Discovering healing through new prayers.

Every December three crimson poinsettias sit together in Laura and JR DeGroot's Colorado home. But they're not there to serve as the usual holiday decor. Instead, the blooming cluster symbolizes three tiny children lost on December 3, 1990, by the then first-time parents.

That morning had already been an eventful one when Laura visited her doctor for a routine 26-week checkup on the unborn triplets. For someone on strict bed rest, she explained, sitting up and going for a drive gave her a great break from the same old four walls.

However, within hours, the trip turned tragic as she unexpectedly and miserably delivered the doomed infants, each weighing about as much as a bag of candy and measuring no longer than a child's school ruler.

Grievous events--from mis-carriages, to accidents, to divorce and serious illness--often force people to probe the mysterious link between spirituality and healing. Laura, now a 39-year-old motivational speaker, confessed that without making that connection, without giving her pain to Jesus Christ through prayer, she would have "died from the inside out."

The process pushed her to pray new prayers, the type the apostle Paul mentions in Romans 8:26. "The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express."

According to her doctors, seeping amniotic fluid had poisoned Laura's womb. Without a speedy delivery, they explained, the resulting infection would put her in the grave right behind her offspring.

So, without any time for conscious, verbal prayer, the DeGroots fell into the whirlwind of an emergency-induced labor. Laura soon delivered Calvin, Leah, and Andrew within 10 minutes of each other. Each cried briefly after drawing their first breath and then quietly slipped into death because of underdeveloped lungs.

It was then that the young couple began reciting Psalm 121 to each other for comfort. They later realized this as their first prayer for healing after the devastating loss. "At the time, I thought I was in a place where I wasn't praying," Laura admitted. Sorrow, she says, chopped her concentration into small chunks and left her mute to pray as she had before--with words and connected thoughts.

Instead, the heartbroken young woman cried watery tears and then dry ones, felt anger ebb and flow, and often fought overwhelming despair--especially after her milk came in, her tummy draped over her waistband, and her arms remained hauntingly empty. "Those were probably the most raw and honest prayers, using the fewest words," she remembers. "It was prayer because it was directed toward God, and He absorbed it. Some people might take their brokenness to another person, but that person is limited as to what they can remove."

It took 11 months of these new prayers before the DeGroots could bury the ashes of their children under three freshly planted aspen trees. Their willingness to pray this way--to give away the grief and make room for God's peace--kept bitterness from souring their lives.

Less than two years after the DeGroot's darkest day, Laura bore healthy fraternal twins, Lyndsay and Lauren.

Today the preteen girls keep her and JR, a 41-year-old accountant, on the go with piano lessons, church activities, and sports. Laura has filled her wallet with photos of the precocious blue-eyed blonds growing up.

But tucked between the plastic covered pictures of this happy parade is a single color photograph of the triplets--a fleeting image of them alive in a row with little beanies on their bald heads and tiny pink, blue, and yellow blankets swaddling their doll-sized bodies. The photograph, Laura says, helps her keep the memories from fading and prompts her to thank God for His faithfulness. "It reminds me," she says, "that He is real, that His healing isn't just a concept. It's real, too."

Pam Mellskog is a freelance writer living in Boulder, Colorado.