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Showing posts from December, 2014

2014 Christmas Card Letter to Family & Friends

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Merry Christmas from the Balentines to your family!   2013 Christmas Card

Sleep in Heavenly Peace

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  As I sang Silent Night tonight, first at church and then again and again as I rocked Teddy to sleep  with his little brothers’ ashes beside our rocking chair, I couldn’t help but think of how many other mothers were also having a silent night without their little baby.  The statistics tell us 31% of our baby’s lives will end too soon resulting in miscarriage, stillbirth or infant loss.  We hear this sort of loss is common and many have walked this path before us and will walk it after us, but knowing that doesn’t sooth our pain.  The pain of losing our own flesh.  Our pure and innocent babies. The moment we begin to walk the road of motherhood, we say yes to God’s plan for that child.  Even if that means the child will only live in our womb for a few days.  He has a plan and he chose us to mother that baby.  What if Mary would’ve said no to the Angel Gabriel and God’s plan?  She could’ve – after all, God gave us each free will, including Mary.  But Mary didn’t say no.

Thomas Job Balentine

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Job 1:21 (ESV) And he said,  “Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return.  The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;  blessed be the name of the Lord.” On Sunday, November 23 at 12:30am, I delivered a small three inch little boy weighing just a couple ounces.  His frame was perfect.  He had ten fingers and ten toes.  We could even tell by sight he was in fact a little boy.  Everything was simply miraculous about him.  This tiny babe took my breath away - I was his mommy.  I am  burdened  with the fact that I delivered and met him all too soon.  However, I am thankful God allowed me to birth his body perfectly which allowed for us to place our eyes on him for the first and last time.  We named this child, our third boy, Thomas Job Balentine. (Job is pronounced with a long "o.") These past two weeks have been some of the most trying weeks of my life.  My faith has wavered like never before.  I have tried to bring it all to

On hope

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At first glance, hope seems like a fairly basic concept that most of us don’t struggle to comprehend.  But when we look closely, the term  hope, like  love , has a wide range of uses.  For instance, one can make the claim that they  love  French Fries one moment and then explain how they  love  their mom with a mouthful of said French Fries in the next moment! Not many people would question if the person truly understood the concept of love or if their feeling were genuine despite the difference in the object of their love.  Similarly, we can  hope  that our favorite restaurant won't have a long wait for a table, and we can also hope that an infant child survives chemo treatments. We can hope it doesn't rain on our wedding day, and we can also hope that our jobs survive the next round of layoffs. We hope for basic, fundamental elements of life to play out in our favor.  We also hope for something absurdly far-fetched to come true.  We toss around hope like it is mag