I wanted to share this here, just because…well, I wanted to. I will be doing a more in depth blog story later. People ask me why I do these sessions. Well, here’s why.
This is Christian Jacob. He was diagnosed with Trisomy-18 a short time before his birth. This family has touched my life more than any other I have ever come into contact with, save my own.
There is a show, then a letter from his Mom to him, then her story of how this had affected her.
Get some tissues.
The letter…
My Sweet Baby Boy,
Your daddy and I lost you before you could breathe the air of this world. The days and months leading up to your birth were perfectly planned by our Almighty God. But before I tell you about the last days of your life in my womb, I wish to tell you about the first few months you graced us with your presence. First of all, I want you to know that I loved being pregnant with you. Despite the morning sickness and the physical exhaustion, I was so very happy! I could not wait to meet you! I spent so much of my time daydreaming of what your sweet face would look like and wondering who you were destined to be in life. My prayer for you since the beginning (which is a prayer that I say to your big sister and brother every night before they close their eyes) goes something like this, “Dear God, please protect my little baby.” “May he/she grow up to be healthy and strong and do wonderful things in your Name.” Amen.”
A few days before I was scheduled to go to the doctor to find out if you were a boy or girl and if you were meeting your milestones, I told your daddy that something was not right. Somewhere deep within me, I knew that God was either going to take you or me. I know now that God was preparing me for the worst possible scenario. The doctor told your daddy and me that you had a disorder called Trisomy 18. I had no idea what Trisomy 18 was at that time but I felt that it could not be all that bad. Boy was I ever wrong! What the doctor proceeded to tell us was that you had 0% chance of living and if you did, you would be severely disabled and would not live long. I was simply heartbroken. How could this be? How do I go from preparing for your life to preparing for your death? Initially, I was so angry with God for destroying the dreams I had for you my child! Looking back, my anger was in vain because you were never truly mine. What I now realize more than ever before is that children are given to us as gift from God wrapped in a bow, but as parents we are given a Great responsibility by God to love, protect, and discipline them. We are given the task to raise our children to learn, acknowledge and love God at the deepest core of their being so that when they are adults, they are equipped with the ability to discern the Will of God for their own lives. These precious gifts from God are not ours to keep but rather to give back to God in due time. Christian, your time came much sooner than most but this does not make you any less significant. In fact, in many ways it makes you so much more special. God has already used you my son in ways that I cannot even begin to fathom.
I relished every moment I felt you move within me. Your mighty kicks and flips gave us to believe that you were a strong baby boy and that someone how you were going to beat the odds. I knew deep within me that for some reason God brought you into our lives and that in time, God’s Truths would be revealed to us. Until then my son, your daddy and I must chose to trust in Our Creator.
When I found out the devastating news of your diagnosis, I cried a river a tears. I still cry for you my baby boy. Immediately, I gave you the name Christian Jacob. I wanted your initials to be CJC, just like your daddy. Your middle name “Jacob” came to me – I believe that God anointed you with this name. Jacob in the Bible wrestled with an Angel believed by many to be God. He wrestled with this angelic figure who begged Jacob to let him go but Jacob told Him that He would let go until He was Blessed. My Christian Jacob, I cannot help but believe that you continued to fight to live until God Blessed you.
Even in the end, your heart rate would increase every time I spoke. The Nurses said that you were fighting to stay with me and encouraged me to continue talking to you. However, my sweet baby, I knew it made no difference because it was obvious that God was calling for you. The night I was in the hospital, I knew at 2:30am that in the silence of the womb, your soul had exited through my mortal body. I cried for you, do you remember? I had an image of you being held in the arms of those loved ones that your daddy and I have lost in months and years past. I try to understand where you are and who you are as a heavenly being. Are you an infant, a child, a young or elderly man? What will you be like when I meet you one day in that Special place?
We realize in time that we will learn how to let you go and let God have His way, right now we grieve for what could have been. One day my son your daddy and I will have the long awaited opportunity to see you, to embrace you, to hear you and to kiss your sweet face. Until then, we will hold the memory of you close to our hearts.
