We talk a lot after loss about giving ourselves permission to grieve. And that’s important! But we don’t talk as much about giving ourselves permission to laugh. To sing. To feel joy, even here. So consider this permission. I’m sharing three practices I’m adopting to welcome joy into my life.
We’ve gotten accustomed to “no contact” delivery - drop it off on the porch and avoid contact, connection, and contamination. But, while that might be a good option for our dinner, groceries, and mail, it’s a poor system for our relationship with God.
It feels powerfully defiant to look suffering in the face, to stare it down, and say, “You can’t have my voice. You can’t have my praise, my affection, my song. No matter how shaky my voice gets, it won’t ever change its tune." Worship isn't always the easy choice when we're facing suffering, grief, and pain but it is a powerful weapon in this battle we're fighting - and we're never fighting alone!
When we've tried everything - kicking, screaming, resisting, begging, pleading - and the pain still doesn't go away, we're tempted to believe that God is inactive, distant, and aloof. But what if God is more present than ever, waiting out our pain with us, and delivering us through the very trial we're in.
Holy Week gives us a birdseye view of all that God is doing in our seasons of loss and longing. When our circumstance feels final, our wait interminable, God is at work and moving in ways we could never imagine or plan. This is the week that secures our hope, strengthens our stance, and enables us to declare, “Even If.”
What does it mean to live as people who trust God, even if he doesn't answer our prayers the way we ask or imagine? Kelly shares about the resolution she and her husband made as they walked through the death of their first child, and invites us to set our expectation on what God can do, and our hearts on who God is...even if he doesn't.
We asked God for a miracle. From the moment we heard the words, “there is no heartbeat,” we started praying. We asked, we pleaded, we begged, we declared, we hoped, we sang, we cried, we worshiped, we believed, we trusted. I texted a group of friends and simply said, “We need a Lazarus kind of miracle.”
When I think back on the hours leading up to Imogen’s birth and the few days afterward, I have no idea how we made it through. It is only the Lord’s grace that allowed us to keep breathing and moving forward through those horrible days. But we survived. And now that we’re a few months out, I have such a deeper understanding of grief and how to support those in the middle of the fog.
Peter and I delivered our first baby girl, Imogen Dorothy, on June 14, 2019. We had found out the day before (at 40 weeks 6 days) that she no longer had a heartbeat, and delivered her stillborn one week past her due date. We are devastated. There are no words to describe the depth of our pain and grief. And, yet, we know this is not the end of the story.
I'm not going to accidentally wash my face or get good abs or have a clean house or pay my bills or get that job or do my homework or join a church or make more friends or write a book or drink more water or actually accomplish my goals. I'm not going to accidentally get the things I want most in life.
