A November 12th day rarely goes by without experiencing all the painful “What if?” questions that rear their ugly heads at me. No matter how many shows I watch, or how many chores I do, nothing numbs away the pain that this day brings about – the day we learned that our daughter’s heart had stopped beating in my womb.
What if I would have gone in to get checked out earlier that day? Could they have saved her? What if I’d been induced days earlier? What if her birthday was 11/11 instead of 11/14? What a difference those 3 days would have made. Then, November 12th would have gone down in the history of my heart as the day I brought my baby girl home from the hospital – the day all my hopes were fulfilled. Instead, my heart remembers so well that it was the day it was crushed. Shattered.
With each November 12th that comes and goes, I find Jesus picking up those broken pieces & bringing them to me tenderly. “Here’s another,” it’s as if He says. And then we weep together over the memory of it all.
I’m still surrounded by the pieces of my shattered heart, but all I see is the tenderness of Jesus moving towards me. All I feel is the warmth of his embrace. All I hear is the sound of him crying as we lean on each other with the pieces of my heart between us.
This time he asks if he can put one of the pieces back in, and I say yes. He reveals that this is the part of my heart that was shattered by the weight of guilt. So crushing is the guilt I’ve felt over her loss – by the fact that I was the one carrying her, and I was the one in charge of noticing her movements. As he’s done a dozen times before, he gently tells me it wasn’t my fault, that the enemy stole from me. “You’ve been feeling guilty about something that was stolen from you,” he says. “So I’m giving back that piece of your heart that’s been shattered by guilt.”
I welcome it like a long lost friend. I breathe in the hope and joy it brings, and I watch it find its place in the mosaic of my heart.
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