"He Held Her..."

Another Kisses from Katie post that just reached out and grabbed me this morning...Kisses from Katie.  Our circumstances are so very different, our experiences in motherhood so very different, and yet this spoke so loudly to me today.  

"I believe that He held her all the years that I didn’t...and I believe that His hand is on her still."  

I remember so vividly leaving the NICU for the first time, our tiny Ammah Grace tethered to all manner of cords, wires, and leads.  I remember distinctly the words I prayed, and I can almost still feel the tears running down my cheeks as I prayed them..."God, please hold her while I can't."  That prayer was to be repeated many times during the six weeks she was there...especially the day they called to say they were doing a spinal tap on my not-yet-two-week-old daughter in fifteen minutes, and I was 2.5 hours away. 

I remember praying it for our older (but still so little) children, and for my sweet and so very worried husband as I rode off in the back of the ambulance in a snowstorm 3 days before she was born, having no idea how long I would be gone.  "God, please hold them while I can't."  And again as I left for an indeterminate time in Little Rock to haunt the NICU in between those critical feeding times, each one hopefully bringing us closer to being together as a family again.  

I remember with an almost physical ache the realization just a couple of years later that during the most horrible time of one of my children's lives...I again wasn't there.   And this time I didn't know to pray those words, I didn't know to ask God to hold her while I couldn't.  If I had known...she wouldn't have been there at all.  

It's been close to five years, but it seems almost like yesterday.  I was sitting in the choir loft...which seems to be one of those places, like the kitchen sink, where God speaks to me most clearly...when suddenly I couldn't get the images...imagined images, but images that I knew were all-too-close to reality...out of my mind.  

I suddenly began grieving...hard...the fact that my child had been so horribly alone during such a traumatic time. {All the while keeping my "Everything's fine" happy church face in place...a near impossible necessity at that point.}  And then God reminded me...suddenly and surely...that she wasn't ever alone.  

He assured me, in a still small voice, that His promises {"Lo, I am with you always"; "He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart";  "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you."} are certain, and that this situation wasn't somehow exempt from that...despite my feelings.  It did not come as a surprise to Him.  He was there the whole time.  He gave me a complete {and completely unexplainable} peace that He was holding her through it all.

And He reminds me every day that His hand is on her...on all of us...still.  

His hand is on us still. 

"He is a good Father.  And I can trust in that." 

It is.  And He is.  And I can.

Always.