About the Journal

My son, Yemi Bowyer, was born in 1996. In 2007, after a mercifully brief illness, he died. He did not suffer much, thank God.

There is no useful way to dress up the death of a child. Yemi was eleven years old, and losing him permanently changed our family.

Years passed. Life continued because life has an irritating habit of doing that whether you are ready for it or not. But grief does not follow the calendar quite so obediently.

My wife, Kike, carried her grief for Yemi very privately. She remained functional, busy, and deeply committed to her Christian faith, but I could still see the sadness in her eyes many years after his death.

I was grieving twice: once for the loss of our son, and again because I was watching someone I loved continue to suffer from that same loss.

I Went Looking for Something That Might Help

At first, I did the obvious thing. I went looking for a grief journal that I could give Kike. I found plenty of them. What I did not find was what I thought she needed.

Too much of what I encountered relied on the familiar comforting expressions people reach for when faced with somebody else's grief: "It's God's will." "It is well." And other platitudes which are usually spoken kindly, but too often reveal that the person saying them has never had to wrestle seriously with the kind of loss they are trying to explain.

"It is well" particularly troubles me. Sometimes, it plainly is not well. Your child is dead. Your husband or wife is gone. Someone you loved has been removed from your life, and no collection of soothing words alters that fact. I did not want to give Kike something that asked her to pretend otherwise.

It Was Supposed to Be a Homily

What eventually became the Recovery Journal began far more modestly. Around September 2023, I intended to write Kike a Scripture-based homily for the next anniversary of Yemi's death. That was all.

As I worked on it, however, the idea began to change. A homily could be read once and put away, but Kike had carried this grief privately for years. If she could not easily reach out to other people with it, perhaps she could reach out privately to God through something more tactile and durable than prayer alone.

That thought gradually became another: why not create the journal I had been unable to find? What I never expected was to spend almost two calendar years writing it.

Why Scripture Became Its Foundation

Kike is a committed Christian, and I had seen that her faith gave her genuine comfort. But I also found myself wondering about something difficult.

If we truly submit ourselves to God's will, should that submission eventually bring some discernible relief? And if it does not, are we sometimes leaning upon Christian platitudes rather than confronting what Scripture actually says about grief, suffering, loss, anger, endurance, hope, and our relationship with God when terrible things happen?

I did not want to reduce Scripture to reassuring sentences printed above blank pages. I wanted to take it seriously enough to let it ask difficult questions and to let the grieving person answer honestly, including the questions nearly everyone who suffers catastrophic loss eventually encounters in one form or another: why, why me, why the person I loved. I do not believe those questions become unchristian merely because they are painful.

Why Writing Became Part of the Answer

Kike had kept so much of her grief inside herself, and that mattered to the way I began thinking about the journal.

Prayer is private, but spoken prayer can also be fleeting. You speak words, thoughts move on, emotions change, and something painfully difficult to express can disappear almost as soon as it has been articulated. Writing is different. It leaves something behind.

You can return to what you wrote. You can see what kept recurring. You can discover that something you thought was one enormous, shapeless pain actually contains anger, guilt, fear, loneliness, unanswered questions, memories, gratitude, hope, and sometimes even relief.

For someone who finds it difficult to unburden herself to other people, I thought a journal might provide a private place to do that work before God.

It Kept Growing

Once I had decided to create a journal, it became obvious to me quite quickly that I was not writing something that could sensibly be completed in a few weeks. I wanted a full year's structure, but I did not want a calendar.

Kike leads a busy life. Some days she would have time and emotional energy to write, and other days she would not. If I attached dates to the journal, every missed day would leave an accusing empty space behind it, and that made no sense to me. Grieving people already carry enough without being made to feel that they are now also failing at grief recovery.

So the journal developed a sequence, but never a schedule. It looks at first glance as though it contains one entry for each day, but I deliberately did not build it to be used that way. I deliberately made it to take as long as it takes.

There are no missed days because there are no calendar dates to miss. A difficult entry can take two days, a week, or longer. Someone can pause and return when ready, and the structure remains waiting for them.

I explain that approach more fully on the Start Here page, but the principle originated here: I was not prepared to build something for my grieving wife that could punish her for being too busy, too tired, or simply too sad to write that day.

From a Gift for Kike to Something for Other People

By the time the work had grown into two volumes and nearly 800 pages, it had become obvious that I was creating something far larger than the personal gift I had originally imagined. It is still that gift, though. I dedicated both volumes to Kike, and that will never change.

But I had also come to believe that the reason the project had grown so large was that it was filling a gap I had encountered at the beginning. I had gone looking for serious Christian grief material that did not hide behind soft words, did not hurry the grieving person, and did not treat difficult questions as failures of faith. I could not find what I wanted.

Having spent two years creating it, it made little sense to me to keep it entirely within our family if other grieving Christians might also find it useful.

What Kike Said

When Kike later described why I had written the journal, she put it more simply than I probably could:

"He told me he was suffering twice: once for the loss of our son, and once again for the sadness he saw in my eyes."

She has also told me, more than once, that the journal is genuinely helping her, and that she prays it will help others too.

That is probably as close as I can come to explaining the reason the Recovery Journal for Christian Women and Men exists.

What I Hope Comes from It

I cannot promise anyone that a journal will remove grief. I did not write one because I believed sorrow could be neatly solved, and I did not create this website on that assumption either.

What I hope is that the Recovery Journal gives some grieving Christians a private, structured place in which they can stop pretending, confront what has happened honestly, bring difficult thoughts before God, and gradually discover what Scripture has to say when comforting slogans are no longer enough. And if you never use the journal itself, I still hope this website gives you something worthwhile.

I hope you find here an understanding of grief that does not hurry you, Christian writing that does not insult your pain with easy answers, practical help when you do not know what to do with what you are feeling, and enough room to approach God honestly rather than feeling obliged to tell Him that everything is all right when it plainly is not.

Above all, I pray that the Father will make you whole again, and that His comfort will be a sufficient balm for your soul.

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.