I've only used this blog once before to write to you instead of your brother. It was just before your first birthday when I wanted to capture how I was feeling about your big milestone. This morning, thoughts about this week have been swirling around in my head, and I wanted to write them down and share them with you.
Being a parent is hard. Being a parent after experiencing the loss of a child is a different kind of hard. Every loss parent's story is different, and I can't pretend to understand how the type of loss, timing of loss, or other circumstances surrounding the loss impact one's journey and experience through raising other children. I know what it feels to lose your firstborn to stillbirth, and I know that experience has profoundly impacted the way I parent you. I hope that the impact has generally been for the good, although I worry that the constant anxiety I feel around your safety and well-being may one day negatively impact you.
You may remember the special Bible verse that God gave us at the time of your brother's stillbirth. It was a bible verse tucked into a prayer book that I had read the day before we delivered Morris, and it brought me peace as we said our goodbyes. For that reason, we call Psalm 94:19 "Morris' verse":
"When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought joy to my soul."The truth is, while the story of that verse and its meaning has brought me comfort over the years, it has also oddly brought me anxiety. I began to see songs, verses, and devotionals that popped up about hard times or pain as a foreshadowing of something to come in our life. There have been many days when I've opened up my inbox to an email devotional with a triggering title like, "Why is this happening to me, God?" and immediately felt my heartbeat begin to rise and anxiety forming in the pit of my stomach. I've quickly deleted these emails without reading and tried to forget them. I've turned the radio station when certain songs talking about trails or tribulations began to play.
Earlier this week, Baylor suffered an unexplained high fever that came on in the midst of a round of antibiotics. The doctor chalked it up to a virus picked up on top of an ear infection, and she told us to monitor it and come back if it didn't go away. Later that day, I opened my email to a devotional titled, "Even If", which I knew would be about trusting God in hard times. I instantly began to worry it was a sign. What if the doctor was wrong and Baylor was facing an illness much more serious than a common virus? I wanted to believe the doctor was right, but for the next 2 days, I was Dr. Google and worried sick.
Baylor has now been fever free for over 24 hours and appears to be on the mend. As I've thought about my immense fear and anxiety, something important occurred to me. I'm not really sure why it hasn't before.
God gave us His Word as a gift of love and peace. He would never intend it to cause pain or anxiety. I don't know exactly how many verses in the Bible address anxiety and fear, but a quick Google search points to at least 50 verses that instruct us to not be fearful and tell us that God is the answer to the anxiety we feel.
God doesn't intend His Word to cause anxiety, but the Devil has different plans. The Devil attempted to use God's word to tempt Jesus in the Wilderness (Matthew 4). He still uses it today to tempt us, to make us feel unworthy, and to make us fearful. As someone else on the internet eloquently put it in an article I read, "History is strewn with people who have twisted the Scriptures to their own destruction." 2 Peter 3:16 warns us against being fooled.
I share this with you today because I don't want you to live a life of fear and anxiety. I am not the perfect example of the life you should lead, and this is an area where I struggle even more than most. But I want you to live in the truth that God created you to live a life that is without fear..a life that is full of peace. I want you to stand strong on the promises He's made you. "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord. "Plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future." Bad things will certainly happen as we go through life together, but your Daddy and I are proof that God will get us through them.
Love,
Mommy
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