Presbyterian Mission Agency bereavement Archives

bereavement

Hallmark holidays can hurt

Posted August 16th, 2022

Mother’s Day was always fine for me, until it wasn’t. My husband and I had been trying to have a child, and month after month stretched into year after year. Eventually, we grew to dread the annual double punch of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Our well-intentioned church tried to soften the blow on those special Sundays by giving every woman a rose on Mother’s Day and having a blowout barbecue for the all the men on Father’s Day. I still, though, found myself choking back tears and doing a lot of fake smiling. It already felt like God had grown deaf to our prayers, but not finding our experience acknowledged in our church community made it worse.

Hallmark holidays can hurt

Posted May 4th, 2022

The church should be a safe place to validate other life experiences that are different from those in greeting cards.