Category: Love

Choosing Love: Don’t Accept Counterfeits

My youngest son was born on Valentine’s Day.  

It wasn’t planned that way but escalating blood pressure meant that, ready or not, here he came!  

It’s been a lot of fun to have this day so often focused on romantic love (which, let’s be real rarely lives up to the hype!) focused instead on him and family love.  

My habit the past few years has been to expand that focus even further and explore the edges of God’s love, my love for others and what love in action looks like.

Too often I SAY I love someone but refuse to DO the loving thing.

Truth is, love is hard.  It’s costly.  It can be uncomfortable. 

It almost always involves sacrifice.  

love in action

And if I’m not careful, I can let valentines and candy and flowers be a paltry stand in for the real thing. 

February is not the only month in the year that tempts me to give a token and walk away instead of giving myself and sticking around to help in meaningful ways.  

So I try to keep Jesus’ words before my eyes: 

For the greatest love of all is a love that sacrifices all. And this great love is demonstrated when a person sacrifices his life for his friends.

~John 15:13 TPT

I try to focus on love in action instead of only love in words. 

Am I the Good Samaritan or am I one of those who toss a prayer from across the way and walk on, comfortable in my piety and clean clothes?  

Good-Samaritan-cropped

I want to be the Good Samaritan.  

Truly I do.  

❤

Choosing Love: Helpful Tips for Interacting With Bereaved Families

I firmly believe that our friends and extended family want to reach out, want to help, want to walk alongside as we grieve the death of our child

 I am also convinced that many of them don’t because they don’t know how.  

It may seem unfair that in addition to experiencing our loss, we also have to educate others on how to help us as we experience it, but that’s just how it is.

The alternative is to feel frustrated and abandoned or worse.  

Read the rest here: Child Loss: Helpful Tips for Interacting With Bereaved Families

Choosing Love: Understanding “Acceptance”

In all fairness, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had no idea her research would be taken out of context and plastered across professional literature and media outlets as a definitive explanation for the grief experience.

But she didn’t mind the notoriety.

And ever since, counselors, pastors, laypersons and the general public have come to expect folks to politely follow the five (sometimes described as six) stages of grief up and out of brokenness like a ladder to success.

It doesn’t work that way.

❤ Melanie

Sometimes those that walk alongside the bereaved are biding time, waiting for that “final” stage of grief: Acceptance.

And some therapists, counselors and armchair psychiatrists are certain that if the grieving mother can simply accept the death of her child, she can move on–that she can get back to a more “normal” life.

But this notion is as ridiculous as imagining that welcoming a new baby into a household doesn’t change everything.

And new parents have months to prepare.

Read the rest here: Loving well: Understanding “Acceptance”

Choosing Love: Transitioning From “Good-bye” to Grief

A funeral or memorial service seems like a final chapter.  We close the coffin, close the doors and everyone goes home.

But for bereaved parents and their surviving children, it’s not an end, it is a beginning.

Much like a wedding or birth serves as the threshold to a new way of life, a new commitment, a new understanding of who you are, burying a child does the same.

Read the rest here: Loving Well: Transitioning From “Good-bye” to Grief

Choosing Love: Just Say His Name

It’s nearly impossible for anyone who has not lost the earthly companionship of a child to know how desperately I long to hear Dominic’s name spoken aloud.

There are days I walk around my home and think silently and even whisper quietly, “You existed! You exist!” just to remind my heart he is real.

You may hesitate to bring him up because you fear my tears. But any tears his name might evoke will be tears of gratitude as well as those of longing.

Please say his name!❤ Melanie

I know you are afraid.

You think that speaking his name or sharing a memory or sending me a photo will add to my sorrow.

I understand.

But even when it costs me a split second of sharp pain, it is truly a gift to know that Dominic lives on in the hearts and minds of others.

Read the rest here: Loving Well: Just Say His Name

Choosing Love: Tales of Friendship and Encouragement

I am well aware that not everyone is blessed by an outpouring of love and support in the wake of child loss. In fact, depending on the circumstances, some families are practically shunned.

It breaks my heart every time I hear of such an experience.

Because if there is one thing I’ve learned in this Valley, it’s this: when a heart is shattered my ONLY job is to show up and do whatever is helpful-even if that means sitting silently and holding a hand.❤ Melanie

When I asked other bereaved parents to share the things people did that blessed them in the wake of losing a child, I didn’t expect so many stories of extravagant love–of acts surpassing anything I could have thought of or imagined.

“After my daughter passed, which was minutes before Mother’s Day 2012, outside the hospital room-

Read the rest here: Extravagant Love: Tales of Friendship and Encouragement After Losing a Child

Choosing Love: How to Bless a Grieving Parent When It’s Been YEARS

I do NOT blame you that my son and my sorrow have drifted down your list of “things that need attention”.  Your life is as busy as mine once was and your calendar full of commitments and celebrations that require your attendance.

But each year it feels lonelier and lonelier.  

Because each year fewer and fewer people remember or if they do, they don’t know how to offer that up as a blessing because it feels awkward or stiff.

So may I suggest a few things that most bereaved parents would absolutely LOVE for friends and family to say or do-especially as the months roll into years or even decades?

Read the rest here: When It’s Been YEARS-How to Bless a Grieving Parent

Some Step Up. Some Step Away.

I was absolutely overwhelmed in those first days.

Cars, cars, cars filled my long driveway and front yard.

People spilling out like ants scrambling after the hill is disturbed.

Oh, our hill was disturbed-knocked wide open by that deputy’s visit.

Read the rest here:Who Steps In? Who Walks Out?

We All Make a Difference-One Way or the Other

Toss that rock in the water and see what happens.

It’s impossible to keep the ripples from moving farther and farther from the point of impact.

And even though I can’t see it, my casual toss has changed the environment of the pond in ways it would not have been changed without my action.

Our lives are like that- we touch other people every day and rarely know how our brief brush may ripple through their lives for years or even eternity.

I have been lifted up by a smile offered by a stranger-that buoyant mood lasting long enough to save an otherwise dreary day.

I have also had a beautiful morning made overcast by the sour attitude of someone that should be helpful.

I want to bring sunshine not rain wherever I go.

I want to speak courage to trembling hearts.

No telling how far the ripples may go. ❤️

Memory Into Silent Joy

There is something about winter mornings that invite me to linger long in my rocking chair with my cup of coffee.  It’s cold and outside chores can wait a bit.

When I sit here, my mind wanders to many things-mostly days gone by when my busy household would have made these long, slow mornings impossible.

And I miss it.  All of it.

Especially the beauty of an unbroken family circle.

I try to hold onto the precious moments as long as I can.

We live in a noisy world.

Music, television, voices and the hum of electricity tunnel into our brains and distract us from hard questions and painful circumstances.

We live in a busy world.

If I’m not in motion, I am getting ready to be.

It is tempting in my grief to try to stuff life full of noise and busyness so I can ignore the pain and emptiness of missing my son.

But there is quiet beauty in the unfilled space of my heart–the spot once brimming with the living essence of the son I love.

In the silence I can hear his voice and see his smile.

So I will guard the noiseless place that still belongs to Dominic and keep it as a treasure,  a comfort, and a tribute to him until we are together again.

There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve — even in pain — the authentic relationship. Further more, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer