Faith, revisited.

**This post is a long time coming. I don't talk about my faith (or lack there of) very much because it's a VERY hard and emotionally-charged topic for me. There are feelings that I don't have words for and typically people don't understand/care to understand enough to keep from shoving their opinions in my face after I've tried so hard to explain myself. It usually ends up with them feeling disgusted with me for "not listening to reason" (aka their opinion) and me feeling wounded that yet another person doesn't get it and would rather "fix me" than simply care for me right where I'm at. 

Please, for the sake of my sanity, don't use this post as your chance to pour out your religious opinions on me. None of that is needed/wanted right now. If you believe God is who He says He is, you don't need to say a word.

Here is a great article to help you understand some of the religious things that are hurtful and feel completely wrong when you've experienced an enormous loss like mine. Please read it and realize you don't have to agree with it, you just have to know it feels very accurate to me. 

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People like to say, "God loves you". Especially to hurting people.  I think it helps you feel valuable when you hear the creator of the universe cares about you personally.I think it's supposed to help ease your pain when you know that despite the nightmare you're living, "God loves you".

It's basically the motto for Christianity.

For a long time, I believed it. For a long time, I found so much strength and comfort from those words. I was proud to be loved by the everlasting God.

I would tell Samuel, "Mama loves you! Daddy loves you! Jesus loves you!" and mean it.

After he died, everyone was quick to say, "God still loves you!" in an attempt to ease the tortuous pain.

But they don't know how it feels.

They don't know what it's like to sit in a hospital room, out of your mind in a blur of meds and stress and exhaustion. To hear the words "he's gone" and know it means your beautiful little baby is gone forever. They don't know how it feels to have put every ounce of your faith and hope in a mighty and powerful God for whom nothing - include a "little thing" called PUV - is too big a problem. To tell anyone and everyone that nothing is too hard for her God, that he is the miracle-worker, only to be left completely empty-handed and broken.

It's easy for them because they were not the ones who couldn't even hold their baby after all they had gone through to get him here. They were not the ones who had to watch on a computer screen as their sweet baby was loved and cuddled by a brokenhearted new daddy.To be a family separated during the time that should have been sacred.

They are not the ones who felt their souls rip apart in a way they had never understood could happen. They are not the one ones whose hearts shattered in a billion pieces - some never to be found again - and who cried out for days and weeks and months with a gut wrenching pain until there was nothing left, all while people around them acted as if nothing happened.

It's easy to say "God loves you" when you don't know what it's like to feel so completely devastated, abandoned and heartbroken you don't know how to keep going even one more second. To wonder where on earth this "God who loves me so much" is and was on that day. To wonder why we didn't deserve the healing touch that so many other people claim to have received. To watch as every single person we know has a healthy and perfect new baby to take home, while ours was stolen away "just because these things happen".

They don't know because they've never been in our place.

How can I feel loved when I feel so betrayed and abandoned?

How do you feel loved when your beautiful little baby was taken away?

It's hard to keep the faith when your very own experience goes against everything you've ever been taught about God.

It's hard to feel loved when everything in your life points to desertion instead.

For the past year, I've been battling with this. Fighting intensely with emotions like utter confusion and outrage, despair and even hatred. All this inside while people judge me for not having faith and push me to come back to something that no longer makes any sense.

All because they don't want to face that sometimes God doesn't show up. Sometimes miracles don't happen. Sometimes - for no reason - babies die. That doesn't fit into the nice tidy box of "how God works" (aka the "God has a plan/Everything happens for a reason" box). It's not comfortable to believe that at any moment your life can be shaken apart and there is nothing you can do to stop it. It's not okay to think Evil can have it's way with you at any time and there is no one who'll step in to save the day. Instead, we have to believe there's a plan.

At times, I just put this all aside because I had no energy to even think about dealing with it. It's too much to try to grieve and also try to make sense of the senseless or explain the unexplainable.

There have been times when I've raged at this so-called "loving" God for taking something so precious from me when there are so many people who have no right to be parents taking their healthy babies home. Do you know what it does to your heart to watch every person you know bring home a baby while your baby is missing? I do. It's worse than murder. At least when you're murdered, you get to be done. This just goes on and on and on. So I guess it's more like torture.

It's that feeling you get when you see something happening that's so completely unjust you have to cry out in sorrow and outrage. It's repulsive, maddening, sickening and rage-producing all at once. And the heart of it is sorrow. A deep relentless sorrow. Why not me? Why not my baby?


Where were you God!! I scream from the bottom of my soul. Where were you!! Don't you know how much we trusted you?! Don't you care at all that we hurt this much!?


There is no answer.

If you love us so much, why did you leave us? Why let death destroy our lives?

There is no answer.

So much emotion, so much confusion. So much abandonment.

I feel like a fool. I spent all my time saying how great my God was, believing deeply in my heart that he was our only hope, only find myself feeling like an absolutely moron when nothing came of it. I wonder how many people who had heard me say God would heal him, just shook their head and said, Yep, knew it when he died.

I've been put to shame and there's no one to fix it.

It's just another part of this nightmare. Not only did I lose the One I love {Samuel Evan}, but I lost the one I thought loved me.

It's a dark place when you realize you have no one to turn to. It's ugly when you wonder if maybe God really does love everyone...everyone except you. It's rejection in the deepest form. (And people wonder why I'm so angry and hurt...)

All this in my head and heart, all while being told from people who don't know that "God still loves me". 

So where do I go from here? That's the big question. How can I have faith in something that feels like a big huge lie. Something that failed so miserably when I put it to the test. How do you trust again when you've been let down completely and utterly, with no explanation, no apology, no excuse?

I have no idea.



But I'm trying.


I'm trying because it's all I can do. I've tried with all my heart to stop believing he exists. Deep, deep down in my broken and confused self, there is this inability to stop believing in God. I don't get it at all and none of it makes sense, but I can't stop believing.

So at this point, if God still loves me, he's going to have to show me. That's all there is to it. No amount of me trying to work it out in my head can get me anywhere. He's just going to have to do it.

I've been trying to do it alone and it's an ugly mess. I have to try something else. 

Nothing and no one can ever make it okay that Samuel died. Nothing anyone can do will make that right again. I will never be okay that he was sick or that he's missing. That's a wound that can not be healed completely this side of heaven. He is too precious to be explained away. His absence is felt to strongly to be overlooked.

But if I'm going to make it, I'm going to need something to believe in. Something to find strength in. Something to give me some sort of hope.

I've always believed that was God.

I want to believe in something.

I want to find a way to keep going. To live, for Samuel <3.