Finding Hope After Losing a Child

Bryan’s daughter Holland had just turned 3 years old when doctors discovered a tumor the size of a golf ball in her brain. The events that followed challenged Bryan’s faith in God like nothing before.

“Why is this happening to us,” he wondered. “We’re good people. We’ve done everything God’s asked us to do and yet this is still happening. I tried to pray. I tried reading the scriptures. I tried doing all these things to try to find peace and I couldn’t. I needed to resolve this. I either needed to come to peace with God, or I needed to say, ‘God doesn’t exist because if God existed, He wouldn’t do this to me.’”

After searching for peace, Bryan found it. He felt sure that his daughter would survive. Doctors removed the tumor. Only a few months later, though, the tumor returned. The third time the tumor returned, it grew down Holland’s spine. Bryan’s sense of peace didn’t diminish, but his understanding of what the future held changed then.

“I said a prayer and the Lord immediately said she’s going to die,” he recalls.

He and his wife lay on either side of Holland when she passed away.

“That was pain and grief,” Bryan states. “That was the worst feeling I’ve ever had in my life. I felt hopeless. I felt angry toward God. A part of me was ripped out and gone.”

Bryan describes why the experience of witnessing someone’s first breath and last breath gives him hope that God’s plan includes so much more than what happens between first breath and last breath. Hear his testimony in this raw episode of His Grace.

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