91 results for author: Constance Ray

When Grief Touches Everything

Hope Mom, We’re here. We made it to another Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. This is my sixteenth October to be a part of, but before my daughter was stillborn, it was a day and a month I didn’t even know existed. Being a Hope Mom and being part of this community is nothing I ever wanted for my life, but it has also been such a gift. I have seen the Lord care for me through so many of the women I have met here, and I’ll be forever grateful for His kindness in giving me these friendships and women who have helped me carry both my grief and Paige’s memory through the years. But a month like this can feel confusing, though, ...

Hold Up Her Arms

October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, and as I've been thinking about what I want to say this year, I keep coming back to a picture in Exodus that I recently studied. Most of the time when I write here, I'm writing directly to you, Hope Mom, but today I want to talk for a little while to those who love a Hope Mom, because I think this picture has something beautiful to show us about how we can care for one another when grief has made someone we love weary. And while I'm writing from the place I know, the grief of losing a baby, I don't think what Exodus shows us is only for this kind of loss. There are weary people all around us ...

We Lament What Has Not Yet Been Restored

One of the things I love most about Scripture is that it never asks us to hide our grief. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible tells the truth about living in a world that has been fractured by sin and death. It gives us permission to weep, to ask hard questions, and to long for the day when everything broken will finally be made whole. The Bible never treats our tears as an inconvenience to overcome or a weakness to hide. Instead, it continually reminds us that God sees, hears, and draws near to those whose hearts are broken. That is why I have always loved the picture of Rachel in Jeremiah 31. Thus says the Lord: "A voice is heard in ...

And If Not, He Is Still Good

You’ve probably seen it on a coffee mug, a wall print, or maybe a T-shirt. And if not, He is still good. It’s one of those phrases that gets passed around so often that it can begin to feel like something pretty we say when we don’t know what else to say. But for those of us who have buried a baby, these words aren’t decoration. We have had to wrestle with whether we really believe them. Is He really still good when our babies die? I don’t believe in the prosperity gospel, the lie that says if we love God enough, pray hard enough, or live rightly enough, He will give us everything we hope for. Scripture never promises us a life ...

You Don’t Have to Be Enough

From the moment I realized my baby wouldn't live, I felt my utter inadequacy as a mom. Cries I would never be able to comfort. A face I would never fully memorize. Milestones I would never get to celebrate. Questions I couldn't answer, for myself or for anyone else. And underneath all of it, the weight of watching the world move on without her in it. I lived with the nagging fear that I was broken. That somehow, in the most important thing I had ever been asked to do, I wasn't enough. Maybe you've felt that too. Maybe loss has left you wondering if you failed your baby, your body, or your family. Maybe you've replayed moments, searching for ...

He Restores My Soul: What Does That Really Mean?

After our Leadership Summit this May, when our team chose He Restores My Soul as the theme for our 2027 retreat, I came home and began praying slowly through Psalm 23. I found myself reading it over and over again, lingering on familiar words that I've known for years, and asking the Lord to help me see them with fresh eyes. As I did, I kept coming back to one simple question. What does it actually mean that He restores my soul? If I'm honest, there have been seasons in my own grief when those words felt almost impossible to reconcile with my reality, because my circumstances hadn't been restored. Paige was still gone. The nursery we had dreamed ...

In His Hands

In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Psalm 95:4-5 Oh, Hope Mom, There are so many mysteries that belong to God alone. While we can truly know Him through His Word, through prayer, through worship, and through life with His people, we will never fully comprehend the fullness of who He is or the wisdom with which He governs every detail of our lives. After loss, that reality can feel especially difficult. When your baby has died, God's purposes can feel impossible to understand. Questions come that have no easy answers. Why did ...

Death Is Not the Last Word

Before Paige died, death was something I knew existed, but it wasn't something I spent much time thinking about. I had been to funerals. I had lost great-grandparents and a few people I knew, but death still felt distant. It belonged to other families and other stories. I knew one day I would have to face it, but I never imagined it would come so soon or so close. Then, one ordinary summer day, everything changed. Without warning, death entered my own story. It came into my womb, into my family, and into the life of my daughter. From that day forward, death was no longer a distant idea. It became deeply personal. Maybe that's your story too. P...

Sixteen Years Later

Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves aren't the whole story. Last week, our family remembered sixteen years since Paige's birth and death. Sixteen years. Sometimes that feels impossible to say out loud. People occasionally ask me if grief gets easier with time, and I never quite know how to answer that. There are certainly things that change, but I don't think healing has looked the way I imagined it would when I was thirty years old. If anything, these last sixteen years have shown me how patient the Lord is. I'm still learning things today that I couldn't have understood five years after Paige died, or even ten. The Lord has a gentle way ...

Retreat Registration Is Now Open: He Restores My Soul

  There are some passages of Scripture that become especially precious after the death of a baby. Not because we hadn't read them before, but because grief has a way of opening our eyes to truths we never knew we would need quite so desperately. In suffering, verses we've read a hundred times suddenly become lifelines, and promises we once appreciated become the very words that carry us through another day. Psalm 23 has become one of those passages for me and the other women on our team. It's only six verses long, yet I don't know of another chapter in Scripture that has comforted more weary saints throughout the centuries. It has been ...