I am grateful for her life, but as her birthday comes around I realize how much of my grief is not just for her beautiful self but because she tethered us to joy and love and possibility when other griefs threatened to overwhelm us. When we had a living child, I was happy for Stella to have a baby too- not just me and Aaron. I hope he remembers her too. There was a long stretch in our lives when it was me, Aaron, and Stella, and not having her with us gives previous closed chapters of our lives this feeling of finality, or maybe just further distance. We are in new waters now, without that anchor. And these waters can be good, beautiful even, but everything is different. And we miss her.

I cried during the first hymn we sang, too, “For Everyone Born,” as we continued to make space for everyone at the table. One of the people who read Scripture was a young person from my conference, a child in a long line of United Methodist pastors and leaders, so her reading revealed to me the great cloud of witnesses at the table with us from before and who will be joining us in the future. We remembered our baptism, and my six month old, who has not yet been baptized, still played in the holy water, splashing around his tiny hand in awe as someone who had prayed for him before he or his brother were ever born held the bowl. He was later anointed with oil by a new friend, offering him another blessing of love. It was a beautifully crowded table- a big beautiful place where we felt so loved. My kids get to grow up in this kind of church- and I get to help raise others in this kind of church.

Today is the seventh anniversary of our first due date. I was still hopeful on that first due date that we would have living children, but after seven more months without a pregnancy that hope was fading. Of course, seven years later I do have living children, and they are so much younger than I planned or dreamed. But they keep me so busy and even distracted so that the grief is not as forceful as it was even though it is always present. Today we didn't have time to have cupcakes like I usually do; I didn't even talk to my older son about his lost siblings. Instead I tried to love that first lost baby by loving my living children. And there's a sermon in that.

I choose to relish this little weird memory because it helps me highlight the laughter and silliness of the day I ended up getting pregnant with a child who brings me deep joy. I choose to create connection to the ones I continue to grieve because I want my living children to fly free in the world knowing just how vast and unshakable love is. I write my own little story seeking to find my own within an infinitely larger story. Even if that perch has me hanging upside down.

On the day sunlight stretches to its fullest into the day, a shadow of a toddling baby girl laughing at the idea of sitting still for the picture gathers by my baby, two months old, holding up his wobbly head to look at me holding a camera. The baby girl lives only in my imagination. She never got to be more than a premature infant before all we had left were ashes we scattered on this very hill.

Iit is not lost on me that, though the ministry of preaching resurrection was first done by women in the Gospels, many people are confused by women clergy like my mom. I remember overhearing her called “‘That Preacher Woman” at a local diner, like there was only one preacher *woman.* However, she was not the first woman at Norrisville, and so she used to joke there that we need to remind boys that they could be pastors too. So many of my women clergy friends talk about how hard it was never seeing a woman in ministry let alone a young mother, but that was my life. One of her former district superintendents told me he once visited her church when we were toddlers and one of us waddled up to her in the middle of a sermon wanting our diaper changed! My child has done the same to me

A year ago next Tuesday, we were due to have a baby. I was supposed to be as big then as I am now, but that baby had died back the November before, our fourth loss for a third different reason. But, as is pretty obvious now, we tried again. When I told my neighbor, who is also a pastor, that we were pregnant again, he told me I was brave. I can tell you I didn’t feel brave. I just felt desperate and didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how to give up- and that sounds like a good problem to have, right? Except Mary Magdalene didn’t know how to give up but she didn’t have hope either, because when she saw her Lord die she thought the only possibility to be near him again was to go to his tomb. Sometimes our seeking of God, or love, or hope, or new life is stymied. We keep seeking, but we have lost the imagination for what we are looking for.

The story of Jesus' crucifixion does not answer this question. God doesn't reassure him or rebuke him. He feels forsaken in Matthew and Mark's gospels, and then he dies. We can skip ahead to the resurrection, but most of us who feel forsaken are still waiting on resurrection ourselves. The forsakenness feels more real than the new life. In fact, I've often felt like the forsakenness *is* the new reality of my life. But therein lies the grace, or maybe the paradox where grace is possible? We are not alone in our forsakenness. For even Christ felt abandoned. Even in feeling alone, we are not.

Mary knows what Jesus could have done if he were with Lazarus before he died, but notice that even in her anger and disappointment and grief, she kneels before Jesus. When her sister declares that Lazarus would be alive had Jesus been there earlier in the same chapter, she is the one who proclaims him to be the Messiah.

And Jesus weeps. But that’s not the end of the story. Our laments never are. Our laments are ways to get us to take a breath and get through to the next part of the story. The practice of lament draws us into more honest and real relationships with God, that can teach us to trust God to get us through.

Telling your story makes such a difference.

