The week that I returned home from my 12-day stay in the ICU and supernaturally evaded death, we dealt with a lot of emotions.
In the midst of a pandemic crisis, of schools closing, and their world being turned upside down, my children watched as daddy helped mommy out the door to take me to the hospital, only to return alone. “Mommy’s sick” is a given in our household, but mommy being on the edge of death is not.
Except it was….for nearly two weeks. Grandma and daddy held down the fort, became teachers, and filled in for mommy while I was fighting for my life, too fragile to intubate but any other intervention seemed insufficient. But these little children heard the whispers, the worried tones, and they knew that the days when we didn’t FaceTime meant that I was too sick to talk. Everyone spent large amounts of time holding their breath, whispering desperate prayers, and trying to stay in the moment during those 12 days of eternity.
In the midst of this season of piercing uncertainty, Lily and Elijah planted grass seed in some cups. Before they were confident that I would survive through Easter, they placed a heck of a lot of hope in the tiny seeds hidden in soil in cups on the kitchen window sill.
Mommy miraculously came home, thank God. But emotions often strike after the crisis has passed. And so my sweet girl, still in the wake of terror over potentially losing someone she loved, wept over the possibility that she had killed her grass.
Like a gentile, intuitive father, her daddy took her out to plant her grass-that-meant-more-than-grass in the front yard, and they celebrated the new life busting forth from the seeds that they had sewn in uncertainty.
Look at their joy in the picture as they study this baby grass. These little hearts are so precious, so precarious yet so resilient, so deep and so important. I pray that we hold them with care, that we steward these precious ones with tender compassion. And I’m so thankful that I got to come home to celebrate baby grass sprouting in our yard, singing of hope and resilience. And I’m so thankful that God provides unlikely tangible reminders of hope like fresh, green baby grass.
The Beautiful Broken 
I remember one time, in trying to explain to my unbelieving mother that the glory and power of God is all around us, I said, “look at the grass; can you make blades of grass?” She just gave me her usual rolled eyes and “Oh Allison!” huff.
But here are YOUR children, fascinated by this very thing, and Jordan was also able to use grass to help Lily process some of her feelings. Wow. The power and glory of our God in grass. 🥰
This is so beautiful. I am so thankful to God that He brought you home to your family. Your blog always blesses me . 🙏🏾