Tuesday's Trust - Trusting God's Heart...

Tuesday's Trust

Trusting God's Heart...

"We cannot always trace God's hand, but we can always trust God's heart."

~Charles Spurgeon

Picture, thanks to Happy Heart Daily Inspiration

Monday's Mourning Ministry - Whispering Hope ~Gloria Gaither and Larry Ford

Monday's Mourning Ministry

Whispering Hope

~Gloria Gaither and Larry Ford

Whispering Hope

~Intro by Gloria Gaither

~Sung by Larry Ford

Soft as the voice of an angel,
Breathing a lesson unheard,
Hope with a gentle persuasion
Whispers her comforting word:
Wait till the darkness is over,
Wait till the tempest is done,
Hope for the sunshine tomorrow,  After the shower is gone.

Refrain
Whispering hope,
oh, how welcome thy voice,
Making my heart
in its sorrow rejoice.

If, in the dusk of the twilight,
Dim be the regions afar,
Will not the deepening darkness
Brighten the glimmering star?
Then when the night is upon us,
Why should the heart sink away?
Then when the night is upon us,
Why should the heart sink away?
When the dark midnight is over,
Watch for the breaking of day.

Whispering hope,
oh, how welcome thy voice,
Making my heart
in its sorrow rejoice.
Making my heart
in its sorrow rejoice!


(The last verse of the song was not sung,
but it also has a strong and hopeful message:)

Hope, as an anchor so steadfast,
Rends the dark veil for the soul,
Whither the Master has entered,
Robbing the grave of its goal;
Come then, oh, come glad fruition,
Come to my sad weary heart;
Come, O Thou blest hope of glory,
Never, oh, never depart.

Whispering hope,
oh, how welcome thy voice,
Making my heart
in its sorrow rejoice.

Video: http://youtu.be/jBe4lADkE-c

Saturday's Sayings

Struggling...Amidst the Pain of Grief

~via Grieving Mother, M.C.

~~~

~via Grieving Mothers

~~~

My mom, she tells a lot of lies
She never did before.
From now until the day she dies
she'll tell a whole lot more.


She used to tell the truth, a lot
but now it doesn't matter.
I died and went to heaven,
her life is all a-shatter.


Ask my mom how is she.
She'll say, "Yes, I'm fine!"
She wants to beg "Please help me,
I can't find that child of mine!"


Ask my mom, how is she,
she'll say, I'm alright."
If that's the truth then tell me,
why does she cry each night?


Ask my mom, how is she,
she seems to cope so well.
She didn't have a choice, you see,
nor the strength to yell.


You think you know the feeling,
but this cannot be.
For even though you loved me,
you didn't love as much as she.


She will smile and tell you,
"It's ok God has a plan."
But she will turn away and cry
cause she just can't understand.


Tell a joke and she will laugh,
but she is not ok.
She wants to share the joke with me,
but it will not be today.


I watch her here, from Heaven.
Her distress disturbs my peace.
Will someone please take care of her,
and thus take care of me?


"Some day you will feel better."
"Yes I will." she lies.
She knows this will not happen,
until the day she dies.


"I was so lucky!
I had him all those years!"
(They passed in a minute,
I shed so many tears.)


Ask my mom how is she,
She'll say, "Thank you. Good."
She cannot tell you how she feels.
Oh, how I wish she could.


Ask my mom how is she,
"I'm find, I'm well, I'm coping."
For God's sake, mom, just tell the truth.
Just say your heart is broken.


Ask my mom how is she,
"I'm well, I'm good. And you?"
I'll shake my head in Heaven.
It simply isn't true.


She'll love me all her life.
I loved her all of mine.
But if you ask how is she,
she'll lie and say she's fine.


Her carnival is over.
She's stepped off the carousel.
But, to save you feeling badly,
She'll say, "Thanks, all is well."


My mom, she's not gone mad, yet
but, oh so very nearly.
Don't ask my mom how is she,
Ask how is she, really.


