God is faithful, even in the midst of tragedy.
These are stories of families who have walked through valleys of grief, loss, and death. Our hope is to encourage you with these deeply personal experiences of God’s faithfulness, even in the unimaginable.
Hope in the Midst of Grief
A parent's worst nightmare -- meeting the hospital chaplain before the doctor arrives to inform you that your seven-year-old child has no brain activity. More than twenty years has since passed, but the memory still brings an actual physical pain to my heart due to the overwhelming sadness. Once again, I am forced to lay the unquenchable pain and sorrow, along with the unanswered questions, at the foot of the cross, believing and trusting that His grace will be sufficient for yet another day, that His power is made perfect in my weakness. We actually thought that we had survived our worst nightmare seven years earlier when our triplets were born prematurely at twenty-seven weeks and five days…
The Dissonance of Death
One of the most painful and powerful moments of this past year occurred the day we buried our daughter Christiana. The jagged dissonance was palpable as we placed our beautiful newborn child in the cold November ground. We tried to sing along to How Firm a Foundation as the Air Force Academy funeral bells solemnly played, but the tempo was quite slow (understatement of the century). We haltingly struggled to keep in sync with one another, never mind those bells that took forever and a day to finish. I remember thinking to myself, “this is all so wrong,” as everyone and everything around me felt and sounded out of sync. If you have ever buried someone close to you, maybe a child or young relative, you certainly know that awful feeling, that gut-wrenching, sickening knowledge deep within, that things are not as they should be…