How to Hold Grief and Gratitude at the Same Time

Blog by the Unhurried Living Team

Holding grief and gratitude at the same time is not something most of us are taught. When Tim Timmons, musician and speaker, received a stage four cancer diagnosis at age 25 and was told he had five years to live, he and his wife Hillary Timmons did not find a clean resolution — they found a practice, one that has taken twenty-five years to learn. In this conversation with Gem Fadling, co-founder of Unhurried Living, Tim and Hillary open the pages of their co-authored book Waking Up Again and share what chronic illness, unanswered prayer, and a life of unhurried dependence on God have slowly taught them about trusting him — not from a safe distance, but from within the fire.

What Do You Do When Faith Doesn't Produce the Healing You Prayed For?

When Tim's diagnosis came, he and Hillary did what most Christians instinctively do: they prayed in faith, gathered people to believe with them, and waited for God to move. Then year one passed. Surgery came. The healing did not.

Hillary describes the weight of those years with a frankness that is easy to recognize. She had grown up in a church culture that taught a clear equation: pray with enough faith, and God heals. When that framework met twenty-five years of unresolved reality, she had to sit with questions she had never been handed tools to hold. Is God still good? Is he actually with me? Why would he allow this to continue? These were not abstract theological debates — they pressed directly against her actual relationship with God, shaping how safe and trustworthy he felt in her daily life.

What Tim and Hillary arrived at together was not a resolution but a reorientation. The cancer did not go away. But in the darkness, in the sorrow, in the uncertainty, they found themselves knowing Jesus in a way they could not have otherwise. Several years in, they found themselves saying something they had never expected to say: they would not give the diagnosis back. Not because cancer is a gift in any tidy sense (Tim is clear: cancer is, in his words, "the dumbest"), but because of who God had formed them to be through it — and who he was still forming them to be.

The honest practice for today: bring the real question — the anger, the silence, the confusion — into your relationship with God rather than away from it. Intimacy does not require resolution. It only requires honesty.

If you want to keep sitting with these themes, the Unhurried Living blog holds many more conversations that meet you in the middle of the hard and the unresolved. Explore it here.

What Changes When You Stop Working for God and Start Living With Him?

There is a sentence Tim Timmons said about a pivotal season in his life — one that Gem recognized immediately: I will never work for God again. He said it not as a withdrawal from faith but as a conversion deeper into it. He had spent years laboring on God's behalf, exhausted by the weight of ministry and the pressure of producing results he believed were his responsibility to produce. When he finally set that down, something shifted that has not shifted back.

From that point, Tim made a commitment he has held to ever since: he would not open a single door on his own. If Jesus wanted something open, Jesus would open it. The years that followed brought a film, a book co-written with Hillary, a song on national radio, an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! — none of which Tim sought out or engineered. He describes it with undisguised delight: how much more fun is it to do this with him?

This is also the soil from which his concept of the 10,000 minutes grew. There are 10,080 minutes in every week. For years, Tim watched every resource and every hour of preparation in church life pour into a single 80-minute gathering. He began to wonder what would happen if the people of Jesus oriented their entire lives — all 10,000 remaining minutes — toward staying present with him in the ordinary, the inconvenient, the in-between. Hillary describes it as a quality of awareness: noticing the person in front of you, being present to a conversation with your children that you would otherwise have rushed past, treating the checkout clerk at the grocery store as a full human being rather than a fixture.

The honest practice for today: choose one moment this week where you would normally be distracted or just moving through — and try, simply, to notice that Jesus is present in it with you.

When you are ready to go deeper into what it looks like to walk with God in the unhurried pace of everyday life, the Unhurried Living weekly email offers exactly that kind of companionship. Sign up here.

How Do You Hold Grief and Gratitude Without Letting One Swallow the Other?

Tim has a visual that has stayed with him for years. Both arms out, open hands, one carrying grief and one carrying gratitude — held simultaneously, neither one winning, neither one dismissed. It appeared in the documentary film about his life, and he says it still moves him every time he sees it.

The alternative, he explains, is what he calls wallpapering over the grief hole. It looks like gratitude from the outside. It sounds like faith. But it is avoidance — a way of skipping past real loss before it has been allowed to have its face. He points to Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus: Jesus did not tell the mourners to cheer up or remind them that resurrection was coming. He wept with them. He held the sorrow and the power in the same moment. That, Tim and Hillary suggest, is where Jesus actually calls us to live — not past the grief, but within it, with open hands.

