Financial Management During a Medical Crisis

When your loved one has a medical crisis, the last thing you want to — or can — think about is money. Sound financial planning will give everyone peace of mind. Care Pages

A Unique Journey

Something about the 15-week-old fetus didn't look right. Not certain what was wrong, the doctor began to run through a list of dire scenarios for the parents. His predictions proved to be correct, so should they have ended the pregnancy early? Read-Only, Print Version (use as a bulletin insert for your church!), Mike and Kristin's Full Story with Photos, Video shown at Noah's Memorial Service

Where Is God Ministries

A collection of bible verses for faith in times of stress Where Is God.net

The 10 Best and Worst Things to Say to Someone in Grief

Keep in mind - context, timing, and the person is making the comment are everything! Communicating With Those Who Grieve

Stages of Grief

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines “grief” as a “deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement.“ In a simpler form, it could be defined as reaction to a significant loss. Naturally, such descriptions do little justice to the depth of the emotion, the all-encompassing pain it gives, and the far-reaching long-term effects on a person’s life it wreaks. At times it appears that grief is all there is within an affected life, yet this outlook rarely lasts a life-time. To those on the outside of this emotion, however, it appears that there is no change within the bereaved individual, and some secretly harbor a resentment, wishing the bereaved would finally “get over it” and move on with life. This first set of lessons will acquaint us with the face of grieve itself, its natural progression, and also factors that impede healing, such as the pain of experiencing a holiday for the first time without the loved one. Stages of Grief

Types of Grief and Loss

Take a quick look and three types of grief: anticipatory grief, sudden loss, and complicated grief. Source 1 and Source 2, and three additional types of grief: uncomplicated, dysfunctional, and disenfranchised. Pages 310-312

Twelve Ways to Help the Bereaved (From Child Loss)

• Be there
• Tolerate silences
• Listen in an accepting and non-judgmental way
• Avoid the use of clichés such as "Think of all the good times", "You can always have another child", etc.
• Encouraging them to talk about the deceased
• Be practical in your support by offering care for living children through funeral planning/arrangements, etc., or providing meals
• Mention the deceased child’s name
• Accept that tears are normal and healthy
• Avoid filling in conversations with a lot of outside news.
• Remember that grief may take many years to work through
• Acknowledge birthdays, death dates, anniversaries, etc.
• Accept that you cannot make them feel better

Adapted from: The Centre for Grief Education, McCulloch House, Monash Medical Centre, 246 Clayton Road, CLAYTON VIC 3168 Australia

Tears and Laughter

Crying and laughing are beneficial to us in a variety of ways and are important coping tools for us on our grief journey. Both are necessary for us to achieve balance in our healing process. Tears and Laughter

Helping Yourself Heal When Your Child Dies

Healing Through Child Death

Uncommon Loss: Mothers Who Grieve the Death of a Child

Every story of losing a child is unique and painful, and every mother grieves in her own way. Is it harder to lose a child suddenly or to lose her after a long illness? Is it more difficult to lose a baby and mourn the life that never really started, or to lose an older child or adult and mourn what was? There are no answers to these questions. But there are many common threads in the experience of losing a child, say bereaved mothers and bereavement experts. Mothers Grieving the Death of a Child

DEVOTIONALS: The Blessing of Tough Times

The superior gift of adversity results in ETERNAL prosperity and abundance which is a far greater, yes infinitely greater value than material possessions. Does that mean we should go looking for trials and tribulations? Hardly. Just be alive for any length of time and don't worry, they will find you. So rather than spending our time lamenting the existence of adversity, I would submit to you that a more profitable use of time would be to discover what God says about it, how we should respond to it, and what, if any, are the blessings to be gained by enduring it. Tough Times, Part 1 Continuing Series: Tough Times, Parts 2-10

Hospice Care Versus Physician-Assisted Suicide

Fear of abandonment, fear of unbearable suffering, depression and despair are the root causes of suicide in the terminally ill. Hospice care demonstrates that terminally ill patients need not be left to die alone or in unfamiliar, sterile environments, and that pain and other symptoms can be prevented or adequately treated. The choice is ours. To enact legislation allowing physician-assisted suicide is to plunge our society more deeply into the culture of death. It is imperative to defeat such legislation, and in its place to enact legislation which would increase the resources available to bring competent, compassionate health care to patients and families in their homes -- not only in the last six months of their lives as is presently done in hospice programs, but also long term for the chronically ill, the severely disabled and the frail elderly. In doing so we would have to our credit a major step toward transforming our culture of violence and death into a civilization of love and life. Hospice Vs. PAS

The Way of Suffering

As I meditate on Jesus’ passionate prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, his human agony and suffering on full display, I am reminded how often we followers of Jesus also long for God to provide another way for us as well in the face of our own suffering. We do not want to follow Jesus down the Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering. We seek to follow the victorious entry of the Messiah into Jerusalem to be enthroned and crowned the king. We want that kind of victory borne out in our lives as the absence of difficulty. We want the glory and the grandeur of Palm Sunday as our entry into eternal life with as little pain and suffering as possible. But as author Kim Reisman has noted, “That is not the Jesus way. God doesn’t dispense with death. God resurrects us from it. The truth is that the Jesus way isn’t about God taking pain away from God’s people; it’s about God providing us with strength, courage, and meaning, with abundant life, often in the midst of pain.” The Way of Suffering