Episode 36 - God So Close - Relying on the Holy Spirit as a Grieving Mom with Becky Thompson
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Join us for a conversation with Becky Thompson about how to rely on the Holy Spirit as a grieving mom. In the midst of a season of suffering, we do not have to wait to meet God on the other side; rather, He is a God so close Who longs to be near to us in our pain.
Becky shares her story of losing her daughter at eight weeks and how the Lord brought hope to her broken heart. She decided to trust in Him knowing that she couldn't lose Him too.
In this episode, we discussed:
Loving and losing a life that nobody knew about yet
Postpartum depression and anxiety after pregnancy loss
Releasing anger and trusting that the Lord is weeping with you
Who is the Holy Spirit and what does He do?
What does it mean to be born again?
Discerning God's voice from the lies of the enemy
What is lie replacement strategy?
Battling against our own sin nature and how the Holy Spirit convicts us
Struggling in the forest of fear and trusting that God is with you
Why we need to address both the spiritual and physical aspects of anxiety
Believing in a God that is not far off and imagining Him holding you in your pain
More about Becky's books, Peace, and God So Close
Full transcript below.
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Discussion / Application Questions (leave your answers below in the comments!)
Becky shares how she experienced God's nearness in her grief. She imagined Him holding her and weeping with her in her suffering. So often, we live like He is distant. But Becky says we don't need to wait until we die physically to be with Him. How does this truth change the way you view Him? What difference would it make in your grief to imagine Him carrying you when you're too weak to stand? Write how this would make you feel.
In this episode, Becky talks about the Holy Spirit as a Person. He is one part of the triune God. She shares that He is Comforter, Friend, and Advocate. He brings peace, strength, hope, and conviction. And most importantly, He draws us into relationship with our Father. What did you learn about the Holy Spirit from this episode?
We discuss how the enemy wants to put in every effort to create distance between us and our Father. Sometimes it's hard to know the difference between the truth and the lies of Satan. But, Ashley says the Holy Spirit is only going to speak truth that is in alignment with God's Word and His character. In what areas do you feel the enemy attacking you or speaking lies over you? Use the lie replacement strategy we talked about to speak truth over it.
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MEET OUR GUEST
Becky is a national bestselling author and the creator of the Midnight Mom Devotional community, gathering 2 million moms in nightly prayer. She is the author of eight books including Peace and God So Close.
Becky lives in Oklahoma with her husband, Jared, and their three children. She has two precious babies in Heaven, Kaylin Joy, and Baby Thompson.
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MEET OUR HOST
Ashley Opliger is the Executive Director of Bridget's Cradles, a nonprofit organization based in Wichita, Kansas that donates cradles to over 1,300 hospitals in all 50 states and comforts over 26,000 bereaved families a year.
Ashley is married to Matt and they have three children: Bridget (in Heaven), and two sons. She is a follower of Christ who desires to share the hope of Heaven with families grieving the loss of a baby.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Episode 36: God So Close - Relying on the Holy Spirit as a Grieving Mom with Becky Thompson
Ashley Opliger: [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Cradled in Hope Podcast on the Edifi Podcast Network. I’m your host, Ashley Opliger. I’m a wife, mom, and follower of Christ who founded Bridget’s Cradles, a nonprofit ministry in memory of my daughter, Bridget, who was stillborn at 24 weeks.
Cradled in Hope is a Gospel-focused podcast for grieving moms to find comfort, hope, and healing after the loss of a baby. We want this to be a safe place for your broken heart to land.
Here, we are going to trust God’s promise to heal our hearts, restore our joy, and use our grief for good. With faith in Jesus and eyes fixed on Heaven, we do not have to grieve without hope. We believe that Jesus cradles us in hope while He cradles our babies in Heaven.
Welcome to the Cradled in Hope Podcast.
Ashley Opliger: [00:00:52] Hello mommas. Welcome back to another episode. I am so excited to introduce you to our guest, Becky Thompson. This episode is packed with practical wisdom and a powerful testimony from Becky. If you haven't heard of her, she is a national bestselling author and the creator of the Midnight Mom Devotional community, gathering 2 million moms in nightly prayer.
Speaking to the struggle of balancing life as a wife, mother, and daughter of God, she has become a voice for modern Christian women. She has written eight books and has appeared on the USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and ECPA bestseller lists.
Becky lives in Oklahoma with her husband, Jared, and their three children. She has two precious babies in Heaven, Kaylin Joy, and Baby Thompson, and today she will share about how her babies in Jesus' arms have changed her life and brought her closer to God.
I'm excited for you to hear this amazing conversation about the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives as believers, but also how we can rely on Him in the depths of our grief. Let's jump in to our conversation.
