Donna has noticed that grieving people often cannot find the words. “A lot of times,” she said, “the widows don’t have words.” So when she sits with one of them, she brings a psalm and lets it do the speaking.

She uses a slow, traditional method — reading the same psalm more than once, the way one might in the traditional meditation method known as Lectio Divina. The first time through, she and the widow simply let the words pass over them. The second time, they read for the senses: what do I feel, what do I see, what do I hear? The third time: what does this mean to me? Somewhere in that repetition a lament like How long, O Lord, will you forget me? stops being an ancient line on a page and becomes the thing the grieving person has been unable to say — you have forgotten me.

She is careful about which psalm she brings. She would not arrive at a fresh loss with something triumphant, trumpets and rejoicing; that, she said, would feel like being rude to someone in pain. She chooses the one that fits, the way you would with anything that carries meaning — poetry, songs — that washes over a person first and only later, with time, begins to speak.

She is also honest about the grief that faith does not tidy away. A believer may trust that a lost husband is with God, she said, and still be furious at being left behind, alone. The Psalms make room for both at once, and that, in her experience, is exactly why they hold.

Donna’s own habit with the Psalms goes back decades — years of reading five psalms and a proverb a day, working through the whole book each month. Not unlike brushing your teeth, she said: you do it because it is right and good, and only over time do you come to understand the deep reasons. Now she brings that long familiarity to other people’s worst seasons, one psalm at a time.

This story comes from a Scriptura conversation with friends of the ministry, August 2026.