How can I keep going after a season of repeated tragedies?

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from a single tragedy but from tragedy after tragedy, with barely time to catch your breath between them. A death, then a diagnosis, then a job loss, then another death. By the third or fourth blow, you may not even have the capacity to cry anymore, just a flat, worn-out numbness, and a dread of what's coming next. If that's where you are, the Bible doesn't ask you to feel strong. It meets you in exactly this kind of compounding grief.

You might find yourself flinching every time the phone rings, half expecting more bad news before you've even answered. That hypervigilance is a normal response to repeated loss, not a sign of failing faith. Naming it honestly, rather than judging yourself for feeling that way, is itself a step toward healing.

Job's story shows God is not unfamiliar with this pattern. In a single chapter, messenger after messenger arrives, while one is still speaking, another comes with more devastating news (Job 1:13-19). Oxen and donkeys, servants, sheep, camels, and finally his children, all lost in what reads like a single unbearable day. Scripture doesn't minimize this as a light trial; it depicts compounding tragedy in its full weight, giving you permission to call your own repeated losses exactly as devastating as they feel.

Lamentations was written from the ruins of a destroyed Jerusalem, and in the middle of it comes one of the Bible's most quoted lines of hope: “Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23). Notice where this is said - not from safety, but from the wreckage, in the same book that opens with “How deserted lies the city” (Lamentations 1:1). Faith and devastation are not opposites here; they sit side by side.

What that verse offers isn't a promise that the whole future will be fine, but that God's mercy is renewed daily, which means you only need enough mercy to get through today, not the whole season at once.

“Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength... they will walk and not be faint” (Isaiah 40:31). This strength is described as renewed, not manufactured by gritting your teeth. Paul describes something similar: “outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). You are not meant to have unlimited internal reserves for repeated tragedy. The renewal comes from God meeting you again each day, not from you finding more willpower than you had yesterday.

This is important because repeated tragedy tends to convince us that we should be getting more used to hardship by now, tougher, less affected each time. Scripture doesn't describe endurance that way. It describes a strength that has to be renewed again and again, precisely because we are not built to generate an endless supply of our own.

Jesus said, “do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34). In a season of repeated tragedy, plan for the day in front of you, not the whole uncertain future. Let others carry burdens with you (Galatians 6:2), accept meals, accept help, accept prayer you don't have energy to pray yourself. Tend to your body, since exhaustion and grief live in it as much as in your mind.

It also helps to lower the bar for what counts as faithfulness in a season like this. Getting out of bed, eating something, showing up to one gathering with other believers, these are not small things when you are carrying repeated loss. Faithfulness in a long, hard season often looks smaller and slower than faithfulness in an easier one, and that is not a failure, it is wisdom.

“Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you” (Isaiah 46:4). There may be days in this season when you cannot walk forward under your own strength, and that is precisely when this promise applies. What you are enduring now is real and heavy, but it is not forever; “our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). Keep going one day at a time, carried more than you know.