🌊 WAVE UPON WAVE
The Wave That Didn’t Break You — On Attritional Grief
What if nothing happened?
No catastrophe. No single devastating phone call. No one event you can point to and say, “That’s what broke me.”
Just one difficult conversation… then another.
💸 An unexpected bill.
📱 A troubling text.
😴 One bad night of sleep… followed by another.
🩺 Another frustrating trip through the healthcare system.
💬 Another comment that you can’t seem to shake.
And somehow, you’re exhausted. Worn down. On the floor.
In this follow-up to the Top Ten Stressors series, Kenny Price explores a word that gives language to something many people experience but struggle to explain: attrition — being gradually worn down by repeated, ordinary pressures when there is never enough recovery time between them.
🌊 Wave after wave.
Not one enormous wave.
Not one catastrophic event.
Just the cumulative effect of the surf.
Drawing from Charles Spurgeon’s Lectures to My Students and his powerful picture of being a “broken shell” hurled from wave to wave, Kenny considers what happens when ordinary life keeps coming before your soul has had time to recover.
📖 Scripture takes this seriously. The Bible has language for the person who feels overwhelmed by the accumulation of life:
💧 Psalm 42:7 — “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your billows have swept over me.”
🌅 Lamentations 3:22–23 — God’s faithful love does not end. His mercies are “new every morning.”
💪 2 Corinthians 4:16 — “Our inner person is being renewed day by day.”
🦅 Isaiah 40:29–31 — The Lord gives strength to the weary and renews those who wait for Him.
Kenny also explores the biblical ideas behind ḥeseḏ — God’s covenant faithfulness — and qavah — waiting with an active, tensile hope.
And then there’s Job.
Sometimes the deepest wound isn’t the first blow. It’s what happens when the blows keep coming and the recovery interval disappears.
🌊 The world’s surf may not pause.
❤️ But God’s mercy is new every morning.
This is Wave Upon Wave — a series about the pressures that wear us down, and the God who meets us in the middle of them.
🎧 Listen now to Season 4, Episode 77: “The Wave That Didn’t Break You.”
📚 Primary Source: Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students — “The Minister’s Fainting Fits”
📖 Scripture References — CSB:
• Isaiah 57:20
• Psalm 42:7
• Lamentations 3:22–23
• 2 Corinthians 4:16
• Isaiah 40:29–31
• Job 1–3
🌊 Wave Upon Wave: A follow-up to our Top Ten Stressors series — because sometimes the thing wearing you down isn’t one wave. It’s the fact that the next one arrives before you’ve recovered from the last.
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All Scripture quotations are taken from the Christian Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2016 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Christian Standard Bible® and CSB® is a federally registered trademark of Holman Bible Publishers.
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