There’s beauty and joy to walk in the sunlight of God’s blessings, but when God took my children home with him, and walked alongside me in the shadow of death for 3 long years, it both broke me and healed me.
There’s something wonderful about motherhood. For me it started when I first realized there was someone else inside of my body- a whole new life, a whole new soul, and knowing Gods hand was entirely in it. Then giving birth to my Micah in 2015, then Eleanor 15 months later- and the sleepy cuddly wonder months with them as newborns was truly what forever changed me. Motherhood was a whole new world that opened up right before me that I could have never imagined or dreamt up until I was in it. I wondered what else God could possibly have in store of life, what I could find in this life.
I think with miscarriage and child loss is the same- it is a whole other world- a door that opens up that you must walk through if that is what God has planned. It’s something you cannot prepare yourself for or understand- it is a place I never knew existed or could imagine what it would be like until I walked through that door and was never the same.
I feel like I have been walking with God through the valley of the shadow of death for three straight years now. He has made His presence known to me, especially leading up to the moment I would miscarry my beautiful children into my own hands (and watch one of them pass on moments later), then to bury them in the ground along with my hopes and dreams.
“God is close to the broken-hearted……”
Right before I lost Jordan at 13 weeks, I was driving to a doctors appointment, and I heard a whisper that said inside of me “God is close to the broken-hearted”.
It actually confused me at the time because I was not broken-hearted… I thought about it going into the appointment for the last time for them to tell me, once again, that my baby’s heart hasn’t restarted, and he was starting to shrink, showing us that he has most likely already died a week prior. It took me time to process. I didn’t believe it at first. I sat there stunned, processing on the whole drive home, processing sitting in a chair on my porch, processing sitting on a park bench watching my living children play.
I remember the moment it hit me at the park- “God is close to the broken-hearted……” I finally had the hard realization that God has His own plans despite my months of pleas & prayers for restoration and for the life of my Jordan- I felt Jesus especially close to me then- with the loss of three of our children in 2017, 2018, & in 2019.
I work with newborn babies at the hospital- and tonight while I was doing my assessments, I looked at each baby with a sense of wonder and tenderness. I haven’t felt this sort of love when I have looked at or cared for newborns for three years now. Shoshana Joy, Jordan Ray, Elisha Noa. I can’t type this without crying even still. I don’t shy away from crying when I need to. I feel like there is so much to be said about each loss- each baby I felt and dealt with grief so differently. I felt everything so immensely- and then at the same time a part of me became absent from the world and time became a byword until that part of me was ready to crawl out from this cocoon of trauma back up into my new reality and into the work of grief.
With Elisha, I was angry and didn’t grieve well- but I went to work with gaining answers. “Where were my babies?” “Are they saved?” were my most desperate questions out of them all. (I also had a lot of angry selfish questions for God that I fired away, believe me… and yet still, like always, Jesus drew near to me and was gentle and kind with me.) He quickly answered many of my questions, others more slowly- and is still answering different aspects of these questions, slowly but surely restoring my spirit.
“My plan is not to destroy you, but to give you a future and hope” (-Jeremiah 29:11)
I wasn’t sure if I would ever gain back the part of me that looked into each baby with such immense love like I used to before I lost my own babies. I’ve found that there is always hope (and I can say now: even so within the valley of the shadow of death). I know that one day I will join my children in heaven. Today is not that day. But God’s words truly do remain forever. “My plan is not to destroy you, but to give you a future and hope” (-Jeremiah 29:11) These words are not only for me but for my babies as well.
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