She read it in like 2 days.
Last Sunday I had some time to kill and I had just rearranged my living room and cleaned my whole house so there wasn't anything pressing I had to do. So I curled up on my couch under my big front window and cracked open the book.
Angie wrote the book about the journey she and her family went on when they were told the baby girl she was carrying was "incompatible with life"
As you know I am not a mom, nor a wife. But I also follow Angie's blog and love the perspective she has on the grieving process and what she has been through. I love that she says again and again that her God is the same God he was before during and after the pregnancy she wrote the book about.
This book hit me right where I needed to be hit. Because recently I've been really struggling with just giving up and crawling in a hole.
I love this part:
I slammed my computer shut. I just felt like the wind had whipped through and knocked me down, deep down into a place I didn't want to be.Because I've wanted to hide. Ashamed and alone with all of this internal turmoil that I've been shoving down my throat with fun size candy bars and food I don't even want.
A place where the answers are fewer than the questions.
A place where God seems hidden, just slightly, by the shadows of this broken life. It is an easy place to get comfortable because all of your hurts are justified and the tears give way to doubt while you meant to pick yourself right back up.
We all grieve differently, and we all hide portions of it in places we wouldn't dare let others see. I have been reminded that I am daily battling an enemy who would love nothing more than for me to shove all my baggage into the crevices of darkness, slam the doors, and pretend I have it all together while I secretly fall apart. As I lie in bed at night and wonder what I could have done differently, he laughs victoriously....Hear me say this, please. I have believe him more times than I can say.
Angie quotes many people throughout the book, I especially loved this one by Henri Nouwen:
And so we wait patiently, if the situation requires it, watching for gifts to come where we are. Look at the wonderful, exuberant flowers painted by the famous Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. What grief, what sadness, what melancholy he experience in his difficult life! Yet what beauty, what ecstasy! Looking at his vibrant paintings of sunflowers, who can say where the mourning ends and the dance begins? Our glory is hidden in our pain, if we allow God to bring the gift of himself in our experience of it. If we turn to God, not rebelling against our hurt, we let God transform it with greater good. We let others join in and discover it with us.
Because in the end,
I can distinctly remember the way grief and joy danced together as if they had a right to.
It was always meant to fall from your hands. And He is glorified in the shattering
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