I should confess that I find stained glass can sometimes be a way to keep us disconnected from the earth and from our community, forming a visual barrier between those Inside and those Outside. But in moments like I captured here, the sun breaks through and throws a rainbow on the wall anyway. I think God is like that, breaking through the ways we are disconnected to give us glimpses of a more beautiful way to be.

May I find rest even if I don't feel rooted. May my vulnerability be my strength. May your Spirit renew mine. Amen.

God who wipes our tears away, intervene. The weight of waiting has left me spent, unable to focus. I have no control, no reasoning can get me out of this, and scrolling often makes it worse. I want you to swoop in and zap my struggles away. But you don't…

My grief is a strange and tangled tapestry. A picture mimicking a social justice icon just before a failed election is knotted with the picture of a mother excited about her baby’s future, not knowing her baby was already dead. The week after the election when I began to miscarry, my grief over my loss twisted up with my grief over the country’s political future. I remember spending a lot of time in bed with the shade pulled down and mindless television in the background. At times I felt like the sheets were knotted up around me like my dueling griefs over the future, keeping me in bed forever. But I did get out of bed. I did start over. I did both keep trying for another baby and trying to undermine the harmful policies the new president put into place.

As we wait for the results of this election, we lift up the children to you and ask that you open our hearts. No matter the results, teach us to welcome the children. No matter the results, guide us to challenge our representatives to govern for children, not corporations. No matter the results, remind us that we have a lot of work to do to help make earth look a little more like heaven. Amen.

This image is the ashy looking sonogram from a frozen embryo transfer. The story is a reminder, as the words of the Ash Wednesday ritual point to, that as creation dies and becomes ash, so we will die and become dust. We are mortal, God is not. Therefore our mourning and pain are not the end of the story, even if it feels that way to us, our sin is not the end of the story, even if it seems impossible to imagine our way out of it. From dust you are, to dust you shall return. You are a swirl of dust in the middle of a story much larger than yourself.

These were simple pleasures of God’s creation; pleasures I was grateful for after the difficulty of years of three miscarriages and numerous failed fertility treatments that have frayed my relationship with God. And now my favorite chicken was dying and I had to lead worship as though nothing was wrong.

A poem about being barren in a season celebrating miraculous birth.

Interfaith relationships have given me strength. The prayers of my Muslim friends comforted me when I lost pregnancies. Their homes are open to me to remind me of the presence of God as I prepare to embark on a new chapter in my life this spring. We are loving one another as the children of God we were created to be.

Today was another first birthday in an alternate timeline. Today was another day still without a living child to derail me from the series of anniversaries of loss that march throughout the year. Today was another day to choose: would I see grace, as faint as it can be, or would I only see the waste of loss?

I think what I am most thankful for, though, are my babies. It might seem strange to be thankful for fetuses whose non-viability has caused me so much pain, but I am. The joy those babies brought us when I was pregnant, as we imagined what they could be! Even now as I navigate the alternate grief timeline imagining what they would be like now, I still feel joy. Because I love them.

I went to my reproductive endocrinologist the day after my miscarriage. She was wonderful and comforting, especially after a traumatic experience in the ER. But as we went to leave, she handed me a summary of the visit, in which I discovered that under my medical history, these words were now listed:

spontaneous abortion

Our baby died, meanwhile life has gone on and it seems like everyone else is pregnant and I am supposed to be happy for them. I have spent much of the last week angry, enraged really, and done with everything. I want to run away. I just want Aaron and I to go off and be hermits alone somewhere where we are far enough away from other humans that I can scream whenever I want and not disturb the neighbors. But today was different. Today, on the day when I was trying to distract myself from death, I felt new life.

I am taking selfies with my cousins, who are both a foot taller than me even though they are only 14 and 16. We are wearing the same t-shirt that says, "Of course I'm awesome: I'm a Sullivan." The other adult leaders are shaking their heads at us, especially me as I scout for signs that say, "Sullivan County, Tennessee," so my cousins and I can get pictures together in our shirts under the sign. Before we left, people in the congregation asked me if I paid off Appalachia Service Project to get us placed in Sullivan County for our annual mission trip. We are all laughing despite our (at least the adults') exhaustion, and excited for the ways in which we will experience God on this mission trip. Only, every once in a while, I have this thought like a needle shoved in my brain: I should not be here.