Liv Gallardo was born on Friday and passed away early Saturday morning.  Here are the thoughts I shared at the service on Wednesday.

Liv Emery Gallardo was born at 6:19pm on August 2^nd, 2013. She weighed 4lbs 1oz and was 14 1/2 in long.

When a husband and wife become pregnant, we as believers are very excited. We have a natural tendency to create a vision for the future. We think of learning to walk, and talk, and riding a bike, learning to read, the list goes on and on.

The bottom-line is that being a parent can be extremely rewarding and it is personally exciting to mom and dad.  God gives us the pleasure of parenting.  The love of a child. The hug and kiss of a tender, little one.  It is so invigorating that it leads some to continue having more and more of them.

When there is a difficult diagnosis, then we as friends and family suffer a loss or death.  It is not the death of the child, but the death of these dreams and expectations.  All of this heaviness and fear and darkness and failure that resides around diagnosis is directly associated with our thoughts of the future.

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