A couple months after my daughter died, my pastor gave me the book, A Grieving Mother Shares Her Heart: Treasures in Darkness. I read it in a couple days, finding in its pages validation for the way I was grieving and how I felt. The process that Sharon Betters had gone through mirrored my own. It helped to know that I wasn’t the only one who had experienced the overwhelming heartache that comes with the loss of a child.
Then I read the book again, highlighting parts that I wanted to come back to.
As Sharon quoted extensively from the journal she wrote in the first months after her son Mark died in a car accident, I watched her struggle with God and then accept her life’s circumstance. Sharon embraces God’s promise of eternal life for His children. She rests in the shadow of the Almighty’s arms, finding treasures of hope in the darkest moments of grief.
The hymns and Scripture she includes in the book were the same passages I had already gone to repeatedly for comfort.
I am worn out from groaning;
all night long I flood my bed with weeping
and drench my couch with tears.
My eyes grow weak with sorrow;
they fail because of all my foes.
Away from me, all you who do evil,
for the Lord has heard my weeping.
The Lord has heard my cry for mercy.
~ Psalm 6:6-9
I think that anyone who has experienced a significant loss can benefit from Sharon’s book. She allows grief and points the reader toward healing and comfort in the Lord.
The book is also for those who want to help and minister to people who are grieving. In a chapter titled Who’s Bearing Whose Burden, Sharon writes,
The challenge of Paul in Galations 6:2, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ,” teaches us that God expects us to not only need each other but also reflect the love of Christ by helping each other. Grief is not a pathway we should attempt to walk alone.
She addresses what she calls “echoes of mercy” which are the little things in life that God sends our way to encourage us. Such a God of grace we have. She shows us how to get through the ugly grief and live life.
grieving with guinever 