When Grief Comes Out of Nowhere: Understanding Prophetic Tears and Calling
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Editor’s Note: This entry captures real-time processing during my prophetic awakening. It is shared not to elevate emotion, but to testify to how God prepares a vessel for greater calling.
On paper, it made no sense.
I was driving to a prophetic gathering. I should’ve been excited—the kind of excitement you get when you sense your spirit is about to be rearranged.
But instead, I kept being hit with sudden, crushing waves of grief.
Not a gentle sadness.
Not a memory surfacing.
But a physical drop.
A tightening in my gut.
A heaviness that came from nowhere and demanded attention.
I’d be fine one moment, and the next it felt like a trapdoor had opened inside me and everything in my body fell through it.
No trigger.
No dramatic thought.
Just… grief.
Raw.
Visceral.
Unexpected.
I felt it driving there.
I felt it in the supermarket.
I felt it in worship.
It was the same wave, returning again and again, like it was asking to be seen.
At first I thought, Maybe this is about my brother.
But as the day unfolded, I realised something much larger was happening.
This wasn’t just emotional.
This was spiritual.
The Lord began to show me there were actually three griefs running through me.
Each with its own signature.
1. The Personal Grief — My Brother
This one sits low in the body.
An ache in the gut.
A weight in the solar plexus.
Warm, tender, memory-soaked sorrow.
The “I wish we had more time” grief.
The “I wish he had known the truth sooner” grief.
This one is love.
2. The National Grief — His Heart for the Nation
The second came as a heaviness over my chest.
No images.
No memories.
Just the sense that something in the spiritual atmosphere was deeply wrong.
In worship, I recognised it:
It wasn’t my sadness.
It was His.
A burden for a lukewarm church.
A land losing its moral compass.
People wandering without shepherds.
Compromise.
Fear.
Performance.
Apathy.
This was intercession rising.
A glimpse of God’s grief for the nation.
3. The Identity Grief — A Prophetic Commissioning
The third grief was the most disorienting.
It didn’t sit in one place.
It moved through my whole body like a tide.
No person attached.
No story attached.
Just the unmistakable sense that something in me was ending—and something new was beginning.
It was identity grief.
The grief of commissioning.
The grief that comes when the old self dies.
I didn’t have that language then.
I just felt like crying for no reason on the way to sit in a room full of prophets.
Now I see it clearly:
Before the Lord marked me publicly…
He broke me open privately.
Before He confirmed my calling…
He emptied the vessel.
Before He showed me the next level…
He removed what couldn’t go with me.
He surfaced the last strands of soul-tied sorrow for my brother—because that weight cannot travel with me into the next season.
He let me feel His heart for this nation—because prophets must carry more than their own story.
And He let me experience the death of my old identity—because the woman who walked into that gathering was not the woman God was shaping.
The old version of me has been dying for a long time, but on that drive, the Lord officiated the funeral.
It was a spiritual contraction.
A shedding.
A release.
Grief wasn’t a sign something was wrong.
It was a sign something was right.
Because for prophets, grief is often the doorway to commissioning.
Grief cleans the palate.
Grief clears the vessel.
Grief softens the heart so God can fill it.
And when I look at what happened that weekend—how everything the Lord told me privately was confirmed publicly, line for line—it all makes sense.
The burden for the misfits.
The hatred of religious performance.
The vision for community, upper rooms, and fire.
The sense of urgency.
The clarity.
The remnant rising.
All of it.
And the grief was the drumroll.
It was heaven whispering:
“Daughter, we are deepening this mantle.
We are confirming what you already know.
We are moving you from awakening into instruction and commissioning.
And you cannot carry dead weight into this new room.”
So yes, the tears came.
Yes, the emotions were overwhelming.
Yes, I felt ridiculous buying a sandwich while being spiritually dismantled.
But now I understand:
Grief isn’t always a sign something is wrong.
Sometimes grief is the sound a door makes when it finally closes behind you.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
— Matthew 5:4
With fire and grace,
This message carries fire. Pass it on. 👇🏻
Victoria Player is the founder of Daughter of Thunder, a movement awakening spiritually sensitive women to truth, purpose, and divine power in a world that’s lost its compass. After walking through her own season of fire and rebuilding, she now writes and speaks to those who sense there’s more — guiding them from confusion to clarity, from awakening to assignment.
“I don’t bow to Babylon — I walk with the Lion.” — Daughter of Thunder
