Review of "Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss" by Dr. Kimberly Harms

Score: 95(+)/100 (9.5(+) out of 10)

Some books just hit harder.
Some books just reach into your chest and pull out your heart.

Have you recently experienced a devastating loss? Have you lost a spouse, a partner, a child, or someone whose absence has completely changed the shape of your life? Have you ever looked at an empty chair, an untouched closet, or the other side of the bed and wondered, What am I supposed to do now? How am I supposed to keep going? Will I ever feel like myself again?

Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss is a deeply moving, compassionate Christian grief devotional by Dr. Kimberly Harms!

At its core, Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss is a 52-week devotional designed primarily for widows, though many of its lessons about grief, faith, identity, purpose, and healing will resonate with anyone who has lost someone they deeply loved.

But calling it merely a devotional does not quite capture what Harms has created. This is part devotional, part grief workbook, part memoir, part spiritual companion, and even part support-group guide. Each week blends Scripture with Harms's own experiences of loss, reflection questions, a short prayer, and a practical "Flourish Forward Challenge" designed to help readers take one small step through grief instead of simply reading about it. Harms even includes a suggested format for small widow groups, making the book something readers can work through alone or alongside others who understand what this kind of loss feels like.

The entire book is organized around the seasons of grief. Winter is survival. Spring is renewal. Summer is growth. Autumn is reflection, wisdom, and legacy.

Rather than treating grief as something that progresses neatly from Point A to Point B, Harms uses the changing seasons to show how loss can transform over time. The coldest part of grief may eventually give way to hope, purpose, peace, and even joy, but that does not mean the person who died has been forgotten or that sorrow has somehow disappeared.

That idea becomes one of the most beautiful themes in the entire book:

“Joy and sorrow are not enemies. They are companions who inhabit the same soul without canceling one another.”

And that may be the best way to understand what Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss is really trying to do.

It is not teaching readers how to stop grieving.

It is teaching them how to live while grieving, heal while remembering, and eventually discover that love, sorrow, faith, purpose, and joy can all continue to exist together.

Harms is not writing about any of this from a comfortable distance. She has lived it. In fact, she has experienced enough loss and upheaval for several lifetimes. Her mother struggled with severe mental illness and ultimately died by suicide. Years later, Harms endured the nightmare no parent ever wants to experience when her son, Eric, also died by suicide. Her husband, Jim, survived that unimaginable loss alongside her, but years later Harms lost him too. In Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss, she openly wrestles with the almost impossible question of how someone finds meaning after the suicide deaths of both a mother and a son, followed by the death of the husband with whom she had expected to spend her retirement years.

And death was not the only loss that forced Harms to reinvent herself. Harms spent approximately 30 years practicing clinical dentistry, building not only a career but a significant professional identity. She served as the first woman President of the Minnesota Dental Association and spent 21 years as a National Spokesperson for the American Dental Association. Then nerve damage in what she calls her "drilling fingers" took away her ability to continue practicing dentistry.

That loss dramatically altered the retirement Harms and Jim had envisioned. They had poured their resources into a home on Lake Wabana in Minnesota and planned to ease gradually into retirement while Harms continued practicing dentistry in the area. When the nerve damage ended that plan, Harms and Jim adjusted and created another version of the dream with less money and more time together. Then Jim's health declined. Then he died. Eventually, Harms found herself selling the cabin that had once represented the future they expected to share.

That history gives this book tremendous credibility because Harms knows firsthand that grief does not take only a person. Sometimes it takes the life you thought you were going to have with them. It can take careers, routines, identities, financial plans, relationships, expectations, and entire imagined futures.

Yet Harms's biography is also a remarkable example of the philosophy she teaches throughout this book. When dentistry was taken from her, she found another direction. When grief devastated her family, she studied grief. When tragedy gave her painful knowledge she never asked for, she began using that knowledge to help other people. Harms eventually became a grief counselor, death doula, civil mediator, life coach, author, and international speaker focusing on grief, conflict, and legacy. Her son Eric's memory has also lived forward through the Eric Harms Memorial Libraries in Rwanda, transforming one of the greatest tragedies of her life into an opportunity to educate and serve others.

