shades of gray

This past weekend was the 8th "birthday" of our baby Sebastian into heaven.  Briefly I held him in my hands, then reluctantly handed him over to the hands of God for eternity.  The memories return if I let them...holding him in the bathroom, baptizing him in the sink, bleeding, more bleeding, then hurrying to the hospital for a D and C, worrying that I would die during the surgery, standing at the cemetery for the funeral, and wondering if everything would always be a shade of gray.  This weekend as our family went to the cemetery to remember our little saint Sebastian, my heart was a very dark shade of gray.  Not because of losing Sebastian, because I knew he was happy with Jesus, but because my husband and I had been fighting earlier that morning, and despair was creeping in to a very old wound in my heart.  However, as I cried at the cemetery, I was able to cry out to my little saints--Sebastian, Christian, and Frances--and beg them to intercede for their mommy, their daddy, and their siblings still on earth.  Perhaps that is why God gave me the gift of three babies in heaven...because He knew I needed some special saints interceding for our family---to remind us that it will not always be gray, for someday we will be surrounded by the joyous light of God's love.  That truth encourages me to not lose hope and to keep my eyes fixed on heaven where there will be no more tears and no more shades of gray.

And for those of you who may have suffered the pain of an empty womb through miscarriage, here's a poem I wrote many years ago that may encourage you:

Womb Now Empty

Womb now empty
Eyes brimming full
Questions without answers
Why given then taken, tiny soul?

Emotions so myriad,
Heart too numb to share
Flee to an inner cloister
A few friends welcome there

Cradle to be barren
Tiny saint in heaven instead
Comforting is the thought
Still many tears are shed

Womb now empty
But heart stretching full
Soon in Heaven reunited
Mother and child, same goal