love. To resist the temptation to close ourselves off from the world and instead become the kind of community that helps carry one another through it.
That is part of what it means to be the church.
We do not grieve alone. We do not ask our questions alone. We do not carry heartbreak alone. And even when we cannot make sense of what has happened, we hold onto the hope of Jesus: a hope that does not skip over sorrow, but meets us in it. A hope that says death does not get the final word. A hope rooted in the God who is near to the brokenhearted.
So in the days ahead, let’s pray for the Meredith and Albracht families as well as everyone carrying grief right now.
May we be gentle with one another.
May we be present to one another.
May we hold our loved ones close without letting fear close our hearts.
And may the peace of Christ hold what we cannot.
Peace,
Matt
P.S. For those who knew Nate or the Meredith family, Nate’s service will be Saturday, June 6 at 11:00 a.m. at First Baptist Church Warrensburg. You can also find Nate’s obituary here.
I also want to invite you to worship this Sunday. We’ll continue our current series Dynamic Duo and talk about what it means to invest in the next generation, which feels especially meaningful this week. But more than that, I hope you’ll come because worshiping together helps us heal. Sometimes we need to pray, sing, grieve, hope, and be reminded that we are not carrying all of this alone.
