Lord, we cry out to you. Where else would we go with our deep loss? Our hearts are split open and our spirit is crushed.
You have promised to be close to the brokenhearted and to draw near to us if we will draw near to you. So we come with open hands and wounded hearts, looking to you to carry us through our grief and walk us through this season. We come to you, the only One who can heal us and lift our head.
Adriel Booker has a heart for women and babies, and women who know the loss of babies. While juggling her three littles, she writes and ministers to women in loss. October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. What a joy to have Adriel share today about that loss and love.
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“I’ll meet her before you do, you know.”
My grandma was in her late eighties and during one of my visits from overseas I had begun to notice she was slowing down in a way I had not seen before. More than ever she spoke clearly of her desire for heaven and her longing to see my grandpa again one day soon. It was close to a year after my first miscarriage; I had no way of knowing it wouldn’t be my last.
I was tender in my loss, and although my grief had thinned, I was beginning to understand that even though it didn’t feel as heavy as it once did, life would never go back to how it was before.
Grief is like that—it changes a person. It can undo us, but it can also remake us. I hadn’t learned that yet. But I would. Eventually.
Get over your grief.
Yesterday, running errands and listening to my beloved Christian radio, I found myself shaking my head and talking back.
This speaker went on:
At some point, you have to put a period at the end of mourning. I know folks whose loved one died five years ago and they act like it was yesterday. Get over it. Ask for God’s help, mourn properly and for a proper time. {audience clapping}*
And my heart breaks for those grieving devastating loss five years later or fifteen years later. I want to look into their eyes and whisper over the hand clapping: God sees your pain. God knows your loss. No one else may understand, but God walks with you in it and has so much for you alongside it.
Those who expect you to get over grief have never suffered life-altering loss.
Their advice comes so well-meaning but is so off.
The thing about trials is, they come unannounced.
One day, you’re eating carry-out pizza and saying goodnight like you have on a thousand other nights and the next, waking up to the final labored breaths of your husband.
Or three days into the new year, you open your laptop with great enthusiasm to start that new project pressing on your heart, when your college boy walks in from work complaining of a low backache that gets so bad so quickly he can’t walk into the ER. The MRI you thought might show a herniated disc? Instead reveals a lemon-sized tumor on his spine that has hemorrhaged.
None of us plan for these kinds of trials.
No one calendars the middle of the night phone call or the unexpected diagnosis or the unforeseen announcement at work.
The hardest trials usually careen into the most ordinary of days.
I’ve been at youth camp most of the week teaching middle school girls and just before leaving, I learned of a family’s loss of their husband and father. Then, on day 2 of camp, my feed filled with news of another tragic death, leaving a husband and girls without their mom.
These events are so mixed for me. There is ache for their deep loss. There is anger at the enemy who wants to steal, kill and destroy. But there is also a knowing — that in their anguish, God will carry them.
Any kind of grief is excruciating work. It’s a daily going to God to exchange our despair for his sure hope. When your heart’s broken or life hits hard, here are 40 promises of God when you need hope.
