Brave Love in the Midst of Loss: Trusting God After Losing a Child

By Bekah Bowman

God's Brave Women - Bekah's Story

I sat straight up in bed, something startling me awake. In a split second, I remembered I was in my son’s room because he’d had a rough night. He was laying still next to me. Too still. I reached out to feel him. He wasn’t breathing.

“God, no, please no.” I whispered urgently as I shook my son.

“Ely! Ely! Bud, wake up!” I grabbed him into my arms and was met with a lethargic head roll and no response. I patted his face over and over. “Ely! Buddy… I need you to breathe! Please breathe!”

Suddenly, my son inhaled in a gasp, his eyes peeking open at me. I took a breath myself, realizing I too had been holding mine. “Hi Bud.” I breathed in terrified relief. My heart was pounding. What just happened?

I held my big 7-year-old in my arms, cradled like a baby. We both sat there in heart-pounding silence, thanking God that didn’t go a different way. As I held Ely, I thought about 4 years prior, when I held my oldest son as he took his last breath at 6 years old. For him, there was no delayed gasp to come back. It was as if Titus ran as fast as he could to Jesus.

He was fighting a rare, fatal, neuro-degenerative disease (a whole string of awful words to describe Batten Disease) and his body was done. God didn’t choose to heal my son Titus here on earth, but He did choose to save him, through Jesus, from the very thing I could not — death. And I knew in that final breath, Titus was healed and redeemed.