January 23, 2006 was my hardest night. My husband and I had a few months prior decided to start our family. We finally discovered that I was pregnant and were flooded with varying emotions. My husband began crunching numbers while I was at once totally elated and completely overwhelmed. It felt so permanent and unknown. The next week I could hardly think about anything else. Would it be a boy or a girl, when would I start to show, what should the name be, what crib bedding should I get, how big would I get, what would the baby grow up to be, would have it hair, should I get an epidural? It’s interesting how from the moment I knew that a baby existed, I began to bond, to make plans, to dream and to wonder.
I remember praying for our tiny baby, that God would protect it and help it grow. Even as I prayed, it really never occurred to me that something might take this dream away. Naively I believed that things like miscarriages or stillbirths happened to other people.
A week later I woke up one morning to discover I was bleeding. I instantly crumbled. My dream seemed precarious, that it was slipping away, almost as soon as it began. For a week I went through life in a daze, constantly waiting, dreading, checking, hoping, pleading, praying, crying, afraid. On January 23, my dream slipped away. I would never deliver that baby, never hold it, never in this life know him or her. Simply put, I have never been sadder. Nothing in this life, no sadness or loss, prepared me for losing that baby.
I felt incredibly alone, isolated both from God and man. Suddenly it seemed like God was distant and cruel. I watched those around me who seemed to be living easy lives with big families, easy pregnancies, even unwanted pregnancies. Why would God even give me a baby just to take it away? I have certainly believed that God loved me, but suddenly, in a wilderness of pain and grief, I wasn’t sure. In fact, it felt like he must NOT love me.
Friends would try to encourage me with well intentioned words about all the children I would probably go on to have. They shared stories of people who they knew who had lost babies but now had other children. While that gave a glimmer of comfort it completely missed that greatest source of my grief...I wanted THAT baby!
One of the first verses I memorized was Romans 8:28 which reads that “God works all things together for good for those who love him and are called according to his purposes.” As I limped along in my faith I prayed that verse thinking, “How can God possibly make good out of this?” One month later, I found myself with this incredible mix of expectation and fear once again...I was pregnant. This came as a surprise but was quickly met by despair as within five days I miscarried that baby as well. My life felt like a joke. I was incredulous. How could life, and by extension the creator of life be so cruel? While other’s lives moved forward around me, my heart was shattered. I entered a dark wilderness I wasn’t sure I would ever find a way out of.
One day a few months later while I was praying I felt the Lord lead me to read 1 Samuel. As I came to verse 8 I had an overwhelming sense of the Lord speaking his Words to me. I read, “Am I not worth more to you than ten sons?” For 2 months I had been so angry with God for letting me lose these babies and for feeling far away. This question stopped me and I began to question myself. “What did I value more, knowing Jesus or getting what I desire? These things are of course often not mutually exclusive but it seems to me that God’s greater desire in my life was to use these losses as a way to draw me near. I had been the drowning man, so busy flailing and fighting that I couldn’t be rescued. I had been so busy fighting to be saved that I missed the gentle hand grasping for me. There is a song on the radio now by Laura Story that says,
We pray for wisdom, Your voice to hear
We cry in anger when we cannot feel you near
We doubt your goodness, we doubt your love
As if every promise from Your Word is not enough
And all the while You hear each desperate plea
And long that we’d have faith to believe
Cause what if Your blessings
Come through raindrops
What if Your healing comes through tears?
What if a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes
To know you’re near?
And what if trials in this life
Are your mercies in disguise?
This song, six years later has made me reflect so deeply on the truth that God’s purpose for my life and his ways in my life, are not for my happiness but for my holiness. His desire is not ease but faith.
If I can say with the psalmist in Psalm 46, “God is my refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble. Therefore, (I) will not fear, though the earth should change and though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea; though it’s waters roar and foam, though the mountains quake at its swelling pride”...though my heart is broken and my babies have been lost….You are my refuge and strength...then I have found true faith. This is where I began to find my way out of the wilderness, to ask hard questions of the Lord, like, “What does it mean to trust you, to be content, to pray with faith, to not fear?
It is in my heart’s journey with the Lord to answer these questions that I have found God’s mercies in disguise. I prayed as Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego did in Daniel 3 that God would deliver me and bless me. But what if he didn’t? Their prayer became my own. “...My God whom I serve is able to deliver (me) from the fiery furnace of blazing fire; and he will deliver (me), but even if he does not…(I) will not worship (anything else).” I chose not to worship the idol of family but to submit to God’s purposes.
I prayed by faith with Job and worshipped, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job 1:21 I learned that contentment isn’t being happy, it’s being humble. Contentment says to the Lord, “You know better what I need then I do.”
In all these things I rediscovered hope. Not the hope that I would have the baby I so desired, but a greater hope, the hope of Hebrews 6.
“This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil”. This hope is gospel hope, that this world with its trouble, trials, and pain are not what I was created for and this hope will never disappoint. Because of Jesus, I’ve been promised more. When I meet grief on earth, I remember as Laura Story in her song says,
this is not our home…
What if my greatest disappointments
Or the aching of this life
Is the revealing of a greater thirst
This world can’t satisfy?
And what if trials in this life
Are your mercies in disguise?
The redemption of my pain is not in taking it away, or in a misled belief that God will protect me from hurt, it is instead in the understanding that in our pain we can meet the very author of life, we can know him deeply and we can see that God’s purposes are greater. He is indeed worth more to me than 10 sons, in fact, He is worth more than anything.
Sorry God that I was thinking that life is ridiculous. It isn't. Sometimes people are, sometimes cirmcunstances feel that way, but You never are. Life is purposeful.
Love you Laura.
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