I am here in Heaven.
I cannot hug from here.
If she lies to you, don't listen.
Hug her, hold her near.


On the day we meet again,
we'll smile and I'll be bold.
I'll say, "You're lucky to get here, mom,
with all the lies you told!"

~Poem shared by Grieving Mother L.N.M.

"Like a Rosebud that never fully blossoms, You were gathered back into God's Heavenly Garden of Souls. Loving you always and forever..."

~Sweet memorial from Grieving Mother, A.M.B.

~~~

~The Compassionate Friends

~~~

Prayer and Grief

April 23, 2012 

Prayer is not about getting my way, but about getting myself out of the way.

This thought came to mind yesterday as I contemplated the wonder of prayer.

Prayer has been key to holding me up and holding me together as I grieve.

I’m celebrating that unlike during past crises, I haven’t backed off from praying. When my sister took her life 32 years ago, I battled with “Why pray?” My anger was, “I prayed for her healing from schizophrenia, and then she died.”

“She’s healed now that she’s in heaven,” people said.

The healing I wanted was in the here and now.

I felt the same way about my brother when someone said, “He’s in heaven—healed.”

But instead of backing away from God because I didn’t get my way, I’ve moved closer.

Here’s part of a prayer which I had in my computer devotions. I prayed it after my brother’s back surgery that brought him to a place of agonizing pain. “Lord, give him courage. Let him turn to You during this difficult time of recovery. Thank You for using this time for his good and for Your glory. Touch him spiritually and let him know that touch came from You.”

Lately I’ve prayed that prayer for myself as I grieve his suicidal death. “Lord, give me courage. Let me turn to You during this difficult time of recovery. Thank You for using this time for my good and for Your glory. Touch me spiritually and let me know that touch comes from You.” I’ve also prayed this prayer for family.

As I’ve stayed connected to God, praying the above prayer, Scripture prayers, pouring-my-heart-out prayers as well as short prayers like, “Calm me,” “Help, Lord,” “Please intervene,” God has touched me.

Prayer brings me from feeling perturbed to feeling peaceful. These verses affirm that:

…The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:5-7 NASB

Prayer truly is the pathway to peace and to getting myself out of the way, so I can see and sense God. I am calmed because in this place of connecting to Him called prayer, I’m reminded He is still my Lord and my Strength, and He knows how I feel.

He too has a loved One who died in a tragic way.

Are you staying connected to God through prayer despite grief and loss?

~via D.C.T., The Addict's Mom

~~~

~via Grieving Mother, T.C.

~~~

"As I rest my soul in the beauty of His love

I will clear my mind, set my affections high above

My eyes will be enlightened to see the wonders of His grace

In the spirit I'll see Jesus and His tender loving face

What glory I encounter as His peace flows over me

All else can pass me by for in Him my heart is free

His grace abounds like rivers rushing through my weary soul

Strengthened by His Spirit I'll reach the heavenly goal

Nothing shall ever separate or ever come between

Our perfect bond of love beyond my every dream

There is no one else beside Him I need each passing day

He excels above all gods He's the truth the Life, the way." 

~Lollita Faith~ ♥ ♥ ♥ 

As you speak these words into your life everyday may you feel His presence close beside you may they bless you and encourage you this day my sweet friends and have a blessed week ♥ Love you all ♥

~via Grieving Mother, J.L.

~~~

~~~

When your heart feels heavy from the burden of grief, it is good to seek out reminders that the gift of hope is alive within us. One of the best reminders of hope is the season of spring.

When you are weary from grief, take a rest outside by a babbling brook, or sit for a while under the starry sky. Spend a few moments watching the butterflies at play as they flit to and fro enjoying the gifts of nature. Listen to the sounds of the birds in the far off distance singing their songs of cheer as they glide through the early morning sky.

