Balancing Celebration and Memory
Hey Reader,
July is here, and if you're newer to this space, this week's email is a little different than what you'll usually find in your inbox. We'll be back to our regular content next week. But today I needed to write this one first.
One year ago today, we buried our daughter Myla.
She was born sleeping on June 19th, 2025 and her funeral was July 1st, and the days in between were the kind of days you don't even begin to have words for until you're on the other side of them, but even now, one year later, the words feel insufficient. If you want to know her story, I've linked it here:
I wrote it last year because I needed to, and because sharing her story has helped me process my grief.
What I remember most about that season isn't just the loss itself, it's the feeling of standing at the edge of something I hadn't chosen, looking out at a life that was going to have to be rebuilt around an absence, completely different from what I had envisioned. We had longed for her, had made space for her, and then had to figure out how to keep going without her, which is the strangest and hardest kind of forward motion there is.
The country is celebrating 250 years this week, and I will celebrate too, because two things can be true at once. You can watch fireworks light up the sky and feel the ache of someone who isn't there to see them. You can hold a sparkler and grief in the same hands. I don't get to know Myla this side of heaven: I don't know what she would have loved, what she would have laughed at, what her voice would have sounded like. But I think about it anyway, the way you think about someone you love deeply and haven't met yet, because that's exactly what she is to me.
I will meet her one day. That promise is what I stand on, and somehow, by grace, it is enough. 💔❤️
So this Fourth of July I'll do what I imagine many of you do with your own complicated days: show up, celebrate what is worth celebrating, feel what I feel, and trust that the God who holds all of it is not confused by the mixture.
Happy 250th, America. And happy celebration of life day, sweet Myla.
Grace
"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds."
Psalm 147:3 (ESV)
One year ago I stood in a sanctuary and wondered how faith was supposed to feel in a moment like that. I don't think it felt like certainty. I think it felt like choosing: choosing to believe that the God who created Myla and knit her together and knew her before I did had not made a mistake. Choosing to believe that her life, however brief, was not outside of His hands.
That is the gospel, at its core. Not that life will be painless, but that nothing, not even grief, loss, and a July that arrives with the weight of a funeral on its first day, falls outside of the reach of the God who loved us enough to send His Son to defeat death itself. Jesus did not just sympathize with our grief from a distance, He entered it. He wept at a graveside, even knowing that he would raise that man from the dead in just a few short moments. He walked through death and out the other side, and because He did, I have a hope that is firm, not dependent on my circumstances.
Myla is with Him. I don't say that as a comfort cliché, I say it as the thing I am most sure of, the ground I stand on when everything else feels like its falling out beneath me. She is known and she is held and she is whole, and one day I will see her face, because the same resurrection that is promised to every believer is promised to her too.
If you don't know that hope yet, I want you to know it's available to you. Not because you've earned it or because your grief is tidy enough or because you have the right answers, but because Jesus already did what needed to be done, and the invitation is open. He wants you. He wants to adopt you and call you HIS. That is the only reason I am standing.
"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life."
John 3:16 (ESV)
He heals the brokenhearted, He binds up wounds, and He does so because He is that kind of God: the kind who does not waste our pain, and does not leave us in it alone, but walks with us through, making beauty out of the ashes.
See you soon,
- Mrs. Holman
