Whispers of God Navigating Faith, Grief and Motherhood

Walking in the Spirit Through Grief and Motherhood

A happy 2026. I feel very hopeful for this year. I am grateful to God for His many little miracles in 2025 and His guidance. I also thank God for the courage to finally start mamanarratives. This has been on my bucket list since December 2023, after a conversation with my purpose coach. I carried it quietly in my heart for some time, and this year I felt released to begin.

I am grateful to the one particular friend and her husband who encouraged and supported me to go for it, to my pastor who prayed and launched mamanaratives, and to my brother Robert, who worked on the initial website. Thank you for being God’s vessels in birthing this space.

I also sincerely thank the six mothers who have already shared their stories; it is a rich heritage for mama narratives. So far, I have mostly shared my own reflections on motherhood, but in 2026, I want to give more space to the stories already collected and to remain open to how God will continue to lead mamanarratives.

Looking back at 2025

My desire in 2025 was to live a Spirit-led life. Truly, God led me when I allowed space for Him to do so. There were also moments when I ignored His leading, and I regret those times. 2025 was a year in which I experienced four particular losses that shook my life, some threatened my mental health, and I had to undergo a few therapy sessions and I have experienced God’s healing. However, my biggest lesson of 2025 through those losses was learning to listen and obey God’s voice in me, not an audible voice, but more like the sixth sense. Some losses came as a result of not trusting and obeying God's voice in me and believing outside voices more than discerning God’s leading, and others just moments of growth,  adulting and character development 🙁.  However, though painful, I learnt and am still learning great lessons. In today's blog, I will focus on one of the losses, that of my beloved grandmother. 

How God was preparing me for my grandmother’s death

When I read Sarah Jakes Roberts’ Power Moves “I’ve heard stories of people who lost loved ones but, because they were sensitive in their relationship with God, they sensed before the person was gone that they needed to be more attentive to their relationship with them”(p. 37). I cried,  I could see my own journey in those words, in the journey of the last days and months of the life of my grandmother. I could see where I obeyed and where I ignored the inner prompting.

Moments of prompting and delay

Around December 2024, I felt a strong nudge to send my grandparents money so they could invite relatives and friends to celebrate Christmas or New Year. I ignored it and instead sent them a simpler New Year gift.

Around Easter 2025, I felt the same urge again. That was the time I was still emotionally low; I ignored it again. Looking back now, I see clearly that this was God’s leading. It would have created a bigger social space for her to celebrate what became her last Easter and New Year with close relatives and friends. She was a very hospitable lady, and she loved people eating bountifully at her home.

The retirement celebration idea

On 26th November, as my mother was approaching retirement in early 2025, I wrote to my sisters suggesting a quiet retirement celebration for her since we had some small amount of money from a project we were doing together, which could facilitate that. I considered booking an Airbnb in the South Coast, inviting five of her close friends, bringing close family, and my maternal relatives. I especially wanted my grandparents to attend because they had never been to the Kenyan coast. We never picked up the idea I sold to them after the message I wrote them. The idea slowly died,  but there was a different type of retirement celebration, not the intimate family one I had envisioned. Which is okay, it was not my retirement 🙂

However, I feel sad that my grandmother died without ever visiting the coast, yet this was something that could have been actualised, even apart from the retirement plan. The week after she died, I began to initiate the plans for my 92-year-old grandfather to visit the coast, which my aunt and her family finally actualised in December. After the trip, he was very happy; he jokingly told me via phone that the trip would add him seven more years.

The documentary that never happened

On 21st May 2025, I asked a friend skilled in video and photography to record a documentary of both my maternal and paternal grandparents. I wanted their history captured. I was to organise this with one of my sisters and facilitate the process, but the idea slipped away again. I felt deeply sad, because this was a chance for my grandmother to tell me and our generation her personal story in her own words. Realising that this opportunity is gone still aches. 

Moments of obedience that now look like preparation

On 16th June 2025, I dreamt there was a funeral, and my grandmother died before I sent her a small token I wanted to share. The next day, I sent it. In the next two months, I sent her little tokens five times more often than I ever had in my life.

On 16th August 2025, my mother and her siblings visited her. I facilitated the trip and asked my mother to buy my grandmother shopping and a simple smartphone so that I could talk with her more easily. My grandmother loved that phone. It hardly left her side for the two weeks she lived there after.

On Tuesday, 26th August 2025, after learning she had a new caretaker, I offered to pay two months in advance to help the caretaker take her daughter to school. I had never done this before my mom and her siblings did it.

The call I never returned

24th August, her last Sunday on earth grandmother called me, full of excitement about her new smartphone. I was preparing to travel back from a conference abroad and told her I would call later because of the poor network. The following week became very busy, and I never managed to call her back.

On 29th August, I was to attend another abroad for a week. I was feeling unwell and cancelled the trip. I felt sad since it was a summer course I had been really looking forward to visiting and was well prepared for. Now I see the news of my grandmother would have found me in a strange country with no support from friends and family.  

On 30th August, I kept thinking of calling my grandmother back, but a friend was visiting and left late, so I would call my grandma back later. That same night, my eldest daughter asked me about her childhood, and I told her, for the first time, about my grandmother’s visit after she was born, the gifts she brought, and how three-quarters of her baby cot was bought from my grandmother’s gift.

What hurts me to this day is that unreturned call. I remember asking my cousin, painfully, what my grandmother had wanted to tell me. She said my grandmother was appreciating the phone — but deep inside I feel it was more, and I will never know what she wanted to say.

On Sunday, 31st August, I felt off and told my daughters I wouldn’t accompany them to church. After they left, I received a phone call full of wailing:

“Grandma from Meru has died.” 

I cried deeply. My whole body was in pain. Separation is painful. The following Sunday, I travelled to bury my grandmother.

She had been unwell on and off, but that day she vomited, when she was being prepared to go to the hospital, she said she was healed, but they still proceeded to the hospital, nearly 17kms from her home, and within minutes on the way, she just slept like a joke but never woke up. God called her home. 

What I am learning

Looking back, I learn so much from this story. However, God’s prompting is not only about hard seasons or death. He also leads us into life-giving opportunities, new disciplines, the right friends and paths we would never have chosen on our own. Sometimes His voice is a gentle nudge and many times we are also caught by surprise. God speaks in many ways - through other people, sermons, Scripture, books, songs, silence, prayer, and even unexpected circumstances. The trick is to know how to get it consistently.

Friends and fellow mothers, my prayer for 2026 is that we walk in the Spirit and be attentive in unique ways God is leading each of us.  Motherhood is wide and sometimes overwhelming - guiding our children’s choices, friendships, habits, education, career, lifestyle, and faith. In all of this, I long to be a friend of God, to hear His voice whisper, “This is the way.” May we be attentive to His leading in our mothering, trusting that God is present with us in every season. My prayer is that I will learn to discern God’s leading and have the courage to obey even when other voices disagree.