One year ago today I was in between two of the hardest days of my life. The day before I had learned that our son no longer had a heartbeat. The day after, I would deliver him into this world. No cries would fill the room upon his arrival except those of his mother and father. One year ago today, I was lost.

As someone who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of my adult life, I would be lying if I said there weren’t days I didn’t believe I would survive through the first year. The pain from losing a child, no matter how old, is so deep, so harsh, so all-consuming I thought for sure that I’d just absolutely lose it at some point.

A fellow loss momma recently asked me on one of my hard days “What has Ollie taught you in the last year?” I quickly gave a few of the things that popped into my head but I’ve been pondering that question ever since.

My initial reaction is still probably the truest thing I’ve learned since losing him: I am capable of surviving the unsurvivable. The amount of times I’ve been told “I can’t imagine” in the last year is far higher than I ever thought it would be. Many are scared to put themselves in the shoes of a mother who has had a child die, to even imagine for a second the pain associated with that. I don’t blame them. But saying I am capable of surviving would be an incomplete truth without one thing: God. Without His grace, His faithfulness, His sovereignty…..I don’t think I’d be typing this.

About a month after losing Ollie, my small group at church started the study “It’s Not Supposed To Be This Way” by Lysa TerKeurst. It is an absolutely beautiful study on living through parts of life that “aren’t supposed to be this way” and finding God in the life between the two gardens, Original Eden and Restored Eden.

Before losing Ollie, I don’t believe I truly felt the tension of living life between the two gardens. Life had it’s hard days, as it does, but the pull towards heaven wasn’t one I experienced regularly. I went to church, I praised Jesus, I lived my life.

Since losing Ollie, the tension between the two has been like that of a rubber band pulled as far apart as it can stand, right before it snaps. The weight of living in a fallen world is heavy and daily I am reminded that there is a new, restored Eden on the horizon. I realize daily that it’s not supposed to be this way. Those same songs of worship now have a deeper meaning to me. The prayers I pray fall on the ears of not some distant far off God, but the ears of the God who walks beside me through the deepest, darkest moments of my life.

He shows up in the mess of this broken world and draws us close.

He turns our broken moments into restoration and peace.

He takes the moments when I feel like I can’t take one more step and turns them into my testimony.

I’m not trying to paint a picture that this year has been full of rainbows and unicorns. It has without a doubt been the hardest year of my life. But God. I survived because, as the quote below says: God takes my guttural cries of pain and is turning them into beautiful melodies. I’m pretty sure we’re only on the first line of the song, but I know He’ll finish what He started.

He always does.