Hadley's Garden and Grieving

Our garden is definitely in the works!!  We have flowers planted, our roses are blooming, and the garden sign with her name on it came in.  Here are some pictures of the process...

 Briley LOVED being outside and planting flowers for her sweet sister!!

On Tuesday it was a rainy day and Daniel went outside to put Hadley's sign in and take pictures of her garden.  I'm so glad it had rained...it made her garden look beautiful.

Don't those flowers just look beautiful and doesn't my husband take beautiful pictures?  I just love going outside to play with Briley and look at them.  This week has been a good week.  Unfortunately, Daniel has been pretty busy at work, but lucky for Briley and I we have found ways to stay busy!!  We have friends in from Seattle, and we have had a blast getting our kiddos together each morning and finding fun things to do.   I will post some pictures from our week in another update.  

Last night, I finished my book, I Will Carry You, by Angie Smith.  It was AMAZING.  It was so comforting to read through another mother's journey of grief and how she is living her life now and keeping her daughter, Audrey's memory alive.

When she started talking about her grieving process I became really curious about it and particularly maybe where I am right now.  I remember learning about the process in college but couldn't remeber all the steps so I looked it up.  

Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was the first to introduce the 5 stages of grief in her book, On Death and Dying.   They are:

1.  Denial

2.  Anger

3. Bargaining

4. Depression

5. Acceptance

In her book (according to Wikipedia) a person will not necessarily go through the stages in that order or even experience them all.   

I started thinking about my Christian perspective on these stages.  There are many people in the bible who went through these stages of grief and I feel like God is laying it on my heart to research this more in my quiet time with him.  I look forward to what God is going to show me about this.  I wouldn't say I am in any particular stage right now.  I honestly think I have experienced all of them at least once already.  When I finished my book, I wrote down many verses that Angie mentioned to go and look up later.  One was Psalm 31:9 and it says,

⁹ Be merciful to me, LORD, for I am in distress;
   my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
   my soul and body with grief.

In this particular passage, David is asking God for help and God answers him.  David is even more stressed later on and God answers him again.  David was simply praying and trusting in his God and he knew HE would answer.

In the book, Angie also quotes from another book written by, Gregory Floyd.  He wrote this...

"Our faith gives us the sure hope of seeing him/her again, but the hope does not take away the pain".

I love this statement.  I know that God understands that I am in pain and grieving deeply for our Hadley.  He doesn't discount that or think I should "move on".  I won't ever move on and He knows that.  While I am here on earth without her, my pain will not go away.  But He and Hadley will take care of me and so will my family.  I will have good days and bad days, just like anyone does.  But I won't let my grief overcome me.  I won't let Satan tell me lies and bring me down.  

I'm going to simply continue to trust in Him and He will answer. 

In Christ's Love,