You Don’t Have to Carry This Alone

One of the questions I hear most often from women considering the Hope Mommies Retreat is, “What if I don’t know anyone?”

Every year, I smile when I read that question because I understand it completely. Walking into a room full of strangers can feel intimidating under the best of circumstances, but after your baby has died it can feel nearly impossible.

What if everyone else already knows each other?

What if I’m the only one who cries?

What if my loss was too early? Or too late? Or too many years ago?

What if I don’t fit in?

Those questions are completely understandable, and I think nearly every first-time attendee has carried at least one of them, but here’s what I’ve watched happen year after year.

A woman arrives carrying not only her luggage, but the invisible weight of grief that she’s been shouldering for months, years, or even decades. She’s spent so much of her life trying to make other people comfortable with her grief. She’s learned to carefully choose when she talks about her baby and when she keeps her thoughts to herself. She’s wondered if she’s mentioned her child’s name too many times or cried longer than people expected. She’s had questions arise in her heart and mind that very few people around her could truly understand, and somewhere along the way she’s begun to feel profoundly alone.

Then she walks into the retreat. She checks in, and someone welcomes her with a hug and says her baby’s name. Almost immediately she hears another baby’s name spoken with tenderness, and then another. She steps into the prayer room where worship music fills the space, songs intentionally chosen to lift weary hearts toward Christ, and she notices photographs of more than one hundred babies represented throughout the room. Every picture tells a story. Every name is remembered with love. And every photograph quietly reminds her that while these mothers continue to carry grief, their precious children are whole, healed, and safely in the presence of the Lord. She sits beside women who don’t flinch when tears come. No one rushes her story. No one changes the subject. No one wonders why her baby still matters.

Because every woman in the room already knows. She knows what it feels like to leave the hospital with empty arms. She knows what it’s like to count the weeks her baby should have been growing. She knows how anniversaries can quietly steal your breath away and how ordinary days can unexpectedly become hard. She knows that grief doesn’t disappear simply because time has passed.

And there is something deeply beautiful that happens when grieving mothers gather around the Word of God. I don’t think it’s because we’ve somehow figured grief out or because we heal one another. Rather, I believe our Father delights to meet His daughters as they gather around His Word, and He often ministers to us through the presence, prayers, and faith of the women sitting beside us.

I’ve watched women who arrived feeling completely alone leave with friendships that continue long after the retreat weekend has ended. I’ve watched women exchange phone numbers, pray together, remember one another’s babies on birthdays and anniversaries, and continue pointing one another back to Christ years later. I’ve watched women realize, sometimes for the very first time, that they are not the only ones carrying this kind of sorrow. I’ve often watched women arrive wondering if they would fit in and leave wondering how they ever walked this road without these sisters beside them.

I think that’s one of the sweetest gifts the Lord gives through the Hope Mommies Retreat, and I am not at all saying that community replaces Jesus, because it never could. But God so often reminds us of His love through His people, doesn’t He? When we worship together, surrounded by women who have walked through the same valley, the truths we sing seem to settle deeper into our hearts. When we open God’s Word together, familiar passages take on new life because we’re studying them alongside women who understand why those promises matter so much. When we pray together, we find ourselves borrowing one another’s faith on the days our own feels weak. And that is one of the ways our Shepherd restores weary souls and reminds us that we were never meant to walk this road alone.

As we continue preparing for our 2027 retreat, I’ve been praying for the women the Lord already knows will be there. Some of you will come with a friend. Others will come knowing no one at all. Some of you experienced your loss only weeks ago, while others have been carrying this grief for many years. But wherever you find yourself today, I want you to know there is a place for you here.

If you’ve been wondering whether you belong, I hope you’ll hear this from my heart. You do! It would be our joy to know your baby’s name, to honor your story, and to spend a weekend lingering in Psalm 23 as we look together to our Good Shepherd, the One who has faithfully walked with us through every valley and who is still, even now, restoring weary souls.

We would love to welcome you this February.

Jennie is the Executive Director for Hope Mommies. She and her husband Brian live in Oregon and have four children together— Trenton, Paige who has been in Heaven with Jesus since 2010, Mason, and Cora. If you were to knock on her front door today, you’d find her in something comfortable drinking a hot cup of tea, while trying to figure out how to balance all the things that make up a life. She enjoys spending time in God’s word, fresh flowers, board games with her kids, cooking, and evening walks in her neighborhood. She adores being a new creation in Christ and prays she reflects Him well on this earth.