5 results for tag: Kelly
Mental Health Moment: Marking Grief with Memorial Practices, Part 2
Last week, I shared how God welcomes and even commands ritual, rhythm, and remembrance —especially in seasons of loss and transition. From the Exodus to stacked stones along the Jordan to bereavement practices, the Bible shows us a God who understands that some moments are too much for our human experience to hold inside without some form of expression. (Read Part 1 here.)
Why does God incorporate these rhythms and practices into our lives? Why does it feel so helpful and cathartic to participate in these memorial activities? It’s because God designed us with many layers and each has a place in our grief.
And he answered, “You ...
Mental Health Moment: Marking Grief with Memorial Practices, Part 1
As Hope Moms, a new year can bring big questions about our grief journey. We tend to ask about how best to remember our Hope Babies, who we are without them, and how we will manage our sorrow another day, another year. Loving our heavenly babies while still on earth can feel confusing, and working through our experience of loss is overwhelming.
The good news is God highly values our need to connect to our heavenly babies and work through the giant life change that is loss and grief. He recognizes our inability to contain all that our human experience entails. He knows we need outlets that meet us in life’s overwhelming burdens.
During ...
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?
...
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 ...
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 ...
