Micah's 3rd Birthday and the Micah Wessman Foundation

Dear Friends,

Tomorrow, we remember and celebrate Micah’s third birthday. We continue to miss him greatly. How we wish that he were with us to celebrate his own birthday! We look forward to the day when we can see him again. In the meantime, we are so grateful for friends like you who have honored our son’s memory by your prayers for us and encouragement to us.

As you may know, in 2009 we created the Micah Wessman Foundation, a nonprofit organization. Our mission with the Foundation is to provide Christ-centered resources and encouragement to families grieving the death of a young child. We wanted to provide you with an update regarding the Micah Wessman Foundation.

• New Website

First, we are very excited to announce the launch of our website, Hope for the Mourning: God’s Promises for Grieving Parents, located at www.hopeforthemourning.com. The website will include resources for parents grieving the death of a child as well as Biblical teaching on suffering, grief, and infant salvation. The website also provides an opportunity for grieving parents to be contacted and/or to receive a care package. We decided to use the Hope for the Mourning name in order to allow our ministry to be more recognizable for those who don’t know Micah’s story. The ministry will retain the name of “Micah Wessman Foundation.” We invite you to visit the website. The website will gradually be constructed over the next few months.

• Care Packages

The initial contact between us and the grieving parents is through the care packages sent to the grieving parents. Since the inception of the Micah Wessman Foundation, we have sent 42 care packages to grieving parents. We are made aware of some of these grieving parents through word of mouth, and others through the obituary section of the newspaper. Most of these care packages are sent within the Twin Cities metro area.

We currently include the following items in the care package:

 Two restaurant gift cards, $50 to any “Lettuce Entertain You” restaurants (Big Bowl & Wildfire Grill are local options) and $25 to Chipotle. We encourage the parents to take a few evenings “off” of cooking and just spend time together.
 Three books on grief written from a Christian perspective. These books are: A Grace Disguised, by Jerry Sittser, Holding on to Hope, by Nancy Guthrie, and Streams in the Desert, by L.B. Cowman.
 A brochure about Smile Again Ministries, a grief retreat ministry specifically created for parents grieving the death of a child. We also provide the parents with information on the scholarship we offer these grieving parents to attend this grief retreat.

Of course, we also provide the parents with our contact information.

• Scholarships to Smile Again Ministries

For those parents who wish to attend Smile Again Ministries, we offer each couple to whom we send a care package a $300 scholarship towards their total costs of attending. Over this past year, the Foundation has contributed $2,000 in total scholarship money to Smile Again Ministries for use in providing scholarships to grieving parents.

Thanks again, friends, for your encouragement to us.

In His Hands,

Cory & Heather Wessman

Death Nailed to the Cross

Cancer. Suicide. Murder. Over the past few weeks, it seems that death has been particularly close. Whether it has been my clients, fellow church members, relatives, or the adult son of a fellow grieving parent, death is clearly prevalent among our family, church, and even my law practice.

But praise be to God, death is not supremely powerful. As Pastor John Piper preached in a recent funeral sermon, Christ's work on the cross provided us, his followers, with victory over the cross. In Colosssians chapter 2, we read that Jesus
took the record of debt that stood against us, our sin, and nailed it to he cross.
http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/conference-messages/victor-watters-converses-with-death-a-meditation-on-1-corinthians-1555-57. If we trust in Christ, then we can trust that our death, by reason of our sin, was nailed to the cross when Jesus died.

Therefore, as we encounter death, I pray that we would overcome fright and fear in faith. May we be able to focus on the victory that has come by reason of Christ's work and sacrifice.

O Death, where is your victory?
O Death, where is your sting?
The sting of Death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ."
1 Corinthians 15:55-57.