Take a close look at the blade of grass as it is pushing its way through the soil and be reminded that following every winter there is a spring. With spring comes the freshness of a new season. There are colorful bursts of flowers, sunrises that will take your breath away, and magical moments of serenity that will fill your soul with peace that can only come from our heavenly Father.

Grief continually presents us with all kinds of reasons to be lonely and afraid. But spring presents us with gifts of hope to carry us through our pain and fear. Embrace every moment of springtime and be filled with hope! -Clara Hinton

“Springtime erases all doubts that God is near and has not left me alone in my grief and fear.”

~By Wings of Hope Grief Counseling & Support Center

~via Grieving Mother, V.W.D.

~~~

~via Grieving Mothers

~~~

Friday's Faith - When Trying to Clean Her Room...

Friday's Faith

When Trying to Clean Her Room...

What's a parent to do

When the child for whom you're longing

Leaves behind only her belongings?

It breaks your heart in two.

Each little note she's written

Expressing her childlike heart

Gives your heart a wrenching start

For this child for whom you're smitten.

Each outfit that you touch

Takes your heart right back to when

Her life with yours was so tightly woven-in,

Yet now ripped apart, it hurts your heart so much.

Each stuffed animal that she hugged

Now just stares at you, forlorn

For the little girl who from them was so abruptly torn;

You hold onto them and cry while your aching heart is tugged.

What are parents to do who've been left behind

By the child they so dearly loved

Leaving only her belongings behind

When each and ev'ry one of them reminds them of her love?

When cleaning piles up from her room,

It seems to pile upon our gloom.

It's as if each pile we pack,

Piles upon our grief pile stack...

And yet our God provides a vision

Of our little girl in Heaven

Helping Him to build her Heavenly room

...With each loving stack we've packed in gloom.

As she builds with Him her room Above,

There's stack upon stack of our symbols of love

Surrounding her to comfort her

With current signs of our love for her.

And since she knows we'll rejoin her soon

She helps her God prepare our room...

Our God of Love makes all love's symbols fit together

As lovingly as a mother bird selects each nest's feather

To build His child a room of love

Reflecting Love's Spirit throughout her Home above.

And He reveals to us we too have a part

In continuing to build up our child's heart,

So now we embrace each loving symbol,

Knowing her Heavenly room will, such love, resemble

Till we too can gather There where all His children will assemble.

Our child, when we gather your things together now,

We will weep,

But we will also before our Father gratefully bow,

Thanking Him that in His loving arms you sleep...

Picture, thanks to Grieving Mothers 

Thursday's Therapy - How Do We Best Cope With Severe Loss and Trauma (Part Three) ~with Dr. Mary Baures

Thursday's Therapy 

How Do We Best Cope 

with 

Severe Loss and Trauma

(Part Three)

From A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON TRAUMA AND RECOVERY

By Dr. Mary Baures, Co-Producer and Author of Undaunted Spirits

Continued from last Thursday, the following are the next three Coping Behaviors and Attitudes that Dr. Baures says Help Us Come Back from Profound Loss:

4. Denial

Denial helps us pace ourselves through the process of adjusting to catastrophic loss. Without denial many of the survivors would not have been able to live through their traumatic experiences. 

If Arn Chorn-Pond had given vent to his anger and feelings of injustice he might have lost control and killed. He coped by denying his rage and humiliation.

In recovery from trauma, denial or a sense of unreality or numbness, a feeling of dread combined with a feeling of being afraid to know, can alternate with emotional overload (Horowitz, 1983). This cycle is aimed at restoring the self and accepting new realities. 

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (1985) similarly argues that adjusting to a new reality is a gradual process. Denial provides us with stability and coherence while we rebuild our basic ideas about life and incorporate them into our internal world. Before we have the resources to accept radical change, denial divides it into manageable doses.

Although he lost both his legs in Vietnam, Max Cleland could not accept that he would never walk again. Through an extraordinary effort, he did what doctors said could not be done: he learned to walk on artificial legs, although they caused him intense pain. He saw the pain as a further test of his endurance. His dream of walking kept him moving hopefully into the future where he rekindled an interest in politics; winning an election eventually gave him the self-esteem he needed to face the reality that he would never walk again.