And perhaps that is why the phrase "flourish forward" feels so genuine coming from Harms. She is not arguing that terrible things happen for a reason. She is showing that even after terrible things happen, there can still be a reason to keep going.

What a message! And what an incredible human being who is able to deliver that message!

This is actually not Dr. Harms's first rodeo with the Outstanding Creator Awards. Her previous book, Are You Ready?, was a 1st-Place Super Champion in both our 2024 Summer Contest & 2024 Clash of Champions contest! In addition, Are You Ready? was ranked #14 in our Top 25 Non-Fiction Books of 2024 list! Those are some monumental accomplishments!

And it creates some pretty big shoes to fill--some hefty expectations.

How does Harms's latest entry fair? Spectacularly!

This book is touching, heartfelt, inspirational, relatable, uplifting, and remarkably well-written. We can't emphasize this enough: the writing is phenomenal. The way that Harms is able to craft beautiful, eloquent, impactful, and gripping passages is almost incomparable. She is a remarkably gifted writer!

It's like these words and passages are sewn together in a beautiful ornate quilt or tapestry.

Here are a few passages, just about the topic of joy. Now, for context, joy is something that many widows (and those experiencing loss) feel guilty about. They ask themselves, "How can I be happy after something so bad? Isn't it disrespectful to the deceased? Isn't it like forgetting?" Well, Harms confronts this with such beautiful passages:

"Joy is patient, but it is also persistent. It stands quietly at the door of your heart, waiting to slip
in through the cracks when grief grows tired."

“Joy does not replace. It restores.”

“If grief is love in its wounded form, joy is love in its healed form.”

“Joy is not betrayal. Joy is survival.”

And that's just the topic of joy.

Harms repeatedly takes ideas that could easily become generic inspirational advice and turns them into something vivid, memorable, and emotionally tangible. Sometimes she does it with elaborate imagery. Other times, she absolutely nails an enormously complicated emotion in just a handful of words.

She does something similar with acceptance. Acceptance can sound like defeat, like throwing your hands up and admitting that grief won. Harms turns that idea completely around:

“Acceptance is not surrender, it’s serenity.”

Again, so few words, yet so much meaning. Acceptance is not agreeing that what happened was fair. It is not forgetting. It is not deciding that you no longer care. It is releasing the exhausting battle against a reality that cannot be changed so that you can begin learning how to live within the life that remains.

Harms does not merely tell grieving readers that they are allowed to imagine a future again either. She writes, “Dreaming again is not moving on. It is moving forward.” She follows that with another wonderful line: “Grief rearranges your dreams, yes. But it does not eliminate them.”

That distinction is enormous. Harms understands that telling somebody who has lost the person they planned their future with to simply “move on” can feel almost insulting. Instead, she reframes healing as movement that carries the deceased forward with you rather than leaving them behind. The old dream may be gone. That does not mean dreaming itself has to die.

Her writing about hope is equally beautiful. Harms explains that grief and hope do not have to fight for ownership of the same heart: “Hope does not compete with grief; it sits beside it, offering companionship on the journey forward.” Elsewhere, she reminds readers that they can simultaneously long for what was lost and reach for what could be, cherish old memories while creating new meaning, and carry sorrow while still imagining a future.

We especially love the way Harms uses imagery throughout the book. Grief becomes winter. Healing becomes spring. Hope becomes a seed. The Holy Spirit becomes a gardener. Memories become roots. Pain becomes soil. Renewal becomes light slowly entering a darkened room. These metaphors are not simply decorative; they make complicated emotional experiences easier to understand and, perhaps more importantly, easier to feel.

And sometimes that writing becomes almost painfully raw. Not every powerful passage is a polished metaphor about flowers, gardens, or sunlight. Harms also brings readers directly into moments when grief simply overwhelms her. One particularly heartbreaking memory finds her crying out for Eric, desperately asking, “Where is Eric? Where is my son?” That desperation matters because it reminds us that all of the wisdom in this book came after moments when there was no wisdom, serenity, or beautiful lesson to be found. There was simply a mother wanting her son back.