Ashley Opliger: [00:02:04] Welcome, Becky. It's so good to have you on the Cradled in Hope Podcast.
Becky Thompson: [00:02:00] Ashley, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited about our conversation.
Ashley Opliger: [00:02:04] Wonderful to have a fellow Midwestern woman here. You're just south of me in Oklahoma; you moved back home. Good to have you back in the Midwest.
Becky Thompson: [00:02:13] I feel more like myself here. We were in California for a little bit and then Tennessee, and I just feel like I'm home, and I feel like not trying to be anybody other than me, and there's a lot of peace in that.
Ashley Opliger: [00:02:24] That is a good place to be. And I think a lot of times Kansas and Oklahoma, we get overlooked, but it's not about the attractions that we have here. I think it's the people that make it home and make it just a good place to raise a family and to be in ministry. So it's good to have you here. Would you mind sharing more about yourself and your experience with pregnancy loss?
Becky Thompson: [00:02:46] Absolutely. Yeah, so Becky Thompson, married to my husband Jared for, I think it's 17 years this year. We got married in 2006, so have to do the math or fact check me, whatever. I thought I was 36 all last year and turns out I was only 35 this year and I'm turning 36. I have no idea how old I am, so I've been married to Jared for a very long time.
We have three kids, three living children, and two children that wait in Jesus' arms. My oldest is Colton and he is 13 - I have a teenager! And then Cadence is 11 and Jackson is eight. And I write books, and I lead an online group of women in nightly prayer with my Mom, and it's called Midnight Mom Devotional.
And we have 2 million followers, people from all over the world, praying nightly with us for all the different needs of a woman's heart, but specifically a mother's heart. And I started all of this online ministry work that I do in 2013, which means that this is my 10-year anniversary of being in an online space and trying to meet women right where they are because I am right where they are.
So basically it's just like calling out, “Hello, I'm here,” and letting women say, “Oh, I thought I was the only one. I'm so glad you're here too.” So I just bring the hope of Jesus. Yeah, that's my ministry in a nutshell, [I’ve] written books and I speak and just here, it's just me, just still Becky. But I guess it's my professional bio, [but] my story of loss….
So this is where our stories overlap, meaning the work that I do and the ministry that I do, and then the ministry that you do here, Ashley. In 2009, my husband and I hadn't been married very long. We got married very young, and I had a story like so many other mommas and found out that I was pregnant and told everybody right away.
I had never experienced loss, whether it was miscarriage or child loss or stillbirth or anything like that, in my close family. I had no context, and it was something that happened far away to other people. And I knew it happened, but it wasn't going to happen to me.
And then I think we were only eight weeks into the pregnancy, so I was designing a nursery in my heart. I had the birth date planned out, what my work life was going to be like on the other side. I had lived an entire lifetime in those eight weeks of being Momma to my sweet Kaylin Joy, and then …
Ooh, I haven't talked about this in a minute. I did not think I was going to get emotional, but I'm sure all of your guests feel very similar.
Kaylin changed my life because I needed the Lord in that season of life more than I had ever needed Him in any other season. I started to have the signs of losing her and I didn't even know, I'd never been pregnant before. I didn't have a sister who had been pregnant, I didn't have friends that had been. I was the first one in my generation of all of my friends and people to be going through this. And so I was kind of leading the way.
The Internet wasn't like it is now, so it wasn't like I had all of these online forums that I could pull from or support or people I could poll or talk to. So I called the doctor that I had made an appointment to, and I wasn't scheduled to see him until after 12 weeks.
And I didn't know why at that time they didn't want to see me until 12 weeks. I think they knew moments like these happen, and so that's why they scheduled appointments out so far. Called them and told them what was going on. And my goodness, they didn't call me back. And I called again and they didn't call me back. And I called again and they didn't call me. For three or four days I called three or four times a day.
And looking back, I have so many things that I at 36 or 35 would do differently, but I just didn't know. I just didn't know. And finally got the doctor to call me back. I went in, he did an ultrasound and I was in labor at that point and didn't know it. The pain was to the point that I was in active labor for this little baby.
And he performed the ultrasound and said there was a good, strong heartbeat and there was no reason that I couldn't go home and just have what he called a successful pregnancy if I took, I think it was progesterone, I think that's what he wanted to have me on, and so just go take the medicine and that everything would be fine.
And we pulled out of the parking lot of the hospital and called everybody we knew because this was the best news, and we were so excited. And I was still in the middle of those calls, I think I was actually just finishing up one of my last calls to say “Everything's going to be okay,” and we were in the Walgreens parking lot in Yukon, Oklahoma. There's very specific data for you. But I was in the Walgreens parking lot, Yukon, Oklahoma, and I lost the baby and she was born right there.
