All Episodes

When our child dies, all our goals that had to do with that child dies with them, which seems to carry over into every part of our lives. We lose hope that life is even worth living without the plans we had for, and with, our child. When we don’t have any hope, we don’t see a future, and it puts us in a vicious cycle which is hard to get out of. The enemy wants to keep us in that place of hopeless...

Most of us have what can be called domino effects after the death of our child. Just like when the first domino in a line of dominos falls and causes others to fall, the death of our child can cause unexpected and painful chain reactions. In this episode, Laura shares one of those personal chain reactions, and prays over other parents who are facing the painful situations of a domino effect after...

This week Laura is doing something a bit different. Her new CD was just released, and you will be hearing her share the story behind each song. (One of the songs was written by her daughter, Becca, who died at age 29.) The songs are: I Remember Well Still Waiting You Are Together Forever I Keep Walking Jesus Never Fails Before the Throne God created music to be a pathway to the soul. We need to be...

As parents who have experienced child loss, we carry a heavy load of grief. In this episode, Laura shares how she discovered five helpful parallels of climbing mountain trails, to our grief journey. Links Mentioned in th is episode: Listen to sample songs of new CD Together Forever Thirty Ways to Bring Yourself Comfort and Take Care of Yourself   Click here  to become a monthly partner, givin...

Many of us struggle with our view or belief about God after the death of our child. We feel like He has abandoned us. But it is much more helpful when we see God as the rescuer in our story, rather than the cause of our pain by something he did or didn’t do. In this episode, Laura takes a deeper look at Philippians 1:21 when Paul says, “to live is Christ and to die is gain.” It seems like a...

As a parent who has had a child die, it is very common to spend a lot of time thinking about the good things our children are missing out on because they are no longer here. We wish we could trade places with our kids because of those things. But how often do we think about the fact that they are also missing out on sickness, disease and corruption? They will also never have to go through grieving...

There are two kinds of guilt. One is when we know we have done something wrong and need to do our part to make it right. The second kind is when something happens, and we blame ourselves after the event happened with information we have now that we didn’t have at the time. Guilt gives us a heavy burden to carry and keeps us stuck in our grief. Feeling guilty about something that happened is not go...

A parent who is in deep grief after the death of their child is in a very vulnerable place for the enemy’s attacks. Jesus knew what it was like to have a wilderness experience and have the devil come at him during a time of intense weakness. In this episode, Laura continues looking at Jesus’ wilderness experience as he faces several temptations directly from Satan himself, and how what Jesus went...

When our child dies, many of us feel like we have been led into a dark pit and abandoned by God. We don’t understand why God did not stop the death of our child, especially when we were doing everything right on our end to be a “good” Christian. In Matthew 4, we read how right after God spoke with an audible voice from heaven how pleased He was with His Son, Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit into a...

The message I kept hearing from many different places for the first two years after my daughter leaving this earth was: Don’t do , just be . I believe it is a message we all need at some point when working our way through the darkness and back into the light. The death of our child is a trauma, and we have some major healing that needs to occur in every part of us. We need lots of rest physically,...

Our thoughts about spending time with God can be all over the place after the death of our child, and it may be the last thing we want to do if we are angry with him. Some of us used to feel close to Him before our loss, and now He feels very distant, as if He either cannot hear us or doesn’t care. Just like there is no right or wrong way to grieve after the death of our child, there is no right o...

Last week we talked about how to answer the question, “How many children do you have?” This week we will discuss the question, “How are you?” This is an area we are good at putting on a mask with those who have not lost a child, but we will take it off very quickly when around those who have. In this episode, I share some thoughts from fellow pareavors about this question, including how several of...

As a bereaved parent, getting asked what used to be a normal, simple question can cause confusion, guilt, anger or even bring us to tears. One of those questions is, “How many children do you have?” In this episode, I share a recently received email on this topic along with my thoughts and experiences with this very common question that we no longer want to be asked, but find ourselves needing to...

One of the struggles I hear from pareavors is the question: Why bother praying if God is just going to do whatever He wants to do and did not keep my child from dying? This is something that bothered me as well for quite some time. In this podcast episode I talk about this area of prayer in our lives, along with sharing something the Holy Spirit showed me about why it is still important to pray. &...

Did you know there is literally a medical condition that in lay terms is called “broken heart syndrome”? In this episode, I share a bit about that, along with how most of us moms just want to be done here, as well as how we can make a shift in wanting to stay for a while longer.   Links Mentioned in th is episode: Laura’s Book: Come Grieve Through Our Eyes Check out The Grief Cruise for...

Last week was the first part of a discussion with my friend Joy Ware Miller. If you didn’t hear it, you may want to listen to that one first and then come back. It is called From Surviving to Thriving and has a lot of encouragement. Both weeks are from an interview back in 2017 from an online event, but what Joy shared is so good, I felt like it needed to get back out there for more pareavors to h...

Joy Ware Miller lost her healthy and active thirteen-year-old son as he collapsed from an unknown heart condition at the local YMCA one afternoon in March of 2005. Joy has become one of my treasured friends who brings encouragement, as she has been on this journey several years longer than I have. In this episode, Joy shares: How she kept pushing herself toward God, even when she struggled with be...

We often equate love with happiness, which make sense. But love also has a side to it that doesn’t give a person whatever they want, just so they won’t have to suffer. This is really difficult to comprehend or accept, when our child dies, especially if there was suffering involved. If God loved us, why doesn’t He step in and stop the suffering and answer our prayers of protection over our children...

Did you know that the first Sunday of each May is International Bereaved Mother’s Day? That’s what we will be talking about in this episode, along with touching on the week that follows which most of us dread… Mother’s Day. Just a warning, I am very real and honest about my thoughts and feelings about all of this, in a way that isn’t normally like me.  But Mother’s Day is one of the hardest days w...

When our child dies, we want to die ourselves so we can go be with them. It may not make sense to others, or even ourselves, especially when we know in our heads that we have reasons (people) to live for. It is important for you to know that this is “normal” for someone who has lost a child, and also that you will get past those feelings at some point and start seeing that life is worth living aga...

The day this episode is released, my daughter, Becca, would be 39 years old. Instead, she is forever 29. Three of Becca’s siblings are now older than their big sister, with one more sibling yet to hit that marker. The birthdays of our children are painful and bittersweet. We are so thankful for the day they came into our lives, but we won’t be celebrating with them, doing things like serving them...

This episode is a continuation of last week’s topic. We are all very aware that in this life, we don’t always get what we planned. I’m pretty sure as a parent, it wasn’t your plan to be listening to a podcast for grieving parents, and it certainly wasn’t in my plan to host one, or to have a full-time ministry to pareavors. Something we desperately need, to be able to move forward is hope. This inc...

We just got done having our GPS Hope and Healing retreat in Texas and it was wonderful! (See the link below if you want to find out more about our retreats.) Today and next week’s episodes are one of the sessions from this past retreat. None of us ever planned to be listening to a podcast for parents who have faced the death of their child! But we know that sometimes things that happen in our live...

When our child dies, we are surrounded by family and friends who hurt with us, cry with us and pray with us. Some of them will sit with us, call to see if there is anything we need, and we often get a couple weeks’ worth of meals brought to our house. Then 3 months, 6 months, 12 months later, it seems some of those same people either start avoiding us or start hinting that maybe it’s time to pull...

This is the 100th episode of the Grieving Parents Sharing Hope Podcast, which means it has been going faithfully for almost two years already! In trying to decide what to do for this special episode, I realized that many of our listeners might not know things like how the ministry of GPS Hope got started, what happened that caused me to start writing my first book, or the crazy story of how we end...