The Next Thing

Author's note: You were going to get a cute Nora update today with her 21 month pictures, but Photobucket's website has been down all day so I can't get them to load. Instead you get some sad thoughts from Mama. But happy thoughts to come--Tuesday we should be able to find out if Baby Jellybean is a boy or a girl, and then a few days after that we will make a name announcement. So stay tuned! I'll get to Nora's pictures and Halloween soon, too!

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The next thing. That’s what my days are filled with now. Just doing the next thing and trusting in Jesus every step of the way. Grace upon grace (John 1:16), that is what He has promised us. Grace for each day. Grace for each new day.

There will be a time to write a birth plan, to choose a grave site, to think through a memorial service. Right now I need time to let go of the plans I had, the nursery fabric I wanted, the new car seat we needed to pick out. I need time to grieve the life that will not be, the growing up I will not see, the sibling my children will always be missing. I wanted so much to teach my baby to read. I’m teaching Annie and Jacob right now and so I’ve dwelled on that. This baby and I won’t slug our way through phonics outbursts and snuggle up to read through a Bob book together. I won’t cry as this youngest one goes off to college and those grandbabies won’t ever be.

I don’t grieve for what my baby will “miss,” so to speak, because I know my baby will be with Jesus. Baby will never experience pain or loss or suffering. Baby will be whole and complete and happy. But we who are left behind, we deal with all the losses.

In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis put it this way: “If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.”

One step at a time, leaning on that grace upon grace, until Christ’s glorious appearing, when “He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces” (Isaiah 25:8).