A beautiful story for anyone who has ever been there or ever will:
“And You sent Your hand from above… my mother, Your faithful one, weeping to You for me, more than mothers weep for the bodily deaths of their children… You heard her, O Lord; You heard her, and despised not her tears, when streaming down, they watered the ground under her eyes in every place where she prayed; yea, You heard her…” (Saint Augustine, Confessions 3)
And by extraordinary favour, Monica was told what would truly happen to her son, thus protecting her from despair.
Yet, she cried still, in “every place where she prayed” and in “all the hours of her devotion”, which is to say everywhere and always. And she was told again, by another means, “The child of those tears shall never perish.” And she cried still.
Contemplative in the Mud 