If you have known us for any length of time you will have probably read a version of this post before or heard us share this part of our story. We felt it important to share today because it is a big part of our family and shapes much of our learning and the journey that God has taken us on over the years. We pray it is helpful for you in whatever you have faced, are facing, or may face in the future.

Today is a precious day for our family, a day we remember and will carry in our hearts forever. Today would be our beautiful baby girl’s 15th birthday.

Our daughter, Cara, lived for 16 memory filled days before she passed away on 22nd May, 2010. I’m not sure we will ever truly find the words to describe our broken hearted pain on the day we lost our baby girl. But our God was, and is faithful, and over the days, weeks and months after Cara’s death, He began to put us back together again. Back in those days we vowed that we would grieve but not become grief. We knew that her death would always be a part of our story but we were determined that it wouldn’t become our identity. We weren’t totally sure how we would do all that, but we knew all things were possible with God. We knew that we would need to fight for hope at times, we knew we would need to choose differently than our emotions wanted to but we knew our God was a healer. There is so much more that we journeyed in those days, so many things that we had to process and walk through, many days that were dfficult, but that is not why we are writing this post. This post is about today. Because today we are no longer living in that fight; we are no longer having to choose to look for hope and we are no longer living in the loss. Today we stand here, healed. Our hearts are full.

God didn’t only walk with us in our pain, He walked with us all the way through our pain and into the future He has opened up for us.

We wanted to write this to declare that even the most painful loss can be turned into abundance by our Father. He opens that door to us, our job is to make the choices to walk through it.

Here are 3 things we found super helpful in getting to today.

1 – We chose to live in the mystery – We, like anyone else in these circumstances, wanted answers about our daughter’s condition and why she was suffering with it. She was the first child in our country, at the time, to suffer her condition and she was one of only 50 kids worldwide who had this particular type of issue. We prayed our hearts out when we first found out she was unwell in the womb. We’d seen other babies and other people healed of other diseases and sicknesses before and we believed that she could receive that same healing, however with each hospital appointment the news only got worse. We never got angry with God but we did ask him a lot of questions. We wanted to know why this was happening, what this meant, could we have done something differently, why didn’t she receive healing etc. One thing we learned in our pain was that these ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions weren’t helpful for our future.

The honest answer is that even if we had received an email directly from God detailing the answers to all these questions it would have made no difference to the pain we were experiencing. None of those answers would have changed our circumstance, none would have brought comfort. There are no ‘answers’ that bring healing in these moments, no ‘reason’ that magics away our pain. But there is God who loved us in the middle of it all.

We knew if we focused on looking for answers and reason we’d be focusing on the pain and not on God’s presence.

We simply trusted that God was good and we chose to live in the mystery. We know God didn’t cause Cara’s pain and it wasn’t His plan for her to suffer, but we didn’t understand why our daughter was’t healed while someone else’s daughter was. We had to be ok with living in that mystery, living with a lack of full understanding. Faith requires mystery, it requires a gap between what is happening and why it is happening. In those early days we didn’t focus on finding answers but on finding God and what we found is that He is particularly close to those who mourn.

2 – We chose to re-engage – In the early days after Cara passed away we just wanted to run away, not from God but from people. It was just so hard to be in public places. All we wanted to do was to stay indoors away from the world, watch TV, and escape from what was happening. For a few days after her death that is exactly what we did. However, we knew we needed to re-engage with the world around us soon or it would become harder and harder to do so. We chose to go to church the week after Cara passed, we chose to walk down our town and see people, we chose to return to work, we chose to re-engage. We’ll be honest, in community we found both the awesome and the awkward; people who were incredible and helped us, as well as some people who said things that were unhelpful. We encountered people who knew what to say and others who grasped for something to say and completely missed. We even had people avoid us completely because they were so worried about saying the wrong thing. We understood why people were doing that because we’d probably done the same thing to other people who had faced loss in their lives.

One thing we learned which initially felt unfair, but became helpful in our healing, was that we would need to pastor some people in how they dealt with the pain we were facing. That sounds like a confusing and mixed up sentence. Unless you have faced a similar story to someone it can be hard to help them in the depths of their pain. What should you say and what shouldn’t you say? Should you talk about something else or just focus on the pain? Is it ok to laugh about something you watched on TV or is that disrespectful? After a while we found it helpful to direct people about how to do this and bizarrely it was super helpful to us but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t without its road bumps!!!

The reality was we knew that we couldn’t do this part of our story on our own and that meant embracing all the parts that community brings.

3 – We chose hope – Those days were such a mix of heartache and hope….but we chose hope. The way we described it back then was;

It felt like we were carrying two things in our hands in those days. In one hand was the heartache, which was real, but in the other hand we carried hope, which was equally real.

Our faith in God was the foundation that we had built our lives on and the strength of that foundation was tested a lot in those days, but we were beyond thankful to have it. There were some days we honestly couldn’t even have got out of bed in the morning if our lives weren’t built on God. We’ve always understood that while the Kingdom story includes us it is not only about us. God is weaving something much bigger than each of our individual lives. There is a hope story at work that is way beyond what we can see and experience, and in a moment of deep grief that is a deep relief. We made a very conscious decision to keep hope alive in us.

We had a choice over whether heartache or hope would be our identity, our reality. We chose hope. Hope remains when all else has gone, it sees a way in the darkest moments and it is free from circumstance so it cannot be tainted by what this world can throw at it.

Today we are writing this living in the freedom of hope and no longer in the fight for hope. Today we are 15 years on and excited for all that is ahead. Today we are blown away at how God has healed our hearts and grown our faith beyond our wildest dreams. Today we are thankful for the days we got to hold Cara. Today we will celebrate our baby girl.

(something her younger brother is very glad about because it means he gets all the benefits that come with a celebration day; gifts, sweets and birthday adventures)