From the wealthy, to the unborn, to the hurting, to the poverty-stricken, God has placed a value on human life far above any other piece of his creation. This month a group of guest-bloggers will share a variety of stories that will cause us to think about the amazing value of life.
Thanks for joining our Sanctity of Life journey.
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Though I have not met today’s guest blogger, Elizabeth Flesher, I had the opportunity to spend many hours in a car with her mom, Mary Potter Kenyon, as we traveled together to and from a writer’s conference in Chicago a couple years ago. I was so encouraged by Mary’s faith in difficult life circumstances while on that trip and have since been encouraged my Elizabeth’s faith and “realness” on her blog Trenches of Mommyhood. The following repost from her blog is filled with the raw emotion of losing a child. Her son, Jacob went to be with Jesus in August. I can’t even begin to imagine her pain, but I do know the indescribable gift God has given me in my own children.
PAIN
Animals will often chew their own limbs off in order to get out of a trap.
I only wish it was that easy.
I would gladly chew off a limb to get away from this pain. I feel trapped. No matter what I do, where I turn, where I go this grief stays with me. There is no getting away from it – I need to trudge, waist deep, through it and hope I can drag myself safely to the other side.
Today I had to make the decision to put our dog to sleep. At 11 years old she was way past her prime. Arthritis in the hip, congestive heart failure. Today I found a large lump on her chest. While she had two similar lumps last year that turned out to be benign she is too old to go through surgery and this lump apparently was growing quickly (since I hadn’t noticed it before). She acted like she was in pain the past few days and that made up my mind. While I sat in the room with her, waiting for the medicine to take effect, I rubbed her ears and wondered how one comforts their dog as she’s killing it (I realize euthanizing is not murder, per se, but it feels like it).
That’s not to say that much of Jacob’s journey home wasn’t holy and beautiful. I think, and pray, that the medicine kept him pretty comfortable those two months.
But it was a solo journey for him, one that I couldn’t walk step for step with him. I couldn’t take it all away or make it better.
When a child lays dying, when a child dies, a piece of you leaves with them. Each of my children are literally a piece of me and one of those pieces is now gone. The pain of that is as physical as it is emotional.
If only the answer of escaping that pain was as simple as chewing off a limb. Because I know that would hurt a lot less.
