Sitting in my favorite chair, coffee in hand, I began to read a blog series you might be familiar with––yep, it was none other than Sara Claudia’s Women of Faith Series. But before I knew it, I fell down the rabbit hole of comparison. As I read each beautiful story of hardships overcome and finding God in the harshest of realities, I felt grossly inadequate to tell my own. Life had dealt some harsh blows to these incredible women, yet against the odds, they overcame the unprovoked adversity thrust upon them in the most remarkable ways.  

Dear God, Be Merciful

As I walked into another room full of people I didn’t know, my pulse quickened and I felt the familiar dread in my stomach. How many times had I walked into a room just like this one? It was full of smiling faces and buzzing with layered conversations, but I felt completely alone.  

This was a familiar storyline for me, a self-described wallflower, bent on blending in and staying quiet. My introverted personality played into my perpetual feeling of being overlooked. And so I  carefully crafted identities that felt safe to protect my heart. 

There are times in our lives when everything seems so clear, and times when we’re stumbling in the dark, looking for something, anything to hold on to. Bouncing around in the ambulance that night watching our 8-year-old son, Julian in pain, I had nothing to hold on to, not even the words to pray.

At the children’s hospital, hooked up to morphine, Julian finally stopped crying and drifted off to sleep. Everything was quiet and still around us when finally, the words came, but I wouldn’t exactly call them a prayer.

“WE DON’T WANT TO BE HERE!”

As I started my day, I looked around my house with frustration. Everywhere I turned there was something to do. Clothes on the couch that needed to be folded, dust on the furniture, dishes that had dried and needed to be put away, and a host of other household chores that were beginning to feel like a to-do list that would slow me down in what I truly needed to accomplish for the day. I already felt behind and my day had just begun. Maybe you can relate?

We celebrated our son’s second birthday in heaven yesterday, which would have been his fourth birthday on earth.

I find it no coincidence that God in all His divine will would allow me to share a story of faith just one day after our belated child’s birthday, and just two days after Christmas. What should be a celebratory season, filled with hope, joy, and fulfilled prophecy, is riddled with such sadness for so many, including myself. As we celebrate the birth of a Savior, we mourn the loss of our very own promise, our only son, Briggs. I will never forget the utter joy of finding out I was pregnant with him, just one year after losing his unborn sibling. The immense pain, tears, questions, and prayers that preceded Briggs arrival were ever-constant, and were, then, one of the darkest times of my life. 

When I was younger, I used to play piano. The piano is one of those instruments that needs to be tuned periodically. I remember watching (or rather listening to) a man tune our piano in our home.

He used a lever or “hammer” to turn the tuning pins inside the piano, an action which increases or decreases the tension of the strings.

A good piano tuning results in two things: accuracy (in tune) and stability (staying in tune). Depending on how accurate your ear is, you can hear when a piano or other instrument is out of tune, because it emits tones and notes that sound “off.”