Heart to Heart - A Transformation Group for Grieving Moms

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Well, I guess it is finally going to happen. The purpose of my blog is growing clearer... And so I am starting a new blog for grieving mothers. If you would like to learn more about it, click the header at the top of this post to send me an email to receive more information. I will continue to blog my personal journey and names of God study here... but I am so anticipating what God will do with this new opportunity.

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As for how I got to this place... In the fall, I will start what my church calls a Transformation Mentoring Group for bereaved mothers. Since the request has been made for an online group, the new blog will be devoted to grief care and healing as its focus.

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Let me tell you about the vision of my heart related to this ministry. Heart to Heart was born in the fall of '06 and the spring of '07 when I was attending two different support environments. H.O.P.E. Support Group: A church based support environment for Bereaved Parents which means Helping Other Parents Endure, and the WARM Place: which is a secular support environment designed especially to help children who are grieving the death of someone close (i.e. a sibling or primary care giver).

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The goal of the WARM Place was to help children by providing age and grief appropriate grief care through support group activities while ministering to their primary caregivers or parents in gender appropriate environments. All the group facilitators were people who had suffered similar losses and had been trained by the WARM Place for the volunteer position. It was the only thing available to help my girls through their grief at the time.

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These two environments were wonderful places to start working through our grief, but they lacked something truly necessary. Each group was entirely dependent on its own environment and the "self will" approach to healing. HOPE became the only source of HOPE for the parents who attended, and often allows people to get mired down in their grief. You have to really be strong willed to get through your grief at HOPE. HOPE was beneficial to me in the first weeks as I attended. After working through the messiness of grief and finding a place to hope, to live and thrive again - I began to attend the group and see that what people who attended HOPE need really is the Lord and His Word. That is when my heart began to grow this ministry.
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My vision for ministry is to have a Christ-centered environment that connects our heart to God's and to one another while working through our grief. I also hope to eventually develop a ministry environment that will minister to the entire family greiving losses of loved ones with a Christ-centered focus. My children all but begged me for the opportunity to attend a more Christ-centered environment but nothing of the sort was available that involved ministry to minors.

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Please join me in prayer for those who are in the process of grieving the death of their child and the opportunity to begin a group that will benefit those who do not have support/healing environments in their local area.