We survived.
We survived 2019 without our Gianna. I don’t know how, and I hate that we had to. But somehow by His strength alone, we managed to make it through A full calendar year without her squishes, or giggles, or lunch dates or dance parties or songs or adventures or school projects or nature walks or shopping dates, or kisses and staring contests with our girl. Without new pictures, new videos, new coloring pages, new marks on a growth chart, new shoes, new car trips and plane rides.
It’s inconceivable how one can still stand after the greatest tragedy anyone should ever have to endure.
To give in to utter despair of death OR take God at His word?
A choice that had to be re-made everyday of 2019 as we faced our greatest darkness and our most painful “firsts without Gianna”, a choice that enabled us to believe for a coming sunrise while facing the blackest nights.
The choice to not let death win and to let LIFE have the final say is a crossroads between a rescue or a drowning.
We had to wake up each day of 2019 to a landscape that assaulted us with continued and collateral loss and a need for overwhelming grace from so many in our lives who witnessed our bloodiest trauma. And so many walked beside us with an unconditional love that could not be paid back in our weakest seasons.
However, We had to also face judgement and ridicule for the way we, as a family, dealt with grief and we often found ourselves having to defending our need to prioritize and make space for healing. We had to make decisions that placed our survival first over other’s expectations and comforts and that came with a cost. This is inevitable and we have learned is very common among fellow child-loss survivors, when no one can fully comprehend such tragedy unless, they themselves experienced it… there becomes a limit to understanding and empathy.
We all need more grace, on both sides. Grace for the survivors and grace for the community who walk an unfamiliar road of how to love the most broken. Grace to grow in understanding. I fail at this so often. But, deep sorrow has taught me so much.
Because Grief changes everything. There is not one corner of your lives, hearts or relationships that is not affected by such loss. We have to have the courage to allow everything to be broken and remade. And, that demands that we engage the pain and not run from it.
2019 felt like a tsunami of ache and we felt every crashing wave.
However, we have survived and are entering 2020 bruised and left with many wounds to show for it. By His strength alone, we survived 2019 and now we are stumbling towards 2020, through the wreckage, to heal and grow as completely changed people. We have to get to re-know our new selves.
When your heart is shattered, it has to be made new. The heart has to be reformed by the promise of eternity. We are being remade by all the broken pieces.
And, in that regeneration, God did a new thing that miraculously lifted our eyes from the valleys to the hills.
In 2019 We found that, as our wounds bled and our tears filled an ocean, something in us was growing to a greater capacity that we could have never imagined. God was miraculously redeeming loss to life as He untethered us from this world and tied us to eternity to bravely trust HIM with a narrative we could have never imagined.
In 2019 The ground was ripping apart in our souls to make room for the birthing of new life. The broken garden was growing new life around the torn down tree. A shoot of new green arose from an cut off stump that was reflecting a promise from a God who’s stories never end in death.
I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the LORD In the land of the living.
(psalm 27:13)
In 2019, utter sorrow danced with overwhelming joy and the miracle of life rebelled against everything that felt like death. In 2019, We were being renewed by utter dependence on the rescuing truth of God’s eternal promises, embracing life, while grieving a story we didn’t understand.
We survived 2019. We embraced the gift of new life.
By His mercy we survived because of the palpable, yet inconceivable promises of God that LIFE WINS.
In 2019 He used our greatest loss and our deepest trauma to tangibly set eternity into our hearts and lift our eyes upwards to show us how to let Him enlarge us beyond our greatest loss. He used our grief to birth something new.
As a result of such grace, He showed us the most soulful lost eyes that led our whole family to The land we love to embrace a new goodness in the land of the living. He allowed loss to radically grow more love.
HIS. GRACE. ALONE.
A story of life from loss that no one can fit into human understanding.
Because the promise of eternity is the biggest plot twist of all, is it not?
Eternity absolutely can not be contained.
Eternity spills over and washes over our broken hearts with the healing balm of regeneration like this rainbow washes over the stormy sky with a promise of coming light. Eternity changes everything.
Our pain has left a mark on our hearts that changes us forever.
We. Are. Changed.
We are scarred with deep pain and yet, eternal perspective that blew apart our lives.
2019 we walked a war torn landscape and somehow found courage to open our eyes to the way God was using the ruins to make something new and call us out to the deep again and to trust a story we didn’t understand that demanded a faith beyond human conception.
In 2019 His promises literally arrested death and catapulted our bleeding hearts to enlarge and believe for a new faith, a new trust, a new love….a new goodness.
He has grown us to love more radically.
I don’t understand His ways, and I’ll never be content with loss and sorrow and brokenness and living the rest of my existence on this earth without my baby girl.
I’ll forever love, therefore I’ll forever grieve.
But that forever love has expanded our courage to love deeper and wider and braver and bolder.
I’ll always wrestle my way through this wilderness to choose LIFE. Life has to have the final say, even when we do not understand.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart;
yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
Ecc. 3:11
However, despite the goodness that can still be unearthed here in this vapor of a life, earth has lost all its affection by the reality of a broken world. Heaven is my prize and that’s where God has set my heart.
Because my heart was made for eternity.
And Jesus has purchased a way to make Eternity our future.
That is a HOPE that is NEVER LOST!
But death hurts deeply as long as we walk this broken earth…. The fact is, Death changes everything. HOPE does not take away the overwhelming pain of separation. God knows this.
But. I am so thankful that Eternity has the final say, and that truth RESCUES my bleeding heart With a promise of LIFE in every new sunrise.
His Hope propels us forward!!