But if Not...

A few months after Baby Kevin's passing I began writing a little book about my experience with grief and loss and how my faith helped me through it. I also express my love for motherhood and family.

This book was both healing and hard to write. I would write some and then months, or sometimes a year or more would pass until I could get back to it. It was emotionally draining.
I had one experience almost two years ago where the Lord encouraged me to finish it, in the same way he encouraged me to "Be not afraid, only believe" through my entire pregnancy. It's in the final stages of editing now. My plan is to make it available as a Kindle book. I hope my experience can bring some comfort to other mother's who have experienced the loss of a child.

I'll share one of my favorite chapters below...

CHAPTER 14

Hope

I like Wikipedia’s description of the word hope.  ”Hope is an optimistic attitude of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes related to events and circumstances in one’s life.”  After receiving our fatal diagnosis, hope was the one thing I clung to every day of my pregnancy.  Hope for healing, hope for a misdiagnosis, and most of all, hope for a miracle. I remember looking forward to my doctor visits and ultrasounds.  I went into every appointment with my heart filled to the brim with hope that somehow there would be some sort of improvement.

I remember during one of my ultrasounds, the technician kept listing off all of the problems she was seeing.  I finally stopped her and asked her to please tell me what looked right with our baby. The only thing she could say was that his spine looked good.  Despite the feelings of despair I felt after most of my appointments, I still managed to work through my grief and revisit my safe place of hope. Some might have called it denial, but I didn’t care.  Hope kept me sane, hope kept me from falling apart, and hope gave me the courage to face whatever was coming. I remember scouring the internet for any stories of miracles I could find. I not only hoped for my own miracle, I also had complete faith that we could have one.  While the ideal would have been giving birth to a perfectly healed baby, I knew the more practical miracle would be that his heart and brain weren’t as bad as they looked on the ultrasounds, that his clefts could be fixed, and while he would certainly have his challenges, he would live.  We would love him completely and he could have a happy life, despite any physical and mental limitations. I think Kevin knew from the start that what we saw on the ultrasounds was accurate. He walked the fine line of trying to help me realize the reality of our baby’s condition while at the same time respecting and supporting my need to have hope.  I’ll forever be grateful to him for that.

In the third chapter of Daniel in the Old Testament we see the courage of the three young Israelites, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego quietly refusing King Nebuchadnezzar’s demand to worship his golden idol. The King informed the young men that if they did not fall down before the golden image, “ye shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace.”  And then he asked, “And who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?”  Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego responded without hesitation, “If it be so, (that you threaten us with death) our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace…But if not (if for whatever reason he chooses not to save us from the fire), be it known unto thee, O King, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.” (Daniel 3:17-18)  I love that story. I love the complete faith of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego.  They were loyal to their God and even if he chose not to save them from the fiery furnace they trusted him.  As much as I hoped for a miracle, “But if not,” I had complete faith in my Heavenly Father’s plan for our son and I was willing to give him back, whenever God chose to take him.