Hope Unshakeable - Child Loss: Finding Hope After Loss

By Jeff Rollins and Mackenzie Rollins

Hope Unshakeable Child Loss is a biblically-based, workbook that helps a parent navigate his or her grief journey after the death of a child. The workbook parallels the other Hope Unshakeable editions in such a way that they can process together what they are learning. It gives parents a way to process the feelings they are experiencing as they navigate the loss of their child. Each chapter includes a child loss story written by other parents, a scripture with a short devotional, and a self-care article that highlights some of the aspects of grief. The middle chapter takes a pause from the stories and readings to give the parent a chance to share his or her own story of loss, empowering him or her to confidently and coherently share with others. There are very few resources that are written specifcally to help parents process their grief. This can oftentimes cause them to feel alone and forgotten in their grief. It does not have to be this way. Hope Unshakeable Child Loss helps them know that they are not alone! Together Hope Happens!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667890098

Book preview

HOPE

STORY

JEFF’S STORY

I never knew what a broken heart felt like. I had felt pains of rejection in the past, and believed those were what a broken heart felt like. I was wrong. Unfortunately, I now know that the emotional pain of a broken heart can actually be felt as physical pain. Perhaps not very different from the pain of a heart attack.

Zoe, our first daughter, was born on February 5th, 2014. At over nine pounds, she was bigger than both of her older brothers by nearly a pound at birth. She did not look like a newborn.

We had been waiting for her for quite some time. We felt like God had given us the name Zoe before we had any children. When we found out that our third child was a girl, we knew she would be Zoe. We were anxious to see what God would do through her.

We didn’t know that just three months later we would find ourselves sitting in a funeral home making burial plans for that same beautiful girl. The excitement we had so recently felt had shattered into fragments of dreams that would never be fulfilled.

Zoe died on May 7th from SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). The worst nightmare for parents had come true for us, our daughter had died. We found ourselves being that family, that family whose lives were crushed by the loss of a child; that family that would never get to hold their baby girl again. That family that would forever have to figure out how to answer the question, How many kids do you have?; that family who would have to figure out how to move forward with life, living with the reality of death. We had become that family.

That, however, was not where God wanted us to stay. God knew all along that Zoe was going to die when she did. God knew that we would experience the pain of heartache so soon after experiencing the joy of birth. He knew all of that and more. That is why He gave our daughter the name Zoe.

Zoe’s name comes from the Greek word for life, specifically eternal life. When Jesus says, in John 10:10, that He has come to bring life, the word in the Greek is Zoé (both physical and spiritual life). We knew that was her name. We knew she was God’s gift of life to us; however, that didn’t take away from the pain that invaded our lives with her death.

That day, I arrived at the babysitter’s house, where Zoe took her last breath, before my wife, Mackenzie did. Because of that, I had to tell her that Zoe was gone. I never thought that I would have to tell my wife that she would never again get to hold one of her babies, the baby girl our hearts had waited for for so many years.

Shortly after I told her, she looked up at me and spoke softly, They’re watching. They’re watching to see if the God we say we believe in is big enough to get us through this.

She was referring to our neighbors. For almost a year, we had been leading a Bible study in our neighborhood, and several of our neighbors had been attending. Some of them had their children at the same babysitter’s house where we had Zoe. They had arrived to pick up their kids and had seen that we wouldn’t be taking Zoe home with us.

It had to be God. That thought could not have come from Mackenzie in that moment. She’s amazing, but that’s not something that a mother would say, just moments after learning of her daughter’s death. It was, however, exactly what we needed to hear.

We needed something in that moment that would help us see that this was bigger than us. We needed to see that, while Zoe was our daughter, God had a bigger plan for her life and death. In a weird way, knowing that people were watching gave us hope. It allowed us to begin to shift our eyes away from Why is this happening to us? to What is God going to do through this?

We needed that shift because we needed hope. Zoe’s death was part of God’s plan, a plan much bigger than our family. We didn’t know it at the time, but shifting from Why? to What? allowed us to begin looking for what God was going to do through her death.

Making that shift allowed room for hope to enter and begin to establish itself as part of the foundation for our lives. We knew that hope on an intellectual level, but in the aftermath of her death we needed to experience hope.

We didn’t know what God was going to do through Zoe’s story, but we knew that we didn’t want to waste it. We didn’t want to go through the pain of loss and not see God do something amazing through it, and He has.

Shortly after her death, we moved down to Ecuador as missionaries. Our dream had always been to be missionaries, only we didn’t think that it would be going down with the pain of loss. Once again, God knew the timing of our move to Ecuador, and He knew it was going to be right when we needed it.

Ecuador allowed us to heal as a family after Zoe’s death. It allowed us to begin to create a new normal in a place where we didn’t have any traditions that we had to hold to. It gave us a blank slate to be able to figure out how to talk about Zoe’s life and death, without having to walk around wondering if people already knew our story. It gave us a fresh start.

We didn’t know it, but our time in Ecuador was to be short. It was necessary, but short.

Many people don’t know how to support a family who has experienced the death of a child. They do their best to support and love the family, but they often don’t know what to do. However, if they know of another family who has experienced the death of a child, they will try to connect the families together. The hope is that the families can support each other and walk together in their shared grief. This can be very helpful; we received this for ourselves and walked this for others after Zoe’s death and in the years that followed.

While we were in Ecuador we connected with many families who experienced child loss. They were families from both Ecuador and the United States. We connected with all of them through mutual friends or acquaintances. While the first few times we connected with families felt heavy (because of the freshness of our loss) we began to see that, as we walked our grief journey with others, we experienced a deeper level of healing.

It was as if the statement that God had given Mackenzie had come to life. They were watching us. Only this time, it was the families who were walking the same grief journey we found ourselves walking. They were watching us to see if we had hope that we could share with them so that they too could walk forward. They were desperate to see that it could be done, but they also needed to know