October Blog
Reaching out to the widowed
Mary Beth: Hi! I'm Mary Beth. I'm one of the Directors of The Widows Project.
Linda: And I’m Linda Smith, the other Director.
Mary Beth: And we're here to talk to you today about how The Widows Project is reaching out around the world.
First of all, we have our website. And if you haven't been there, please go to thewidowsproject.org.
I know that many of you see our videos here and our purpose has been to bring conversations of hope to the widowed. And we want that to be the case here today too, but we also want to reach out to those of you who have a heart for the widowed, and you wondered, “What can I do?”.
First of all, you can refer people to us from all over the country. And we'll talk to you about little more later. In fact, not only all over the country, but we have ministry to widows all over 20 Latin American countries as well.
So, you can find us on thewidowsproject.org, through our Facebook page—which is simply, The Widows Project. We have videos on YouTube, and we have a monthly vlog which is our video blog. And if you'd like to be on the list for our vlog, you can send me a message on Messenger or you can go to our website and sign up for it there. We just need your e-mail to get you signed up for that. And if you go to our website, I just want you to know we have videos there. Videos of comfort and encourage for just about every stage of loss and recovery for those who have been widowed.
Then we have other resources. We have our books. And I'd like to talk to you about our, what we call our first book, although it's not the first one we published. But it's for what we call Grief 101. This is the book, if you, if you or someone you know has just recently lost a loved one, this is the book for them. It's called Take Courage! Growing Stronger After Losing your Spouse. This book, thank God, has been translated into English, Spanish, and we're, Lord willing, coming up in the future, French, Ukrainian, and Polish. Can you imagine the number of Ukrainian widows who could use this book? We have a missionary, named Sarah Michalsky, who is actually widowed and went through our Zoom group who can—if we can get these books published, and in her hands—she can distribute them to Ukrainian widows.
So, we also have a real heart to see churches buy this book, Take Courage!, in bulk. Just the same way that churches by Bibles in bulk. If, buy a box of these books, we’ll give you a book price, and then you'll have one in your hands to give to someone who just lost a spouse.
So, as you can see, we've got, we've got so much going. And we've got many more projects in the hopper. And we would love to minister to widowed people, men and women, and we'd also like to appeal to you to come on board to help us if you have a heart for those folks.
We have a couple more books Linda is going to tell you about.
Linda: The first book we published was for widows, and it is Don't Lose Heart! A Widows Guide to Growing Stronger. We have that in English, French, and Spanish. And we also have videos that accompany each of the 12 chapters, so if you want to start a group in your church, you've got books, videos, all you have to do is clean up the living room and invite your friends!
Mary Beth: And then, of course, you've got all the resources on the website.
We also have, we also have 12 teaching videos for the Take Courage! book, so in other words, there's a teaching video for each chapter, so it's plug and play.
Linda: Our third book was, is, for men. It was written by two of our widowers. They said, “Men think differently than women. We need our own book!”
Mary Beth: They do? I guess, they do.
Linda: I don't know! You should read the book. We have that in English, and we want to get it in Spanish. We also are working on videos. And the official name of that book is Take Heart! A Widowed Man's Guide to Growing Stronger.
Mary Beth: Something that's very near and dear to me as a therapist is our special project you've heard about, called HeartWork. HeartWork is healing from the actual trauma of losing your spouse, because although grief is very challenging for anyone, sometimes people experience complicated grief, or traumatic grief, and then that impedes them from being able to move forward in their grief process and recovering from their loss. So, HeartWork is a combination of timeline and inner healing prayer. And we are, we've already written the curriculum for it, and we've already had three HeartWork retreats right here on my property. You've seen some of those videos. And the response that we've received from the men and women that have gone through the HeartWork retreat is that it has been life changing. That they've been set free. Now, they still have some grief work to do in order to let go of, of what they can no longer keep, but now they're free to at least move forward.
Linda and I are working on the textbook that accompanies the curriculum called HeartWork: Healing From the Trauma of Losing Your Loved One. Now, we have, we've had people say to us, you know, “Please! We need this book too! We didn't lose a spouse, but we lost a family member, we lost a child, we lost a loved one.” And so, we've made it more general, but we use it very specifically for our widowed population as well. That book is in process, and we will have expenses to publish that book.
And we're also training up leaders, we have a core of leaders and intercessors who have helped us with at HeartWork retreats, and they are rearing to go help more men and women through this HeartWork process.
Also, we expect, in the near future, to do a training for our Hispanic partners that work with widowed men and women. Ruth Ost Martinez is a ministry widow who went through one of our groups, and she decided she didn't want to keep this to herself. She needed to share this help with others, so now she's reaching out, as I said earlier, to 20 different Latin American countries. And she's also reaching to the United States as well with her, what she calls Encounters, which are meetings with, for people to share their grief with each other and receive comfort.
Linda: And that's not all. We have Zoom groups.
Mary Beth: We do!
Linda: And the reason we have Zoom groups is that we started when COVID hit. And the good thing is we can have men and women in different groups, um, from all over The United States. They come on Zoom, and we bring them comfort. I just talked to a lady today from Texas, and she was looking for some comfort.
Our women's Zoom group is 6:00 on Thursday night, half an hour from now…
Mary Beth: ….yeah……
Linda: …and we also have a Zoom group for ministry widows. Those are pastors’ wives, the missionaries, who have an extra layer of grief to work through.
We're soon gonna have a men's group. That is in the in the organization stage, and it'll soon be announced on our website.
Mary Beth: The ministry widows’ group is every Monday from 10:30 to 12:00. These are Pacific standard times, but we purposely made them earlier in the day so people from other time zones can join us.
Linda: We are available to come and speak at your church or your group, all you have to do is go to our website and contact us. There's a contact button, and we'll call you back, e-mail you back, whatever.
We need you in our ministry! You can help us by donating. You can help us by telling other widows and widowers we're here, and we'd be happy to have them join us too.
Mary Beth: God bless you and remember, James 1:27 says that it is pure religion and undefiled to minister to widows and orphans in their distress. That's what we're doing, and we need your help
Do you shop at Fred Meyer? They offer Fred Meyer Community Rewards.
You can choose to have them contribute to The Widows Project in proportion to your spending at Fred Meyer.
Go to the Fred Meyer website and your account, and then search for “Community Rewards”.
Please choose The Widows Project.
Thank you so much.
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