When people are frightened by overwhelming feelings which disturb a fragile equilibrium, denial is a scramble to ward off panic. Panic is an extreme form of anxiety which comes from not knowing the world one is in (Rollo May, 1969). Trauma destroys our sense of security in the world, but in adjusting to the experience, denial allows us to let in only as much pain as we can tolerate at one time.

5. Hopeful Visions of the Future

The people whose story this film tells forged hopeful images of the future which served as a holding environment, gave them a model to strive for in their imagination, and, as they attempted to make their dreams a reality, gave them a respite from their present difficulties.

Max Cleland began to come back from a severe depression when he decided not to dwell on all the doors which his disability closed for him. Such a focus, he realized, kept him from seeing the doors which it might open for him.

Robert Lifton (1988), however, makes the point that survivors must look backward as well as forward in time, in order to assemble images and feelings that assert, however tenuously, the continuity of life.

6. Developing Skills

Survivors of trauma need to learn to accept those things which they cannot change; more importantly, they need to learn how to work a change where they can. 

To that end, survivors have to, and frequently do, acquire skills having to do with both work and relationships.

Before the trauma, many survivors had skills that seemed appropriate to their gender. Women were more skillful at intimacy and connecting to other people; men were more independent and aware of their agency. 

In dealing with the crisis, the men became more skillful at intimacy or communication, the women realized their own agency more fully and became more independent.

Prior to an accident which left her paralyzed from the chest down, Nackey Loeb lacked confidence. With her husband, she attended meetings at their newspaper, but she would always just sit in a corner and knit. 

The intense struggle of learning to function gave her a kind of self-assurance that she had never known before. 

After William Loeb died, the newspaper needed her and she was able to go in and use the skills she acquired in her own survival. 

Just as women seemed to gain confidence during their crises, men learned how to love and connect in new ways. 

Author Andre Dubus, who spent much of his life protecting those weaker than himself, had to reexamine his concepts of manhood after he became disabled. Before, masculinity was associated with physical strength, but after his body was badly damaged he developed new relationships with his children and learned how to take support from them.

http://www.cambridgedocumentaryfilms.org/media/guides/strong.pdf

Wednesday's Woe - How Do We Get Our Minds Right for This? ~by Tommy Prince

Wednesday's Woe

How Do We Get Our Minds Right for This?

~by Tommy Prince

How do you sufficiently prepare to face dismantling your deceased child's bedroom? How do you fold up each and every belonging of the child you so long for, but now only have the belongings she left behind? How do you touch every stuffed animal, every personal note she wrote, every outfit she wore without becoming dismantled yourself?

Furniture is coming soon. We've got to do something as there's not enough room to put more pieces of large furniture, at least as things now stand. Angie's parents have both died now, and they had wanted her to have some of their furniture and treasured possessions. The furniture has been divided among her parents' surviving children, and soon it will be transported to each child's home. Ready or not, here it comes...

Normally, with big projects facing me, I say, "I've just got to get my mind right." Working on the car, working in the yard, cleaning out the garage, etc. whether in the heat or in the cold, I somehow manage to tackle these exacting tasks one way or another. My son has asked, "Daddy, how do you do that?" And I always say to him, "I just have to get my mind right."

But this? This project involves much more than just getting our minds right. How are we to "prepare" for this major project? This project threatens to, and I'm convinced it will, rip our entire hearts out...

Picture of teenage girl dressing up in her room: http://www.webstockpro.com/BigCheese/BCP923-27.Teen-girl-dressing-up-Photo/

Tuesday's Trust - Discernment of Hearts

Tuesday's Trust

Discernment of Hearts

Has anyone noticed as you go through this severe grief involved in Child-Loss that you have developed a keener discernment of people's hearts? It's almost as if God gives us that "sixth sense" to see right inside a black heart with an almost x-ray vision when it presents itself. In giving us this ability to very quickly discern what people are showing us about who they really are, God is enabling us to self-protect the very broken heart that resides within us. 