Hillary adds a dimension Tim doesn't always name for himself. She tends naturally toward grief; Tim tends toward gratitude. Over twenty-five years, they have learned to carry the balance together — she draws him toward what he hasn't yet grieved, and he reminds her of where gratitude is genuinely warranted. Neither of them has arrived. Tim is careful to use the -ing form of that verb rather than the -ed: he is still learning to hold both, still in the process, still practicing. That honesty is not a weakness in the conversation. It is the invitation.

The honest practice for today: name one thing you have been grateful for while quietly papering over something underneath it. Give the underneath thing its face. Hold it in one open hand. Then ask, slowly, what belongs in the other.

Living With God vs. Working For God: What's Actually Different?

For the Leader Who Recognizes the Weight Tim and Hillary Are Describing

The audience of Unhurried Living tends to be leaders — pastors, ministry directors, nonprofit executives, church staff — who are still showing up, still producing, still caring deeply, while quietly wondering if there is a way to sustain this that doesn't cost everything. This conversation was not made for people who have it together. It was made for people in the middle of the question: people who are praying and not seeing answers, serving and feeling the slow drain, holding grief with one hand and trying to be grateful with the other without letting either one go. Tim and Hillary Timmons are not offering a method or a framework. They are offering a testimony: that God is with you in the 10,000 ordinary minutes, in the unanswered prayers, and in the grief you haven't yet named — and that an unhurried life is not a life without suffering. It is a life that moves through suffering with Jesus rather than ahead of him.

Both Hands Open

Twenty-five years is a long time to hold a question without a resolution. Tim Timmons wakes up each morning and writes an X on his wrist — another day, not promised, received. Hillary has walked the long road of theological wrestling and depression and unanswered prayer, and arrived not at certainty but at intimacy. Together, they point toward something Unhurried Living has always believed: that grief and gratitude are not opposites to be resolved but realities to be held, with both hands open, in the presence of a God who weeps with us and wakes us up again.

If you want to receive regular, unhurried reflection from Gem Fadling and Alan Fadling that meets you in the middle of your actual week, sign up here for the Unhurried Living weekly email. And if you want a quieter, more sustained beginning, the 40-day Unhurried Daily Email is a gentle way to start — get started here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How do you hold grief and gratitude at the same time without one canceling the other out? A: Tim Timmons describes it as holding both arms out, with grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, rather than using gratitude to paper over grief that hasn't yet been processed. The goal is honest coexistence rather than resolution. Jesus himself modeled this at the tomb of Lazarus, weeping with those who mourned even while resurrection was imminent.

Q: What does it mean to live with God instead of working for him? A: Working for God treats faith as a job — a set of tasks to accomplish on his behalf, which tends toward exhaustion and disillusionment over time. Living with God means moving through everyday life in awareness of his presence, trusting him to open what is meant to open, and staying present to him across the full 10,000 ordinary minutes of the week.

Q: How do you trust God when your prayers for healing aren't answered? A: Tim and Hillary Timmons have held this question for twenty-five years without a tidy resolution. Their honest answer is that trust did not come through the healing arriving — it came through continued relationship, through bringing the real questions and the real anger into the presence of God rather than away from it. They found that the depth of knowing Jesus they gained through suffering was not available any other way.

Q: What is the 10,000 minutes concept, and how does it relate to unhurried living? A: There are 10,080 minutes in a week. Tim Timmons observed that most church energy and resources pour into a single 80-minute gathering, leaving the remaining 10,000 minutes largely unaddressed. He committed his life to joining Jesus in those 10,000 minutes — the ordinary moments of family, work, conversation, and difficulty where real formation actually happens. This is close to the heart of what Unhurried Living means by a life with God rather than a life for God.

Q: Is unhurried living just a passive or easy approach to faith? A: No — and Tim and Hillary are clear about this. Living with Jesus in the unhurried way takes real intentionality, a willingness to grieve, and sustained effort. The goal is not to slow down and disengage from hard things but to move through them the way Jesus did: present, attentive, and rooted in the Father rather than driven by performance or self-generated urgency.