Friday, May 15, 2015

A Letter to my Friend on the Day She Buries Her Baby

How does one dress for the funeral of their child? How can a parent’s soul bear the weight?

As if the hair, the clothes, the shoes really matter when your perfect babe lay lying in a tiny casket. How do you walk into the bathroom, stare into the mirror and see anything put sorrow.  

You walk in broken, you walk out broken.

There is no wholeness that is given from the vanity in the room of self-care. There is no freedom lent when the tie is tied and the hair is swept up. There is no return of your child just because you've readied your body to bury the body of your sweet one.

If the heart can break into a million pieces, today yours is in ten million pieces. And it’s only just begun to break…

There’s a beating sound...thump…thump…thump and you realize it’s the quiet sound of your own heartbeat and you hear it only because the sound of your breathe is gone. Your breath that has not been released for days. You have held your breathe as you longed to hold your child. Only now, you must breathe because you must stand face to face with the nightmare. It is true. Your holy, perfect child is laid bare in that casket. The flowers surround the innocence and it threatens to break you. That casket steals your tears and your sorrow and a piece of your heart is laid bare with your babe laid bare in that bare, cold casket.

Loved ones file in to the church bringing their gift of hugs and words of love. Children run innocently through the isles unaware of the grief running through the hearts and minds of the adults. You stare at the momentous wishing it wasn’t so. Those pictures can’t be of your child. Those poems haven’t been written for your child. Your heart files the memories of this week and it labels them strangely. The days and hours blur together and you forget the details of the happenings but the memories of your baby your heart does not forget. They are clearly filed away into the deepest places of your raw soul that only you can access. There they will stay forever.

Grief. It’s a strange thing how we can smile and cry at the same time, over the same memory.

But then…you remember…Hope. As your face is turned downward and your heart screams from the ache, your soul breaks free. With an overflowing sweetness, as honey suckle comforts a crying babe, so HOPE comforts your bare heart.

And you become full.

You stand in the mirror not to dress your broken body but to dress and honor the body that carried your baby for months and then with a heroic act of labor-love gave the gift of being born into a world that would never be the same because of what was given that day. That mirror does not stare back with emptiness but with a promise. A promise that those bags under your eyes are evidence of the worth of your child. Your red eyes have flowed freely with the liquid love of that babe so precious. Oh that liquid love. It could save a lost soul or touch a weary heart. And you have given your child the gift of shedding pounds of liquid love.

You clothe your body not to hide but to reveal. In your brave covering you are really taking off the covering. You’re standing brave in the shadow of darkness, with the light covering you and overshadowing even the darkest of earthly horrors and still you stand uncovering - the truth and hope that all is not lost and It Is Well with Your Soul. Though you fight the human desire to run far from the dark-dirt-earth prepared to lay your baby’s body to rest, you stand as one who shares a message the world cannot survive without. A message that says, It Is Well. My souls is not broken, though my heart may be, my soul is held by the unbreakable source of hope and love and resurrection life.

There is no barren soul. For we can all experience the supernatural gift of the birth of hope and beauty from sorrow.

As you cover your body, you are uncovering for the world what it looks like to face the ultimate sorrow with hope resonating so deeply and freely that no dirt can bury that which is meant to be freely given.

As the grave could not hold our Savior so the darkest of sorrow cannot contain the hope of our Savior. As you cling to the resurrection power so you display the resurrected message that It Is Well with Your Soul. And you uncover that message with great bravery and delight because it is what you cling to as you dress your body to bury your child’s earthly body laid bare in a love-box to be covered by the earths glorious surface.  

It is well with your soul.

As you sprinkle dirt upon the grave site of your child, you are uncovering for the world what the mystery of love looks like. The mystery of love that all search for but struggle to find. You are love incarnate. You are hope personified. Your baby has given the world the greatest gift – love. He has given space for the heavens to open and allow the rays of hope to shower down, even upon the darkest of earthly sorrows. Your baby has been the vessel of uncovering that which we need to uncover even if it is through the deepest of pain.

Just as a ship sees the beacon of light from a lighthouse best on the darkest of nights, so searching souls sees the light of hope and love while watching the lighthouse, you, during your darkest of nights.

So dress yourself sweet woman. Prepare your clothes and your hair and your makeup. Give way to even the slightest of desire to look your best. Because today, oh today

Today you honor the life of your child that gives hope to the world.

Today you dress yourself to uncover the truth that It Is Well with Your Soul.

Today your physical body gives physical evidence to the spiritual hope we have in Jesus.



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