Today marks four years since Ethan was born. I read back over my blog posts from 2009. I can remember the pain behind those words, and I know that most of them were typed through tears. Most clearly, the final post written before his due date is burned in my memory. I was angry...and that's just one in the thousands of emotions that having a stillborn child causes. Looking back at the effects of his life and death on our family, there aren't words enough in this world to describe the way it infiltrated into every nook and cranny of our existence. It wasn't all good either. We suffered. A lot. For a long time. We suffered together, we suffered alone, publicly, outside in the park, in front of our families,and on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night where no one heard our sobs. There was anger, at each other, at God, the doctors, anyone we could find to blame, to make sense of the pain. We went down every road there was. And every one was a dead end. You see, there are some amounts of pain that you just can't figure out what to do with. You try to stuff it someplace, or dump it somewhere, anything to get rid of it, to not have to bare it yourself. And then you realize you can't. You can't run away, and you can't overcome it. There's no magic fix, and no good answers. There's just the mess you made carrying that huge burden around trying to dump it, hide it, or cram it somewhere that it doesn't fit, and then you realize you're broken, and everything around you is broken too. That's the place where we began to heal. To find God, in the pain like a tiny sliver of light shining through a crack in the door, and the wider we opened the door the more His light flooded our room. What we found was that if we let him, he would light up every corner of our room in ways that we never imagined. Neither of us had ever truly considered letting God take complete control of our lives. There's nothing like being shown how absolutely powerless you are, to convince you to stop trying to steer your own course. Today we are parents of six, living by faith. We still struggle on days like today. We still miss Ethan , still ask why us. But we look at our two babies who we are certain would not be here today if not for Ethan's life, the amazing experiences we've had and the wonderful people we've met along the way and are able to be thankful for him and what we learned from his short time here. God is good all the time. <3
