Hallelujah Sunday

It’s been 7 months since March 7, 2021 – Hallelujah Sunday.

Seven months since we sang and sweated and soaked our facemasks with tears every time we forced ourselves to sing my daughter’s name to our God. The 9am service brought rows of our family members. The 11am service brought friends and doctors and nurses and neighbors. I don’t even remember the 5pm service. I heard the same five songs, stood up and read the same 589 words from my sheet of paper, heard Bryan tell the same story about our daughter’s life. By the end, I was admittedly numb, but I’d like to tell you about somewhere in the middle when God took ahold of my heart and said to me, “Look around you. Look at how my people are bearing this with you. You are not alone.”

Today, I watched the church livestream from March 7 on YouTube. It took me a while to find, but I’ve included a link here, in case you didn’t get to see it. Watch Hallelujah Sunday here

The livestream is from the 2^nd service. As I watch it now, I am in awe of all the players who worked so hard to give us this day honoring our daughter and our God.

There’s Anthony.

Anthony’s baby daughter, Amelia was born three days before this service. Amelia and Hallelujah were supposed to be friends, just like the rest of our kids. 

When Anthony’s wife told me she was pregnant, I secretly rejoiced on a greater level, knowing I too was pregnant. We didn’t tell them til months later, and we were so excited to have almost identical due dates. Our joy was short-lived as we both grappled with the October news that our baby was not going to be ok and their baby would never get the best friend we had hoped for. We were in small group together, moms group together, and it was a big burden for them to carry as we still wanted to celebrate their miracle, but we were grappling with our trial at the same time. I can’t begin to process how hard this must have been for them. To watch people you love suffer is a choking kind of helplessness. And to see some of your greatest fears (health of your children) play out in front of you is a horrible thing. I won’t pretend to know what Anthony was processing on that Sunday, playing drums (my favorite instrument) to songs praising God for a dead child on the 4^th day of his own daughter’s life. I don’t know if he’d slept. I don’t know if he’d had time to practice those five songs. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I know his heart was heavy, and that he was only there because God knew I needed him to be.

There’s Blane.

Blane has served alongside Bryan and I through the years at CKC and at Grant. He came into our lives the year Cayden was born and got saved and baptized the year Piper was born.

He spent Christmas with us that year. 

A four-year-old Piper would eventually drop petals down the aisle before Blane’s bride, Rachel, as she walked to him in their 2017 wedding. 

Youth group events, mission trips, worshipping together in so many different places – Blane (and his better half, Rachel) have become part of us. 

In 2019, while attending another Epic wedding in Hawaii, we got to meet some of Blane’s family and even visit his Grandma’s house on the beautiful western side of the island.

 It was a gift to step foot on their family land he has talked so much about and meet the people who raised him. As I mentioned, Blane’s wife Rachel has also become a constant for us. Rachel can be counted on to show up. Always thinking of others and wanting to help, she has showered us with selfless generosity in more ways than one over the past nine years.

Watching the replay of Hallelujah Sunday, I am struck with the weight Blane carried on this day to make it a day, not just about our daughter, but about our God. To get up and sing when your heart is breaking is something supernatural, I think.

There’s Kevin.

Kevin is a quiet soul, the talented violinist with unruly hair and a sway to his play. In June 2015, Kevin was part of the worship team that played “Everlasting God” for us at a Sunday service where we honored the short life of our first son, Hunter, who died in utero at 14 weeks gestation. My brother helped the worship team record the song and I made a video for Bryan for Father’s Day 2015. Kevin is in that video, playing his violin. Kevin has been around for a long time, in the world in which my family exists, where friends come and go every 3-4 years. Living in a college town can be hard. But Kevin has stayed. He has built houses in flip flops (or as Hawaiians say, “slippers”), he has helped replace doors and floors and laid patios at our house, he has spent holidays with us and gone on mission trips with us. We've loaded moving trucks for church families, caught crawdads, and one time, we even had a guy with a gun threaten us. That's a story for another day.

