This morning I woke early with a sense of utter calm, a deep knowledge that the God of comfort was filling every inch of my home, that He was near. And then I remembered.
December 2nd.
A year ago today, over 5,000 people visited this newborn, highly unattended blog to read No Heartbeat, to this day the most highly read post I have ever written.
It is the account I wrote the day I found that the baby we were anticipating to make us a family of six was no longer living.
One year.
As I snuggled and nursed our little Finn, who we welcomed into the world six weeks ago this morning, I talked to One who chose for his life to inhabit the space where another had to leave to make room. I thanked Him for both. I thanked Him for all this year has held… grief and loss and hope and new life and growth and the places he is taking me {and us} deeper still.
And then I laid that little life down, tucked him in tight, and left the room to remember the little life lost. I sat down at my computer, again turning my heart toward Heaven, and read, remembering.
That midnight post on December 2nd written through tears and desperation and heartache and belly empty gave way to some of the most incredible compassion, healing and hope I have yet found. You rose up. You reached out. You were the tangible manifestation of God’s healing touch. Processing so publicly proved to be the way through pain and into healing. The kind of healing that leaves a really beautiful scar, one that will fade but never leave, as I am forever changed. And so many share that scar. There is solidarity in that scar. There is evidence of a healer in that scar. There is hope for renewal in that scar.
I would not have known such healing had I not shared, had you not responded. Thank you.
And so this morning, the tears that fall are a mingling of all those I wrote of here … but mostly these tears fall with gratitude and with hope. for heaven is waiting.
As the words of those posts I wrote last December washed over me this morning, it became so evident to me that God had a firm hold of my “pen”. As I stumbled across this passage at the end of “Betrayed”, I read it and wondered how I could have written such an account; I am struck by how God was so faithful to remind me constantly of who it was my hope was in:
“Death brings life. It is the story of the One we are all frantically forgetting to celebrate this December.
He slipped out of heaven, and into the world, into a teenage girl’s womb, in one of the darkest times of history. A baby who even in his arrival stirred such fear that a decree was sent out to kill every boy under two in hopes to wipe out this prophesied threat to the Roman Empire. He would escape death numerous times, grow to be subversive and revolutionary, and overturn authority that ruled with fear by setting up a kingdom rooted in hearts of men, women and children. A marginalized people would change the world with love, and death would be the conquering force. Death would make things new. Death not of others but of ourselves. The death of our King ushers in the death of us, if we are truly to follow Him. Death that pales in comparison to the new life coming.
And I trust Him with my life that the new is coming.”
So true.
THE TETHERING PLACE 