And so we drove to the hospital, the same hospital I had just been in for that appointment, and there wasn't a need for an ultrasound because she had been born. And that was that journey.
I went home and had to deal with a loss of a life that nobody had loved as much as I had loved in that amount of time. And that's just how it felt. And I say I, but it was my husband and I, it was both of us, and it was our parents and it was the people that were dreaming with us.
But shortly after that time, I think, looking back, I was dealing with maybe a little bit of, I think it's fair to say I was dealing with a postpartum type of depression, which I wonder if people discussed enough. I'm sure you guys discuss it plenty.
But only eight weeks, but my body had already said, “This is life,” and so I was anxious and depressed, and I was in physical agony still. And I think it was all of the events that take place after birth, but there was no baby at home with me.
And here's where Hope enters into my story, Ashley, because Hope had been there all along. Hope had held me, and Hope had loved me, and Hope had comforted me, and the God of all Hope never let me go and never left me in any of this.
But I had prayed. I had prayed during the time leading up to the loss, “Lord, I believe that You can, and I believe that if the world was as You had designed it to be in the beginning, this wouldn't be a part of our story. But even if this doesn't happen the way I want it to happen, even if I don't hold her here, I believe You're good because I have to believe that You are still good, because I cannot lose her and I cannot lose You too.”
That was my prayer to the Lord. “I cannot lose my Anchor. I will have nothing. I will be adrift without You, Lord. So I need You to help me hold onto Your goodness in the middle of all of this.” And He did. And He walked me, over the course of the next few years, it wasn’t even…
I feel like a lot of my healing came then with the release of anger. I didn't hold onto anger very long. I mourned and I grieved, but I wasn't angry. I know that's not everybody's story, but a lot of freedom came for me personally when I moved through anger, when I got to the other side of anger and I just let the Lord weep with me.
And I would picture Him, Ashley, weeping with me in my suffering. Sometimes I think we paint God far off and we picture Him waiting for us at the end of eternity, like He needs us to die physically before we can be with Him. But the truth is, He is with us here, now.
And when we become born-again Christians, meaning our life is new and our spirits come alive, He enters in and He is close from that moment on, as close as He will be in eternity, just not fully revealed.
And so when I saw Him in my story and I saw Him in all of those hard places, I had time for the next few years where I let Him show me: “I was with you when you were praying. I interceded for you. I was with you when you went to the doctor and you were in labor, and I was speaking peace over your heart and body. I was with you as you rejoiced when you heard the news, and I was with you when your sweet Kaylin Joy slipped from your body into My arms.” And that has been my comfort.
That has been my comfort and my message, because I've realized that I don't need a God who waits afar off for me. I need a God who holds me close through everything, through all of it. And when He revealed Himself to me through that time, through that loss, it painted a picture of Him.
Ashley, when I say I saw Him, I didn't just imagine Him there. It was like I was in prayer and the Lord showed me Jesus holding me close. I pictured Him there. And it changed the story. It changed the story from, “Why didn't You,” and, “How could You,” to the Lord weeping over the brokenness that entered into the world when Adam and Eve sinned that He paid His life to overcome.
But we still live in this broken space and yet, through the suffering of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, and now the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, we don't have to suffer as those with no hope, that we have an eternal hope and a present hope that He is with us in all of it. And that really is the message that I speak from.
What happened with Kaylin and what happened within me, through her life and through her passing, is that I received this revelation of the God who holds us in all seasons. And now I get to have that as the message of my life, whether in joy or suffering, whether in hope or heartache, we have an eternal hope that holds us in all seasons.
Ashley Opliger: [00:13:27] Amen, sister. That'll preach. Oh, my goodness. You're sharing the hope of the Gospel that in spite of this broken world and in spite of sin and death ravaging all aspects of our lives, and this includes the perfect design that God had for us as women to conceive and give birth to life, because of sin and death, that system is broken. And unfortunately, sometimes babies die, and that is heartbreaking. And that is not God's good design for earth.
And so often I think the anger that women experience is because we have our theology wrong and we believe that maybe He intended for it to be this way, and how could a good God want this for me?
But when you flip your perspective like you did and you understand, no, this breaks God's heart just as much as it breaks our hearts, and that He was the one that created your precious Kaylin Joy and He wants good for us, and when the brokenness of this world overwhelms us, He's there to hold us.
And that's the motto of our podcast, Cradled in Hope. It has two meanings. One is that our babies are cradled by Jesus in Heaven, but that He cradles us in hope now, like you said, not when we die, which of course when we die, then we will be in the perfect presence of Jesus, but even now when we're suffering and we're walking through this.
And what a beautiful image that God gave you to picture Him wrapping you up in His loving arms because He is a good Father that loves us, that wants to comfort us. And you actually talk about this in your book.
You have a book all