Lord, Breathe Peace Into the Memories That Still Hurt.

The last few weeks, I've read more emails than I can count from readers who've lost someone. A husband. A mother. A child. A pet. A friend. The specifics change. The ache doesn't.

I want to tell you a smaller story. Not because it compares. But because it's the one I have.

Four years ago, we were expecting a little girl. The 20-week scan said so. We spent six months talking to her, praying for her, singing to her, imagining her life. She had a name. We pictured who she would become. She was, in every real sense, part of our family before she was born.

But, two weeks before the due date, we had a second scan that told us they'd got it wrong. It was a boy...

Logically, we had good news. A healthy baby was coming. But in those two weeks between the news and his arrival, we were grieving.

All of a sudden, this little girl who had been fully alive in our minds and home had suddenly vanished. Not only that, she had never existed. There was no one to bury. No one to talk about. Just a soft, strange absence that didn't fit any category of loss.

When Theodore was born, the grief mostly quieted. He was and is a complete joy. But sometimes, years later, a memory will surface. The way I pictured reading to her. A name I still hear in my head. I'd almost forgotten I used to carry it.

I tell you this not because it is the same as the grief you are holding. It isn't. Losing someone who actually walked the earth, whose voice you can still hear, whose chair is still in the house, is a weight of another order.

But I tell you because I've learned a small thing about memories that hurt.

God doesn't come to erase them. He comes to sit inside them with you. In the image with this devotion, I like to imagine Jesus pulling up a chair at the back to sit too.

If the memories are still raw today, you don't need to hurry. He is not hurrying you. He is simply, patiently, there. And he will be. Every time the memory hurts.