Welcome to Serve with These Hands!
Serve with these hands is a non-profit organization and ministry that provides resources, care baskets, and support for women who deliver stillborn and babies who pass away before leaving the hospital.
Why We Are Here
The support for families continues months into years after loss as each baby is honored on their heavenly birthday and mommies are supported through painful anniversaries of due dates, death dates, and doctor visits.
As the Serve With These Hands founder, I offer my testimony through journeying grief to healing to mother groups, hospital professionals, women’s groups, Celebrate Recovery groups and have participated in the Grief Recovery Program and am certified and trained as a specialist. I sit along with women month after month in a local support group to always welcome a mommy on day 1 and to listen to grieving mommies who question if the pain will ever lessen. I share my story of the worst day to share my hope and joy that has been restored.
Serve With These Hands’ purpose is to provide support, comfort, information, and inspiration to families who have experienced baby loss from the earliest weeks of gestation to babies who lived outside of the womb. This ministry was breathed and called to be by God after delivering Jeremiah stillborn. Serve With These Hands provides a place to validate life and loss, allow grief to be heard, and provide a safe place to share the waves of emotions following loss.
Serve With These Hands is best known for gifting care baskets and totes to grieving mommies all over the United States for almost a decade. Carebaskets/totes are filled with the items I requested from friends during my hospital stay after delivering Jeremiah. They would be wonderful items to receive on their own, but partnered with a heartfelt letter and personal contact information, grieving mommies know that someone sees them and is ready to walk the journey through grief alongside them. Care baskets are waiting in over 160 labor and delivery units at hospitals all over the United States to be gifted to mothers after loss. There are so many hospitals we have not yet partnered with so care totes are also shipped directly to grieving mothers at home following loss.
Care Baskets
Care baskets can bring comfort to those experiencing the loss of their little one.
Each basket contains the following:
Lip gloss/lotion: My lips were so dry from only chewing on ice while I waited in labor to deliver my baby. My hands were so dry too. I loved having something refreshing to moisten them up with.
Blanket: This blanket is to fill a mother's arms, to cuddle with, and to rest her head on. It can never replace cuddling a baby or the bulge of a baby belly but I wished I had one like it after delivery.
Kleenex: The hospital tissue was so rough and I cried so much. The soft tissues are for your tears and those who come to visit.
Thank you notes: It may seem strange, but I wanted to write thank you cards to some of the nurses and visitors. Their kindness overwhelmed me and it helped me sort through my mixed emotions to recognize my appreciation of their service in writing.
Journal/pen: I only grabbed three things the day I headed to the hospital, unaware my baby had passed away. My journal was one of the items I grabbed. I wrote every thought, every doubt, every pain, every verse, and every detail of the days leading to Jeremiah’s delivery and the days to follow. It offered me release when my husband didn’t understand my pain. It filled the quiet lonely hours in the hospital bed in-between nurse visits. Weeks later, I am still clinging to my journal to release my broken heart and search for hope.
Basket: It will not only hold the items for delivery but the basket will also be used to carry home all of the items collected for memories while in the hospital.