Micha Boyett and I would be best friends by now, if fate hadn’t intervened and spoiled our plans. Micha was originally on the World Vision team that traveled to Sri Lanka last summer, but had to withdraw when her husband got a job transfer and they had to move. I still hope to meet her in person one day, but for now, I’m settling for joining her for a special series on her blog, Mama Monk.

She began the series she’s calling “One Good Phrase” a couple of weeks ago. She asked us to examine one good phrase, whether it was something told to us, something we tell ourselves, or something we tell others.

This post wrote itself, and made me cry. Then I cried some more when I read it to Scott. I feel it that deeply.

I have four children, three living. My oldest fought for her life for eight years through hospital stays, surgeries, therapies, special education, medications, feeding tubes, wheelchairs, emergency rooms, breathing treatments, seizures, and sleepless nights (both hers and ours). She lost her fight in October of 2008. It has been over four years, and I still have a difficult time accepting that those three sentences are part of my story.

We all know in our guts that a parent ought not have to bury their child. It’s against the natural order of things. The old die, not the young.

I have three other children, and that is a gift. Caring for them kept me from drowning in my grief. Caring for them has allowed me to experience new facets of another thing we all know in our guts. I like to think of it as the first law of parenting: a parent ought to love their children no matter what.

No matter what.

I’m no Pollyanna. I know that ought is no unbreakable law. Just as parents like me face the unthinkable and bury our children, so too do parents commit the unthinkable – disown, abandon, or reject a child. I’ve seen it.

Read the rest here.

Comments are closed here, but I’ll be reading and responding to comments on Micha’s blog.