So much love

This week has been full of ups and downs, good days and bad and days where I experience anger, sadness, fear, peace, comfort and happiness all at the same time - those are the day that I think I'm literally going crazy.

But this has been a week where I have felt so loved, by family and friends and complete strangers. My friend Sarah has been an angel to me, reaching out in so many different ways, listening to me, guiding me, crying with me and laughing with me. She recently gave me a locket with Elliott's name and some other very precious sayings engraved on it. I feel so honored to be Elliott's mom and wear this for her. Our families call, email, and send messages letting us know everyday how much they are thinking of us and praying for us. I spent this week with my sister and had so many moments with her laughing like we did when we were kids. I really needed that, thanks Abbie. None of this goes with out notice and appreciation. So thank you!

But there is also one other group of people who have/are helping in ways I didn't expect I would find. It's the mothers who have walked in my shoes before. These women start out as complete strangers to me at first, but after just one email or one phone call I feel like I know them so well. They are honest and honesty is not always easy to hear during this time, but it is what we need. They share their stories or heartache, of babies lost and never forgotten, and they prepare me for whats to come. One woman reached out to me just a few weeks after she lost her twin daughters - just two weeks - wow, what amazing strength she has to comfort me right now. I hope I can be strong like them, I pray for strength every day and for peace when we have to say goodbye.

I read this in my devotional a while back, it didn't apply then but it sure does now.

If I am in distress, it is in the interests of your comfort, which is effective as it nerves you to endure the same sufferings as I suffered myself. Hence my hope for you is well-founded, since I know that as you share the sufferings you share the comfort also. 2 Corinthians 1:6-7.

Are there not some in your circle to whom you naturally betake yourself in times of trail and sorrow? They always seem to speak the right words, to give the very counsel you are longing for; you do not realize, however, the cost which they had to pay ere they became so skillful in binding up the gaping wounds and drying tears. But if you were to investigate their past history you would find that they have suffered more than most. They have watched the slow untwisting of some silver cord on which the lamp of life hung. They have seen the golden bowl of joy dashed to their feet, and its contents spilt. They have stood by ebbing tides, and drooping grounds, and noon sunsets; but all this has been necessary to make them the nurses, the physicians, the priests of men. The boxes that come from foreign climes are clumsy enough; but they contain spices which scent the air with the fragrance of the Orient. So suffering is touch and hard to bear; but it hides beneath it discipline, education, possibilities, which not only leave us nobler, but perfect to help others. Do not fret, or set your teeth, or wait doggedly for the suffering to pass; but get out of it all you can, both for yourself and for your service to your generation, according to the will of God.