Part 3

The strengthening process that I talked about really did take a long time. I still felt broken and shattered, even though I was able to get back into my normal routine. I specifically remember one Sunday. My cousin played an arrangement to "Master the Tempest is Raging" in Sacrament Meeting. As she played I was overcome with emotion. I opened up the hymnbook and followed along with the words and felt that the first two verses in particular really described how I felt at that point in time. 

1. Master, the tempest is raging!
   The billows are tossing high!
   The sky is o’ershadowed with blackness,
   No shelter or help is nigh;
   Carest Thou not that we perish?
   How canst Thou lie asleep,
   When each moment so madly is threat’ning
   A grave in the angry deep?
   • 
     
2. Master, with anguish of spirit
   I bow in my grief today;
   The depths of my sad heart are troubled—
   Oh, waken and save, I pray!
   Torrents of sin and of anguish
   Sweep o’er my sinking soul;
   And I perish! I perish! dear Master—
   Oh, hasten, and take control.
3. Thinking about this song and how much the words really applied to my life at that point in time had me in tears the rest of the day. I taught the YW lesson and bawled through the whole thing. I think the girls were a little weirded out. They didn't know what was going on with me and truthfully no one did. A miscarriage isn't exactly something you broadcast to people. It's something that is kept quiet. I didn't tell my very closest friends for a really long time. So we were just privately mourning throughout the entire fall. Those were really bitter and bleak days. Even though I had been strengthened, it was still painful. And it hurt all the time. There was a ragged hole in my chest that didn't heal. And if I didn't know any better, I would think that there was literally a hole there because I felt it. It had ragged edges and was just there and wouldn't heal. Every time I cried during those months I could feel it and I would huddle up and clench my shoulders together to try to stop it from getting bigger. 
4. One thing that helped me get through that fall was the poem "Good Timber" by Douglas Malloch. I would constantly (multiple times a day) repeat the following lines to myself.
5. The tree that never had to fight
For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
But lived and died a scrubby thing.






Good timber does not grow with ease:
The stronger wind, the stronger trees;
The further sky, the greater length;
The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In trees and men good timbers grow.