When Jesus talked to the religious people who were doing many "good" things but whose hearts were as dark as the Queen of Spades, He did not tread lightly. In my father's King James Bible, I was reading again today of how Jesus spoke to such folks. Instead of His typical kind, loving, compassionate heart that He showed the sinners caught in sin, for example, we see His very harsh treatment for the judgmental, hypocritical, pious, but unloving hearts that many of the religious teachers and leaders of His day exhibited. His words to them in the King James Version is "Woe unto you..." over and over for their harsh, unloving actions toward those Jesus so loved. Of these dark hearts, Jesus said,

"This people draweth nigh unto Me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from Me."

~Matthew 15:8, KJV

Jesus had such discernment as He looked beyond what people were saying or doing, and looked straight into their heart and called it for what it was. So too it seems He gives us a version of this keen discernment for our own survival. We have been given a clarity of heart in many ways amidst our brokenness and weakness; it's as if a new strength is rising up out of our weakness in that we often are able to see what most people miss. It seems we can no longer brush by the callous treatment of the broken, the wounded, the handicapped, the less fortunate, for we are now firmly in their camp and know what it feels like to be kicked when we are down. All of a sudden we see such hard-hearted callousness for what it is and will not stand for it. As Tommy said tonight,

"I may have lost my child, but I can see people's hearts."

Things that are important to so many in our circles today are just not important to us anymore. And we often feel like we stick out like a sore thumb because we just will not put up with it any longer. We cannot afford to. We are already about as broken as we can be; we cannot tolerate a person with a vile agenda "piling on" their meanness and unnecessary abuse to our already broken hearts. And it seems to us, our loving God gives us the eyes to see, the wise actions to take, and the words to say when we see it coming. 

Black hearts beware; our hearts may be broken, but they are not blind.

Picture, thanks to 123rf.com

Monday's Mourning Ministry - You Are Not Alone ~Michael Jackson

Monday's Mourning Ministry

You Are Not Alone

~Michael Jackson

You Are Not Alone

~Michael Jackson

Another day has gone

I'm still all alone

How could this be

You're not here with me

You never said goodbye

Someone tell me why

Did you have to go

And leave my world so cold?

Every day I sit and ask myself

How did love slip away

Something whispers in my ear and says

That you are not alone

I am here with you

Though you're far away

I am here to stay

But you are not alone

For I am here with you

Though we're far apart

You're always in my heart

For you are not alone

All alone

Why, oh?

Just the other night

I thought I heard you cry

Asking me to come

And hold you in my arms

I can hear your prayers

Your burdens I will bear

But first I need your hand

Then forever can begin

Every day I sit and ask myself

How did love slip away

Then something whispers in my ear and says

That you are not alone

I am here with you

Though you're far away

I am here to stay

For you are not alone

I am here with you

Though we're far apart

You're always in my heart

For you are not alone

Whisper three words then I'll come runnin'

And girl you know that I'll be there 

I'll be there

But you are not alone

I am here with you

Though you're far away

I am here to stay

For you are not alone

I am here with you

Though we're far apart

You're always in my heart

For you are not alone (You are not alone)

I am here with you (I am here with you)

Though you're far away (Though you're far away)

You and me (I am here to stay)

For you are not alone (You are always in my heart...

For I am here with you

Though you're far apart

You're always in my heart

You are not alone (Not alone, No.)

You are not alone.

You are not alone

Say it again:

You are not alone

You are not alone

Not alone

Not alone

You just reach out to me girl

In the morning, in the evening

Not alone. Not alone

You and me 

Not alone.

No~

Together,

Together,

Just stop being alone

Just stop being alone.

Picture, thanks to Grieving Mothers
Video: http://youtu.be/ito5ELbyyxs