Charlotte Faith

The following is a letter Steve and I wrote and had read at Charlotte's funeral.

Since people didn’t get a chance to know our daughter, we wanted to tell a bit of her story and share how we knew her and what we knew about her.

For the first time, the name of our daughter, Charlotte Faith, had significance beyond just being a name we liked.  Once we knew that we were having a girl, we started to more seriously look for names for her.  Charlotte was a name suggested by one of our kids that we both immediately fell in love with and that seemed a better fit than the other names we were considering.  

But the name Faith, that was a name that God had given us shortly after she was conceived, even before we knew she was a girl.  

You see, as is often the case for us, we had recently struggled with God’s plan for our family. Thirteen years ago God called us to total surrender with our family, to put all of our faith and trust in His plan for us.  We had been resisting this for a while, but then God reconfirmed clearly that He wanted us to fully surrender our kids and our plans to him.  This brought peace and joy beyond measure.  There’s no better place to be than walking with Him.

Eventually we found out we were expecting a baby.  God had confirmed through his Spirit that our new baby was a gift from him and that we needed to trust him, to have Faith.

Little did we know at the time, that her name, Faith, would also become something that we would have to hold on to with all of our might.  When we look back at this journey, it is clear that God was preparing us for this loss and that he is calling us to a deeper Faith than we have ever known.  We had often wondered, that if tragedy struck us, would our faith be strong enough to trust Him.  Now that we have experience tragedy, trusting God is all we have.  It is all we can hold on to. It is the only hope that we have.  If we don’t trust him fully, then we have absolutely nothing.

Psalm 134:15 says “My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in you book before one of them came to be.”  

God formed our daughter in the womb, he knew her before she was formed.   He had her life planned out before she was born.  God is never surprised.

We are heartbroken beyond measure at the loss we feel, but we are also so thankful that God has called us to have faith and that our faith has taken on a depth that we would never have imagined.  We have never felt a hurt so deep, but have also never felt God’s presence and peace so strongly.  Our hope and prayer is that Charlotte Faith’s life and death would bring glory to God and point people to the source of all hope, Jesus Christ.

“The Lord give and the Lord takes away, BLESSED BE THE NAME OF THE LORD”