The One Way Through
Small disclaimer that this may be a difficult read. I promise it's hopeful. If you're going through unbearable suffering. I sit with you. He sits with you.
What is it like when your child goes before you? When the light of your life goes dim? When the precious being you swore to love, care for, and protect with all you have slips away from your arms?
It’s not humanly bearable.
When the initial shock of it all fades, the world doesn’t stop for you. Everything and everyone picks things right back up and it all keeps on going. Government documents come through to remind you of the “change in your family” you already knew about. No phone call. No empathy. Just a lifeless document with facts. Your medical transcript recounts the children you’ve carried and their present day “status”. The name you chose for your first child, is the same name that you need to fill out on documents you never imagined you’d be signing. And the one that happens most frequently: innocently unknowing strangers asking if the baby you carry is your first. No, this baby is my third. I have had the gift of loving three littles entrusted to our care. Without control over whether they’d be ours for keeps. It’s not humanly bearable.
The places we’d go on leisurely days; the ones we held special. Now out of bounds and stained with pain. The tears are heavier, and the absence of hopes and dreams of the times, moments, and years we would have spent together lie scattered in my field of view at all times. As the world picks up and keeps going, our days are full of lags when nothing else is more important than feeling through the present moment. Because even in pain, those moments hold you. No one talks about the ways you grapple with the time that has passed, grasping at the ways to hold onto everything that’s left of you.
The world gives you a million and one methods to cope. None are sufficient.
When things are not humanly bearable, where do you find the strength? In Whom can supernatural strength be borrowed from?
I fiercely want to tell them. To tell those yearning for answers that there’s only One Way. That none of it makes sense if God isn’t truly Good. That there is no other way around, only through. It’s Jesus.
Last month, we had the absolute gift of visiting the Sisters of the Little Way at their new convent in Portland, OR. These beautiful sisters, Sr. Danielle Victoria and Sr. Maria Kim prayed over us, sat with us in our grief, and showed us Jesus. The living Christ in His agony and pain. Before the death and resurrection. The Christ who carries our pain too. Please pray for the Sisters of the Little Way and their “calling within a calling” to establish a new religious community that reaches out to those on the fringes of the Church—especially those people who have been abused, wounded, and scandalized by members of the Church. They count on our prayers and our support. Learn more about their mission here.
The Truth is that you matter. That my girl, in her short three years with us matters. That each of us is called to grow in unique and personal holiness. That the many examples of holiness in all His saints show us that it’s possible for us too. Through His grace, that we can play a role in it too. Now. In the Communion of Saints. In the Body of Christ. That I can’t yet see all of the souls my daughter has and will help come to know Jesus, but that I know she’s already making an impact that transcends this world. That she’s continuing to help. That she’s encouraging us to get there too. Our work here is not done. Her work there is a mission I will forever choose to cheer on.
None of it makes sense unless He is Truth and Goodness. In a few years time, we leave this world with nothing. Only the souls we’ve helped come to know His goodness. If in the grand scale of time, our family can be reunited for longer than the briefness of time we spend here, that is a good I cannot yet comprehend, but I will choose daily to hold onto it. For this love and unity, I thirst.
When the world gives you a million and one methods to cope, the method I will choose to hold tightly onto daily is the Way of Love.
Pray for us Lilo. Show us the way to Jesus.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
―C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Moments of Hope from the last two weeks:
Mike and I met a woman who knew Lilo and her story, without knowing us. Lilo was always better at making friends than we were. She continually reminds us of this.
Lilo’s impact on a special Occupational Therapy cohort.
Little friend Ollie asking to go on a white airplane to visit Lilo in Heaven.