Kevin is the guy I call when I need someone spry to climb up on a roof to sprinkle way too much Moss Out and clean out gutters for an elderly couple at church. And he’s the guy who plays the songs I love so beautifully on his violin. Songs that hold power over my day, that stop me in my busyness when they come on the radio.

When I hear these songs, I see Stephen playing the piano intro and Kevin filling in buildup to the bridge with mournful pulls of bow on string. I no longer hear Lydia Laird’s voice when “Hallelujah Even Here” starts to play, it’s only Jamie’s voice. I see Jamie’s head bow and shoulders sag during the end of singing “Forever,” when all of it catches up to the 22-year-old and she just can’t finish and Lisa steps up to the microphone to finish singing “Forever He is lifted high, forever He is risen, He is alive.”  I remember sitting right in front of Jason playing bass that Hallelujah Sunday. Watching the livestream now, I see how he praised God with eyes closed more than normal that day, I think because his line of sight was filled with a grieving me and my sobbing support system choking on my daughter’s name. I think it was the only way he could hold it together, offering broken hallelujahs that day. These songs have become anthems.

Looking around a room filled with people I love, grieving together in song, I felt the presence of God.

His presence came alive in our collective praise bathed in collective grief. Praising isn’t always easy. Praising isn’t natural. I think naturally, I would have hidden at home, not wanting to see all these people who were so sad. But God knows better. He knows that we need to lament together as a family. As the people around me shouldered the weight of my burden, I knew that THIS was exactly how God designed the church. Our burdens may be great, but we lift them together, acknowledging that our strength comes from the ONE so much greater than us.

This past Sunday at church, Bryan quoted Genesis 16, where the abandoned Hagar gives a new name to Yahweh – she calls him El Roi – “The God who sees me.” This is how I know God is real. So many times, I have felt seen by God. So many times, those “anthems” are playing on the radio when I start my car. Even as I was writing this post, I got a phone call from Belcrest Cemetery. I wiped my face and straightened up to listen. They had just finished digging a spot next to Hallelujah and planting a maple tree in her honor.

You are a God who sees me.

I’m a lover of trees.

I’ve planted 16 trees on our 0.25 acre property since we moved here 11 years ago. When I pulled a 10-foot kwanzan Cherry out of my van last spring, I declared to my head-shaking husband that “this was the last one.”

I guess I get one more.

I don’t know who bought me this tree, but I know that it was someone who has called Grant Avenue Baptist Church their home church at one point. God’s love is poured out on me again, through his people.

This month has been unique.

Two of my best friends gave birth within a week of each other. 

I witnessed one of these births – my first time watching/photographing a birth since Hallelujah. Desperate prayers had been prayed in that delivery room when an emergency C-section seemed imminent and the room filled with doctors. Henry came out without that C-section, a little blue and cone-headed, and when he finally screamed – we all breathed a hallelujah.
When there was nothing left to do, I left.

What an honor – and also, what a weight. Quietly shutting the door on my best friend as she and her husband drank in their little boy, I started to feel the crushing weight of what had just happened.  Turning and nodding to the nurse’s desk, I shouldered my camera bag and the hallway swayed under the lack of weight in my own empty arms.

Pulling out of the parkade and knew where I needed to go. I drove through Taco Bell and ordered my guilty pleasure and drove to nearby Belcrest Cemetery. With the September evening light filtering through the giant kwanzan cherry tree that grows nearby, I settled down to have dinner with my daughter. Her grave is no longer the newest one in Babyland. The grass has greened up and there’s no more mud around the edges of her headstone.

When they buried my daughter, a hole remained in me.

I’m learning to live in a new world where I can be happy and sad about the babies around me – where two extremes are allowed to coexist within my soul. I’m also starting to allow God to reveal to me the things I’m now meant to do, the person I’m supposed to be, the people I’m supposed to pour into, because now I have time. It will never be lost on me that I now have more time because I don’t have a baby. That’s reality. But time I have, so I’ve decided to redeem it.