Father,
Thank you for another morning to spend time focusing on you and learning more about Your truths. Thank you for time with Andrew last night. Thank you for another opportunity to live for you. Please help me to be positive, productive and motivated today. Lord, please change me, make me new. I fall short in so many ways, but I am trying. Please forgive me for my many sins. Shed light on them and help me make better decisions in all areas of my life. Thank you for everything you do. Please hug and kiss my boy for me
In Jesus' name alone, Amen
Soon after we moved to Delaware, Andrew and I got connected with a great church in Wilmington called Brandywine Valley Baptist Church. Several weeks ago, we started attending an incredible support group at the church on Thursday nights called GriefShare. Each week we meet with other grieving people, people who have become our friends, to share where we are in our grief journey, pray for each other and study biblical truths to help us through this journey we did not choose to go on. During the week we are encouraged to pray, journal and work through various exercises designed to guide us “from mourning to joy.” I can’t recommend this program enough. It has been the single most helpful thing I have done to work my way through the grief of losing Maddox.
Last week, in addition to the regular GriefShare exercises, we were supposed to think about the last time we felt joy. This was not easy for me, because the more I thought about it the more I realized how easy it is to confuse joy and happiness. I can think of lots of times I have felt happy since losing Maddox – a lazy Saturday morning in bed with Andrew and the dogs a couple weeks ago, conversations with Meghan and my mom, picking out decorations for our new place together at Target…
But that happiness is emotional, it’s fleeting – there one minute, gone the next. Joy is harder to define. Joy is more than a mere emotional response. Like faith, it is a choice. Like faith, it can be unmoving and not based only on the circumstances of the moment. Joy is so much more than happiness.
I felt joy while holding my sweet baby boy at the hospital, feeling his small body warm with the life he had, seeing his face and comparing his features to mine and Andrew’s. That joy was sadly overshadowed by the pain we felt in losing him, just when we had expected to be meeting him and falling in love with him even more. But the joy remains because of God’s promises and His presence. He has revealed Himself in a way I have not previously had the privilege of seeing. Nothing other than such a great loss can allow a person to experience God in such a way. What comfort it is to know that God has known about Maddox since before the world was formed. God knew the short life our boy would have and the impact his life would have on me, Andrew and those who knew and still love him. I feel joy in remembering my “sonshine” and though I am deeply saddened he is not with me now, I have hope and peace in knowing that some day, someday soon, I will see him again in heaven. Thank God for His promises and above all salvation in Him!
“So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” – John 16:22
“And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” – Isaiah 35:10b
“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” – James 1:2-3
Adapted from my grief journal
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