I was alone. That day, after I had given birth and then had that life end in my hands, I was alone. I still had one tender heart beating below my own but I felt so alone.
My husband had left to make some phone calls. The first time he had left my side in over a day. He performed a job I don't think I could have done: informing loved ones that a sweet life was over and that we still did not know the fate of the other.
While he spoke words of deep pain, I laid in a bed, completely weak and utterably dependent on others to move physically and I wept. I cried out in
anger and confusion and a hurt that surpasses anything I have ever felt before in my life. I felt so alone. The most alone I have ever felt before.
I! HATE! YOU!
Those three words, silently screamed, were directed at the God I had prayed endlessly to since we had learned the diagnosis of our sweet girls.
I felt like He had left me. Never to be seen or felt or trusted again.
Where was He? When I needed Him most in my life, where had He gone?
A few hours later, when I was weak from the medication and the emotions and the wrestling, I saw two roads lay before me.
They were both dark. They were both treacherous, unpaved, unknown roads. Both consumingly scary.
One road, I could travel down myself, completely alone.
The other road, was just as dark and as scary, but I would have Someone with me.
It was my choice.
And as angry and as hurt as I was with the One I had called my God, I chose the latter.
It wasn't an easy decision.
I knew deep in my heart that there would be no way I could do this alone. I had never seen anything so black, so desperate before in my life and I knew I needed someone.
Someone much stronger than I. Someone much wiser.
I made a choice that day and I reached out and grabbed tight to His hand.
It wasn't an easy thing to do.
This thing called Faith rarely is.
It is a daily choice and some days it is so hard.
We sometimes don't have a choice when it comes to circumstance but we
ALWAYS have a choice in how we will respond.
My response was, and every day since, as been to choose to trust The One who sees it all. To trust that, even now, He can perform a
miracle. He can turn the ugly to beautiful.
I choose to trust.
On the road I didn't choose to take, I am choosing to trust in the One who calms all storms.
I've been faced with choices before, just like all of us have. I haven't always made the right choices. Responded in ways that were good or healthy. Some of the choices have led to more pain.
Our struggles with infertility left me bitter and angry. There were baby showers of close friends I couldn't attend. People didn't understand and I couldn't explain. But I know I must have hurt people.
I didn't realize the depth of resentment and bitterness until I held my first born in my arms. I became so ashamed with how I had let that situation . . . that trial affect me and make me into a person that I wasn't, that I made a
promise to God,
"I promise You, the next trial You place before me, I will trust You. I will let You make me into something You desire. I will allow You to make it something beautiful."
To say that I remembered that promise the day I held Emmerson and Vivienne would be a lie. I didn't. I couldn't.
I didn't remember that promise for a few months. But I had already made my choice.
I was going to choose to walk this road with God.
A few months later, when I remembered my promise, it made that daily choice a little easier. I had made a promise.
And because when I made that promise a few years previously, I knew in the marrow of my bones, that the beauty of God trumps everything else.
He gives beauty for ashes.
There is always a story in a trial. I want this trial, this story to be one that honors my girls and makes them proud to call me mom.
And I want my promise to my God to glorify the majesty of the King.
"We only are broken and this is beautiful: in brokenness, we are instruments in the hands of the Wounded Healer."
Ann Voskamp
One Thousand Gifts
Stephanie
