Another excerpt from Choosing to See...
"Some people...would innocently try to connect our sorrow with some event in their own lives. They were simply trying to relate the best they could. But when they people would say that they knew how we felt because they'd lost their dad or their mom or their grandmother, I felt numb. I know grief is grief, and pain is pain, still, in the natural order of this life we do tend to lose our parents and grandparents first. Burying a (child) isn't in the usual order of things." So, I'm reading "Choosing to See" by Mary Beth Chapman, wife to Steven Curtis Chapman. I have written about them before and his CD "Beauty Will Rise." They lost their daughter in 2008. I have read a lot of books on grief and loss, but I really connected with the way she describes how she felt, as a mom burying her child. By far, the part that touched me the most was how she described feeling carried through the grief at times:
"In the midst of our grief and struggles, we were also living with an experience of special grace...a sense of God's presence, as if the veil between the temporal and the eternal had been lifted. I believe this is because of the prayers... We felt a supernatural sense of God holding us. We had a heightened awareness of what really mattered, a clearer vision of eternal things that we normally could not see. We were desperate for God. The Bible was like oxygen for us as we searched for comfort within its pages." Kyle and I say all the time that while losing Gabe was horrifically painful and awful, we wouldn't change things because of the way his loss has brought us closer to God. That may be hard for some to understand, but I hope Mary Beth's words shed some light... |
Author: Meghan
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