Group counseling again

2.24.14

     On Monday, I realized that the hospital grief group was meeting that night. For some reason, I just felt like I needed to go. Couldn't put my finger on it, but I decided that if I somehow "magically" remembered, then it was pretty obvious that I needed to go.
      Alex decided to bow out of this session, so I drove up to the hospital solo with a Hope Box under my arm. I figured I would talk to the nurses that run the group while I was there about the ministry and getting it started at that hospital anyways.
      For the first few minutes, it was just me and Ginny, the nurse who runs the group. Then others slowly started trickling in. There was a gay couple and one other hetero couple (yeah I don't know the PC way to say that), and then another lady going solo. We started as we started all of the grief groups, with everyone telling their stories.
      Since I was a veteran in the group, Ginny asked me to go first, and I was happy to tell our story just because I know how much hearing others' stories helped me in the beginning.
      Then the gay couple started telling their story: both were female, if I didn't say that outright or if it wasn't obvious (I don't know if it would be...?). Anyways, the older one, named R, was the one that carried their baby girl, and then S was the younger one who did not carry. They lost their baby girl one day after her due date. S was clearly still angry about the whole situation, and she confessed with us that she doesn't believe in a "higher power". She told a story about being so angry that she just started picking apart the word, "Stillbirth."
      "Still," she said, "means quiet, and peaceful, calm. Her birth was anything but calm. So there I sat in this coffee shop down the street from our house and I was just picking, picking apart the word stillbirth and just getting irate at the term for what we went through. It was not peaceful." She let her tears flow freely down her face as she told the story, her partner sitting quietly by her side.
      The other couple had lost their little boy, and he had a heart defect that was not picked up on the sonogram. They had given birth at one hospital, but they had to move both the baby and the mom to another hospital by ambulance to try to get their son into heart surgery. Unfortunately, he wasn't stable enough to go through surgery and passed away shortly after making it to the hospital. The husband of that couple kept blinking back his tears as he talked about his son because he had been the one to ride in the ambulance with the baby.
      The last story was from the lady who was there solo. She started to tell her story, and as she told the name of her son, Logan, and the time frame, I started putting two and two together.
      "Wait, are you...?" I interrupted her story. And she slowly started to nod. This is Melissa, that I had just dropped off a Hope Box for on Friday. I went over to the couch she was sitting on and gave her a BIG HUG. She was so fresh from her pain, and I was so humbled that God used me to deliver her box and to meet her in person at this meeting.
       It was the perfect transition into the Hope Box ministry. I talked to the group about the boxes, and told them that I had one there if anyone wanted it. S of the gay couple took the box, and I was shocked.

Maybe God was going to use these boxes in even bigger ways than we could ever imagine.