You don't owe anyone your story, of course. You don't need to produce your trauma for someone else to consume it. You don't need to stand up in front of a group of people or post about it on Instagram. That's not what I mean. What I mean is, when you are sitting in someone's living room, and they share with you a struggle they had 3 years ago or 25 years ago or 50 years ago, and you make a connection to your own life, often there is healing in that connection.

Remind us all, God, that your love is shown to us in many ways, through many people, and help us be messengers of that love today. Amen.

My daughter was born just after my belly popped. I texted friends about how I couldn't stop looking at myself in the mirror, reveling in these curves announcing new life. Those curves have sloughed off into pouches of fat, clinging to my hips as though in a botched attempt to comfort me. My body killed this baby, and yet it carries the weight of her like a souvenir.

My guiding scripture verse as a pastor and a Christian comes from the Gospel of John 10:10, where Jesus is talking about himself as a gate protecting the sheep from harm, and he says, “I came that they might have life and have it abundantly.” People who are against abortion are often labeled as pro-life, but in my ministry and in my own fertility journey, I have learned that the decision to have an abortion is often about seeking that abundant life. Access to abortion, especially for those of us in the pregnancy-loss community, is about protecting women and families from further harm in terrible circumstances. Subjecting us to the hurdles, humiliation, and potential physical injury of restricted abortion care in a situation where many of us are already in shock and grief is immoral. The politicalization of abortion only hurts families. 

For National Infertility Awareness Week, I mainly just wanted to communicate how much being barren sucks. Every part of my life feels poisoned by infertility and loss- my relationships, my faith, my joy, my hopes for the future. There isn't any silver lining, and I'm not a better person because of any of it. But all I can do, all any of us can do, is keep persisting. So I will.

Last week was my daughter’s due date. One of my daughters’ due dates. She was the second daughter I had hoped to name after Mary Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles who was the first to share the good news of the resurrection. The first daughter announced herself with a positive pregnancy test during Holy Week and the second was due during Holy Week. But both of them are dead, and I feel their losses so profoundly I could not name them after the one who brought good news. These daughters of mine were not witnesses to resurrection; they merely seeded in me doubt that new life will ever be possible. They are not children through whom I praised seeing God; instead, their deaths sent me to my knees screaming into the void. And their deaths, even the one that happened four years ago, have me analyzing every moment from my memories asking what I have done to deserve this.

Our church is using Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie's book of devotions, *Good Enough,* in small groups, and today we talked about her devotion on the The Velveteen Rabbit, so I reread the children’s book by Margery Williams (and you can reread it here: https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/williams/rabbit/rabbit.html). The Skin Horse's monologue on becoming real that is cited in *Good Enough* is powerful, but as a multiple-time loss mom, I was fixated on a question about love and realness that comes later in the book, a question before the Velveteen Rabbit must be burned after the Boy gets Scarlet Fever: “Of what use was it to be loved and become Real if it all ended like this?”

At funerals, I remind people that grief does not follow a timeline, that it is measured not by time at all, in fact, but by love. Love and grief standing hand in hand is a poetic image, giving hope that love in loss is still beautiful. But on day 118, I am not really feeling the beauty. I am just feeling like I have been trying to dam up that love, make it power the rest of my life with another dead child, but the dam is too broken and leaky and I am stuck wondering, if day 118 feels so horribly lonely, how can I make it to month 118?

I try to stop up love for my dead daughter fearing I will shatter without it- for how can I replenish any of the love that spills out? There have been too few memories with her, too many days she has been gone and too many more to go. But that isn’t how love works either.

What is the point of seeing glory this one time, of letting it transform us, only then to see just how wrong life can get?

But if “awe is an exercise” (32), then it is something we can experience even in the middle of that wrongness, giving us the courage to keep transforming, keep glowing even, in the worst of times. I come back to Cole Arthur Riley yet again, when she says, “Practicing wonder is a powerful tool against despair” (37). I thought this yesterday after a rough night of grieving. But even in the grief, I couldn’t despair because I found myself sitting on my living child's bed, in awe of his perfect sleeping face.

Why should we care about Ukraine? This post keeps going around my social media after Putin has invaded, and, while it gives some helpful information situating Ukraine in the larger world, it makes me super uncomfortable. Why should we care about Ukraine? Because we should care any time a child is living in a place where there is shelling. Because we should care anytime politicians, who will experience not an ounce of discomfort, put people in their country at risk of hunger due to sanctions and at risk of retaliatory violence. Because we should care anytime nationalism poisons a country to enact violence against others.

Our Christmas baby showed us the power of love, even a love crammed into the last possible moment.

Maybe one day I will feel that way about Autumn too, trusting in the power of love crammed into 118 days between a frozen embryo transfer and a doomed birth. Maybe that is the promise of the fox blanket: that love is not nothing. Love gives something.