Consider, too, the way Harms describes healing after prolonged darkness: “Light doesn't rush you. Dawn comes at its own pace; and so does healing.” A few paragraphs later, she describes life gradually regaining color after grief, not suddenly or completely, but “in brave little patches.” She compares the experience to somebody slowly turning the saturation back up on a life that had gone gray.

That's gorgeous, and it is also incredibly accessible. You do not need a psychology degree, a theology degree, or years of grief counseling to understand exactly what she means. Anyone who has spent months or years feeling as though the color has disappeared from life can recognize the significance of finally noticing one little patch of it again.

Some of Harms's best writing comes when she combines several of the book's recurring metaphors. While discussing personal transformation after loss, she writes that God is calling readers to “carry your memories as roots instead of weights.” Later, those almost imperceptible moments of improvement, noticing sunlight, laughing without immediately feeling guilty, realizing that a painful day did not consume the entire day, become “stitches of grace” in a larger tapestry.

What fantastic imagery!

A memory can be a weight. It can drag you backward, hold you down, and make every step harder. But a root? A root also connects you to the past, except instead of preventing growth, it supports it. It feeds what continues growing above the ground.

That concept eventually develops into another beautiful declaration about purpose and legacy: “the love you lost becomes part of the legacy you leave.” We especially love that line considering how important the subject of legacy was in Harms's previous book, Are You Ready? Love does not simply disappear when someone dies. Throughout Embracing the Spirit in the Winter of Loss, Harms treats it as something stubbornly alive, something that refuses to stay buried with the person who died. As she writes elsewhere, “Love after loss is not smaller. It is deeper. It is slower. It is wiser.”

That is the kind of writing Harms produces again and again.

Even when discussing the uncertainty of beginning again, she finds fresh ways to describe it. Hope is not presented as some giant triumphant breakthrough. Sometimes it is simply a tiny spark. Sometimes it is a seed buried where nobody can see it. Sometimes it is the first faint strip of morning light entering a room that has been dark for a very long time. Harms understands that healing rarely arrives with fireworks. More often, it sneaks in quietly enough that you may not recognize it until it has already begun.

And perhaps one of the most powerful examples comes when she describes planting hope after loss. Harms essentially turns sorrow into soil. The tears that seem pointless or wasted can become nourishment for whatever eventually grows next. Rather than treating tears as evidence that a grieving person is failing to heal, she describes them as part of the healing itself. The pain becomes soil. The tears water it. Something new, however fragile, can eventually take root.

Harms eventually imagines a grieving person looking back at the garden that has grown from that suffering and realizing that something beautiful emerged not despite the tears, but because of them.

That is the magic of Harms's writing in this book. She takes grief, something abstract, chaotic, invisible, and nearly impossible to explain, and gives it seasons, soil, roots, weather, light, color, gardens, and something that can eventually bloom.

What's interesting about all that is this book has a double-edged sword on its hands: its presentation.

On one hand, the illustrations and backgrounds are bright, vibrant, and beautiful. This really help to facilitate the envigorating, positive, uplifting tone and atmosphere of this book. On the other hand, they can also be a bit distracting or even overwhelming.

The writing by Harms is so good that a part of us kinda just wished it was on a plain white page with a blank white background. It really didn't need all these graphical enhancements, even as pretty as they are. All the pretty doves and flowers draw attention away from the amazing text. This problem is made worse by the choice of font size (the font is a bit small) and the lack of indentations. Gosh, fixing these issues (which are probably tacked on in post-production anyway) would've made this book a 9.6.

All in all, Harms is such an extraordinary human being with an extraordinary message to share with everyone--especially those in the midst of tragedy, sorrow, grief, and despair--those who need it most.

Harms is such a remarkable, incredible example of what to do with the pain and sorrow of loss. She endured all of these profound losses and her career ending to become a phenomenal award-winning and best-selling author who is now able to touch the lives of countless people through her work.

Check it out on Amazon!