Love,
Your mommy and daddy
Cindy’s words…
My Words
You may ask is she mad at God for taking her baby? You bet I am. I’m mad and frustrated and annoyed and irritated and perplexed, and yes, I love God, deeply, but, as in all other relationships, if to know Him is to love Him then it follows that knowing Him might often make you want to give Him a swift kick in the pants, as well.
So am I mad? Sometimes. If God didn’t ordain Christian’s sickness, if it wasn’t His design, why in the world did he have it? Because I live here in the South, it’s like asking why I have a Southern accent. It comes free, courtesy of my locale. He wasn’t sick because I needed to learn a lesson. He wasn’t sick because I didn’t do enough things right – or too many things wrong. He was sick because we live in a broken, fallen world and until Jesus comes back, things are just going to keep going wrong. Not all the time – that’s when the glimpses of Heaven come in. But quite frequently, Life is truly one long dysfunction. Only by God’s grace – getting what we don’t deserve – do we ever see any good at all. I bargain with God a lot. I tell Him that this was it. This was my quota of “bad stuff.” And I mean it. But the reality is that as long as I’m here, the bad stuff’s going to keep on coming. All I can do is pray the packaging looks a little different and that Jesus will hold me up until He takes me home or returns. It sounds like a pretty raw deal. But that’s through human eyes. If we could see differently, we’d think differently.
I find myself thinking that Christian Jacob’s existence was all a dream. I struggle to even say those words – while one part of me rests in the emotionlessness, the other fights against it, longing to feel, even if just for a moment, what I know I can – what I do – in my harder moments. Sometimes I think this is what keeps Christian here, what makes his existence a reality. It’s foolishness, and I constantly comfort myself with the notion that, were he alive and old enough to do so, he would tell me that my needing to feel nothing right now – my needing to go out and do the silly, trivial things of life and simply to function on some level of normalcy – is okay. That even feeling like his existence in my womb and his delivery was a dream is okay. I believe he’d say these things because I would say them to my own mom.
God has exchanged my sorrow for elation, my weeping for dancing, my agony for peace. I recognize that God often first gives us what we do not know we need before He gives us the things we long for. For we “do not know the thoughts of the Lord; we do not understand His plan” (Micah 4:12).
Be blessed today, and everyday, as you open your hands to receive what the Father will lavish upon you. And may He grant us a thousand lifetimes in eternity with which to know one another and to rejoice in His goodness to us.
He is making all things new. It is immediate, and ongoing. He was, and is, and is to come! There is an end to this story. There is a purpose. And there is calm behind the chaos. He is making all things new. It is happening in those who believe, and He is urging us on in the metamorphosis of the world around us. Breathe in and know: change is coming.
Just for me:
First there was the couple who hoped their twin boys would just get along. Then there was the guy who hoped the giant boat he was building really would end up needing use in the end. There was an old man who hoped God would make good on His promise to bless him with descendants that outnumbered the stars. There was a mother who hoped her infant son would be spared when she placed him amid the swaying waters of the Nile. And there was an entire nation of people who hoped that someday, someday, they’d be looking at the soil they were meant to inherit – not foreign ground they were forced to work.
Hope is woven through every story and life in the books of the Old Testament. But not so much in word as in – something else. No one has to say they’re hoping for a child or a spouse or their father’s blessing or deliverance or purpose or rescue. It’s just there, in the lines that sculpt their faces in our minds as we read, that make them as real today as they were all those years ago. We know they hoped because we do, too, and we know that we would had we been in their shoes.
But the Bible doesn’t think of hope as we do. The Bible-kind of hoping is different. If you look for the word ‘hope’ in the back of my Bible, for instance, the verb hope, the first mention of it isn’t anywhere near any of these stories. Not that hope didn’t exist. It just seems hope, in its purest, most God-given form, was meant to make an entrance on a stage a little more bizarre. A stage where it would seem totally inappropriate, in fact. God chooses to first place this verb – ‘hope’ – before us in the book of Job. A book I have hardly ever read and do not particularly enjoy reading. A book I read a few days in a row about a year ago and now am happy to pass over. But a book that, strangely, the Father seemed to feel was absolutely perfect for the introduction of the idea of Biblical hope. And He ties it to these words that come out of Job’s mouth: “Because even if He killed me” – lovely – “I’d keep on hoping.”
