Posted on by Lois Stephens

Finding Hope in the Waves of Grief

Sitting quietly, I listen with my ears and watch with my eyes, the eyes of my heart that is.  Eyes unlike my natural ones that are myopic with a touch of astigmatism causing an annoying blur when my contacts don’t settle just right. I listen and watch with my heart-eyes until I “see”. 

A mother lamenting the death of her child. This is not the way it’s supposed to be!

So much dark-water pain in her ocean blue eyes. Tidal pools formed in rocky coasts, filled with hard-shell creatures imprisoned in isolated depressions.  Living pain feeding upon trapped-water memories until they rise and spill over in tears. 

Morning and evening tides of pain.  Patterning, rhythmically, methodically – in and out, ebb and flow, always moving.

Both King Solomon and Bob Seeger remind me, “For everything there is a season”.  Yet today I question … does the season of weeping over the death of a child ever really end?

While the pain may lessen as time goes on, the impact of the loss seems to me to linger on and on, season after season.

I hear the mother’s lament once again, lingering decades beyond her precious child’s parting.  And with it I hear all the aching voices I have known, including my own, that still weep from time to time.

Yet in the moment I’m reminded that in every lament there’s a latent hope: God hears, and God cares.

We ride the waves of grief—up & down, down & up—until eventually, somehow, we land upon solid ground.  Ground that takes us in—womb-like—and protects.  The solid rock of trust in God when there are no answers to the hard questions. 

Love & Peace.

Posted on by Lois Stephens · 8 Comments

Solid Rock

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“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”  Ernest Hemingway

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She was a natural-born paradox.  Gentle yet tough; loyal yet independent; social yet a bit of a loner.

Remembering the autumn so many years ago when we watched her free-spirit belly grow under her man-size shirt.  Surely she is carrying someone’s child, but she denies it for as long as she can.  Until one cold day in December, she delivers a baby girl into the waiting arms of the adopting parents.

She has her reasons.  Good reasons painfully drawn from the deep waters of a brave girl’s heart.  I don’t judge—I know better than that.  She shows us the birth certificate with tiny footprints and cries.

A year later, on a snowy night in January, she stands with us at the church altar as her brother and me exchange our wedding vows.  We will never see her again after that night.   Her gypsy heart and hippie spirit calls her westward where her life comes to a sudden and tragic end a few months later.  She was 22 years old, and our hearts broke.

Life goes on; 20 years pass—and then a letter, a phone call, a knock on the door.  We embrace through tears, and I whisper, “I always knew you would find us”.  And through her daughter’s eyes, she smiles knowingly.

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The death of a young person brings confusion, perhaps even more so to a person of faith.  We ride the waves of grief—up & down, down & up—until eventually, somehow, we land upon solid ground.  Ground that takes us in—womb-like—and protects.  The solid rock of trust in God when there are no answers to the hard questions.  Solid ground—placental earth—protecting, revealing & healing.  Something that does not happen overnight.  Love & Peace.