64 results for author: Constance Ray

Mental Health Moment: Grief’s Effect on our Minds and Bodies

  Intense Grief Disrupts Normal Functioning After your baby went to heaven, did you feel like you were going crazy…like your brain and body were going haywire and reacting unpredictably?   Maybe some of these symptoms ring true: Feeling numb or frozen  Trouble with concentration or memory Having angry outbursts or sudden tears Compulsively cleaning or organizing Feeling separated from your body or detached from your life Mentally replaying scenes of the loss over and over during the day or in dreams Trouble initiating or completing even the smallest task at home, school, or work Dizziness, racing heart, tight ...

Prayer: Praying Scripture When You Get Stuck in Prayer

Most of us would agree that we need God in grief (no matter how we feel about Him). During dark nights of the soul, we come face to face with our humanness–our frailty & our inability to take another step (or another breath) without His divine intervention. If we need God so much, then that means we must talk with Him. Yet talking with Him–praying–can feel very very hard. Our minds wander, we say the same things over and over, and we feel bored or just plain lost.  This struggle is quite the conundrum! We need to pray–to offer up our pain, hurt, confusion, hope and gratitude–but it feels unattainable at times. What do we do?  ...

Prayer: God’s Invitation to Wrestle Him

This month I cover various topics on prayer. Many of them were inspired by ideas found in a little-known book on prayer, Long Wandering Prayer by David Hansen. It has become a new favorite. Hope Mom, nothing can shake our faith than the loss of a child, am I right?  After William went to heaven, I had more questions than ever about God’s character, His plans, and His love for me. I also wanted to give Him a piece of my mind. How about you?  What do you do with your questions and frustrations? Do you ask other saints, other Hope Moms, your pastor? Do you ask God Himself?  One of the common messages threaded throughout the entire ...

Prayer: When God Seems Silent

This month I cover various topics on prayer. Many of them were inspired by ideas found in a little-known book on prayer, Long Wandering Prayer by David Hansen. It has become a new favorite. Sometimes it feels like we are praying to a brick wall. We have tried everything we know (including some of the ideas I mentioned last week, and more) and still it’s as if our prayers get sent out and nothing comes back. Like we are being ‘ghosted’ at a divine level.  We might determine that we have failed at prayer. Or we might determine that God is not as loving or faithful as claimed, and doesn’t care to respond. Friend, neither of these are ...

Gentle Ideas to Help Your Prayer Life in Grief

This month I cover various topics on prayer. Many of them were inspired by ideas found in a little-known book on prayer, Long Wandering Prayer by David Hansen. It has become a new favorite. Prayer can be a tricky and difficult thing for all of us even when we aren’t in a season of grief. A gifted British preacher, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, once said, “everything we do in the Christian life is easier than prayer.” Adding the loss of a baby can make prayer feel absolutely unreachable. For me, in the months after William went to Heaven, prayer was next to impossible: I wasn’t sure how I felt about God and didn’t really want to talk to Him, but ...

Mental Health Moment: Grieving Styles

Before my Hope Baby, William, went to heaven, I had a career in mental health counseling. God has used my training and subsequent experience as a Hope Mom to help me understand more intimately the human bereavement journey. One of the most basic, yet in my opinion, vital concepts to know about grief is the various grieving styles people exhibit. While I will describe some of the categories, it’s important to note that there are as many grieving styles as there are people. We all internalize and express grief in personal ways–and these ways are affected by our personalities, histories, relationships, the nature of the loss, culture, and our ...

Asking Why: Did My Baby Die For a Reason?

Hope Mom, I know you are hurting. And when we hurt, we want to be comforted with reason and rationale–to know that our pain is not in vain. I do not know why your baby died or what God’s purposes are for the situation around their passing. You, no doubt have heard many answers, and I imagine most (if not all) of them are unhelpful.  One of our wonderful blog writers, Lindsey Dennis, has written a gentle response based on Biblical truth to the question “Why did God allow my baby to die”. I encourage you to reflect on it before reading further.  I want to continue Lindsey’s wisdom by addressing another situation: witnessing something ...

Asking Why: When You Don’t Get an Answer

We all want to know WHY.  Why me? Why this baby? Why this diagnosis? Why on this day? Why in this way?  It’s only natural to ask why – from the time we were little we have been asking “why” to make sense of our world. So, of course we ask these questions when it comes to our greatest heartaches. In asking this question, we are trying to wrap our minds around something that was never meant to be–death.  Last week I described how God put eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11); when we encounter the opposite of eternity (death) it not only breaks our hearts, it breaks our brains, too. What I’ve learned about asking ...

Confusion in Grief

There is nothing quite so jarring to our daily rhythms as loss. Whether it’s the news of a fatal diagnosis, an unexpected stillborn, or an out-of-the-blue miscarriage, our minds get stuck, shocked, and confused when they are asked to comprehend the death of our beloved babies. Even though we have lived in a fallen state our entire lives and expect a certain amount of death, when it actually strikes a loved one–our own flesh and blood–our minds and hearts are left disoriented. In the early weeks after William’s passing, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Literally.  My husband and I were displaced, living in my parent’s home. We ...

The Only Way Out is Through: Hope in Raw Grief

Last week I shared briefly about my personal experience with the death of a baby, and with the secure Hope God shared with me. While we Hope Moms do have the hope of a future reunion and eternity with our heavenly children, we still have to walk through the painful, confusing aftermath of their deaths. I’ll share some of my experiences right after loss, and then explore what the Bible says about our suffering. While in the hospital recovering from my c-section, I was presented with all sorts of “next steps”--ways to care for both my body after surgery, as well as William’s body after death. I didn’t want to do any of it. I wanted to go to ...