God loves us. And He cares deeply about every detail of our lives. But He also wants us to grow up. There are things in us that we don’t have to mature into; they’re just a basic part of our DNA. It’s not that these things are always wrong, but they aren’t the best. The best was what we were created for, but we’re now a part of a human race that will always be flawed until God sets us right again. And part of our journey, if we decide to follow Christ, is to figure out what the “best” things are – what we were created for. Interestingly we aren’t alone in the figuring out – God longs to show us. But it does require some action on our part. Some reaching for the best. Here’s an example: we are all born as dreamers. But it would seem that sometimes, God doesn’t care about our dreams. We don’t often get the job we’ve always dreamed of, or the spouse or the kids or the paycheck or even the things we’d label, on our own, as more worthy than others. Some of us dream of going into ministry only to find our efforts thwarted at every turn in the road. It’s far easier to swallow God’s blatant rejection of your dream to own a BMW than to see Him dispel your dreams of adopting internationally. It doesn’t make sense. If what we dream of is good, dignified, holy even, then why does He say no? Because we can dream without Him. There is something harder to do than dream, something deeper and grittier and much more costly. Hope. It is the better of the two, and it is one of the bests we as believers are called to.
But hope is not something we are born with. It is not a part of our basic DNA. We are actually disinclined to hope, and this is because we are, in our human nature, creatures of fear. Hope is the opposition of fear – but not in an antonymical kind of way. In an opposing, force vs. force kind of way. God doesn’t give us a spirit of fear – but we inherited it when we were born into sin. God tells us that hope is one of the three things that remain – beside it are faith and love – and what remains is certainly not of this world or of this flesh. What remains is His entirely. And without Him, we cannot taste or see or understand it. We like to use the word ‘hope’ because we intrinsically know it means something greater than ‘want’ or ‘dream’ or ‘wish’. But we don’t know why. When I learned I was pregnant, I felt the Father extending it to me. I was totally battered and entirely furious with Him and I honestly wanted nothing to do with it, but like the starving child whose pride has finally worn thin, I begrudgingly took HIs hand and held within my own something entirely new to me. I was hesitant at first because fear, as horrid and draining as it is, was a comfort. It made me feel sane, since fear is what so many seemed to think I should feel. And it made me feel powerful, since as long as I feared I was in control. Fear kept me from looking like an idiot. But, like I said, I was starving. So I reached out and took hold of Hope. And it was awkward. It still is. Hoping does not come easily. But I can do it now. Because, in some ways, He killed me. Or, more specifically, He killed my dreams. It was Him, after all, who let me starve.
Let God give you Hope. It will not feel good. Mostly because He usually has to strip something good away. But it will, for lack of a better word, blow your mind. God will absolutely blow the doors off of what you think He wants to do for you. When Paul writes to the church in Corinth that “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9), he isn’t making it up. And he isn’t just talking about Heaven. There’s so much to life that we often miss because we hold onto what we are convinced is the best. Let God give you the best. Stop trying to figure out how to get your hands on it. Stop trying to be good enough or to think in the right way or to accept where you are and what life has handed you (frustratingly, reverse psychology doesn’t work on Him). Stop trying. Hold out your hand and ask for Hope.
A visitor from Heaven
If only for a while
A gift of love to be returned
We think of you and smile
A visitor from Heaven
Accompanied by grace
Reminding of a better love
And of a better place
With aching hearts and empty arms
We send you with a name
It hurts so much to let you go
But we’re so glad you came
We’re so glad you came
A visitor from Heaven
If only for a day
We thank Him for the time He gave
And now it’s time to say
We trust you to the Father’s love
And to His tender care
Held in the everlasting arms
And we’re so glad you’re there
We’re so glad you’re there
With breaking hearts and open hands
We send you with a name
It hurts so much to let you go
But we’re so glad you came
We’re so glad you came