One month ago, I was in the hospital. The same hospital where my baby girls were born four years earlier. The same hospital where they each died in my arms, days later. One month ago, I was holding our newborn son. The same baby I pleaded to God to keep safe as I spent day after day, week after week, in the hospital with preeclampsia. The same baby who wasn't due to be born until this week. By the time I left the hospital for good, my world had been turned upside down. We had a premature baby in the back seat. We had spent the anniversaries of our daughters' deaths in grief's ground zero. We had left our lives uprooted, torn away from home and work without warning. I couldn't make sense of how birth and death had broken me open all over again. It felt like too much to process, on top of a scary delivery and a slow recovery that left my heart literally sick. But even then, I had no idea what was coming next. None of us did. . . . What seems like a lifetime ago, … [Read more...] about a month that changed the world
Spirituality in Daily Life
the wisdom of unknowing
If you have young children in your life, odds are good you have recently sat in a movie theatre strewn with popcorn, listening to a snowman sing: See, that will all make sense when I am older,So there's no need to be terrified or tense.I'll just dream about a timeWhen I'm in my aged prime'Cause when you're olderAbsolutely everything makes sense! I roared with laughter, spilling the popcorn bucket, and nearly every adult in the theatre did the same. Because what could be further from the truth? . . . Last night, our 5 year-old (bedecked in Olaf pajamas and clutching a stuffed snowman to his chest) interrupted his own rendition of the song to ask me quite seriously: Is it true? Does it all make sense when you are older? I laughed out loud again. No, I told him. When I was a kid, I used to think so. I thought adults had it all figured out. I thought I would know a lot more by now. Turns out I have a lot more questions as a grown-up. It doesn't all make sense when … [Read more...] about the wisdom of unknowing
another, again, anew
When we were dating, then engaged, then married, I used to catch a glimpse of him and think—God, please send us daughters. Because I had never met a man like him, so strong and gentle all at once, so humble and quietly confident, so genuinely kind and caring. I watched how he treated his mother, his sister, his friends, and me. And I knew—with all the women who suffer father wounds, who never learn that they deserve to be treated with respect by every single man they meet—that we were meant to have daughters. That he would be so good to them. That he would leave such a legacy of love to build them up for a world driven to diminish their worth. Then God gave us a boy. And another. And another. Then we were going to have two girls—two!—but they went home to God as quickly as they were here. And then we had another boy. Now we are having another son. I realized I was wrong about raising daughters. Not that it wouldn’t have been amazing, … [Read more...] about another, again, anew
the wonder of wrong
Remember that manuscript I told you about? The draft of a memoir, the story of our daughters. I wrote tens of thousands of words in the years after they died, words I never shared with a soul. Then I shoved them in a drawer and plowed into another book, two. Anything to hold off on the hardest story I had to tell. I pulled that manuscript out last year. On Instagram I told you how I dusted it off, skimmed through, heart sinking, and thought: ugh. No good. All wrong. I decided I had to let it go, trash it again, start over fresh. So I did. Started clean last spring with a brand new document, brand new folder, brand new ambition, brand new determination. Guess what? Wrong again. Turns out I couldn't read my own words with true eyes. One night in prayer, I told God I was ready to jump in and start this brand-new book—and clear as day, I heard one word. No. No? NO?! What do you mean NO? I was ready for this, I protested. I had a plan for starting anew, … [Read more...] about the wonder of wrong
