What does the Bible say about…?

Twelve things people actually arrive with. Each page is a handful of passages with one line on what each says — no advice, and no promise the text does not make.

• Anxiety — Worry is treated as a normal human condition to be brought somewhere, not as a failure to be scolded out of.
• Forgiveness — Both directions: being forgiven, and the far harder business of forgiving.
• Grief — Scripture does not hurry grief, and it does not tidy it. One of these passages does not resolve at all.
• Money — More than almost any other subject — and rarely in the direction people expect.
• Doubt — The Bible contains a great deal of doubt, mostly voiced by people who are commended.
• Rest — Rest is commanded, not permitted — and the reason given is usually memory rather than efficiency.
• Anger — Not forbidden. Given a time limit, a direction, and a warning about what it does to the person holding it.
• Loneliness — It begins in the second chapter, before anything has gone wrong.
• Waiting — Long waits, told without shortening them — twenty-five years, four hundred, seventy.
• Shame — The distinction the Bible keeps making is between what you did and what you are.
• Work — Given before anything went wrong, made hard afterwards, and never treated as beneath notice.
• Death — Named an enemy, not a friend or a door — and the hope offered is resurrection rather than escape.