For the second time this year, I've just finished a season of
waiting to begin an impending miscarriage. For the third time this year, I find myself again in the process of saying goodbye to my baby, physically and emotionally detaching.
In just one year and just like that...
miscarriage has become part of my story - a deeply personal,
embedded layer of who the Lord is asking me to be - and even though it hurts...I'm thankful for the lessons.
"Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls."
Matthew 11:28-29
When Brodie and I set out to have children initially, our feelings had mostly to do with our desires for a large family. Certainly, those desires pleased God and I believe they were from Him. After all, He loves children, considers them a gift, and as we delight ourselves in the Lord it is He who gives us the desires of our hearts.
"Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart."
Psalm 37:4
But, as the years (and quantity of little gifts) progressed and as the road of childbearing became...more treacherous, our desires and motives melded into much more than merely a love for children. Our intentions grew much weightier and our goal became more solidified, with a potentially higher cost, so it happens to turn out. As our motive developed into an exclusive aim to glorify God and trust Him in ALL things, including the creation of life should He choose to create (that is giving Him full control over our fertility), including taking life if that should be His will, what we've had to accept additionally is that such surrender lands our lives unreservedly in His hands...on His terms...both of which are always good:
The Bible is sufficient for all things and should therefore be our guide for every decision we make.
"All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching,
for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,
that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work."
2 Timothy 3:16-17
The Bible tells us that God is the Creator of life.
"For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb."
Psalm 139:13
God tells husband and wife in His Word to be fruitful and multiply as is the natural process.
"And God blessed them. And God said to them,
'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it."
Genesis 1:28
God created man and woman and the union of marriage with the intention and result of godly offspring.
"Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union?
And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring."
Malachi 2:15
God is trustworthy and good. His plans are always good. We can trust His wisdom over our own.
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.
It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones."
Proverbs 3:5-8
God is our Provider. Everything we have comes from Him and where He leads, He provides.
"And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus."
Philippians 4:19
The Bible tells us that God's love is perfected in us. Through His Holy Spirit who dwells within us, He loves infinitely and is able to multiply what we can't on our own, apart from Him...so there's always more than enough.
"No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us."
1 John 4:12
In death and in life and everything in between, we should thank the Lord for His wise plans and sovereignty.
"The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."
Job 1:21
For all these reasons and many more, we can peacefully and consistently conclude that God is trustworthy when it comes to our fertility and ability to raise children for His kingdom and for His glory, even in the later years of my childbearing season, and with that comes the prospect of miscarriage. It just does. Yet, with miscarriage comes this amazing, intimate, private ministry of partnering with God (the Creator) in ushering a soul straight into heaven, never having tasted the realm of the fall. When I consider the three worshipping souls already in the presence of our Lord, in paradise, rejoicing, waiting there for me...it fuels my drive to trust that God was all knowing and wise in His choice to create those lives and draw them straight to Himself.
Yes, that means pain and loss for me...but I rest in knowing that it's not about me.
That's the thing...
Our lives on earth are not about us.
We live to glorify God.
And if He thinks that His creation is best off straight to heaven,
then I agree without reluctance because He is always GOOD.
God is so good!
Which brings me back to the waiting....
Waiting...to miscarry...after hearing the news that the life inside the womb is no more, after seeing a little baby on a big screen TV with no heartbeat and wanting that precious life so badly to get to be mine here and now, yet accepting God's sovereign choice in the matter...is a unique kind of waiting. It's sacred in some ways, I've found. And it is good.
This waiting, child still with me in the physical sense, though triumphantly and in spiritual actuality with Jesus face to face, generates dependence and clinging unique to the situation. Zero control over circumstances fosters an intimacy with the Father that is worth the grief and trial. It is quiet, thoughtful, childlike faith put directly to the test and it beckons I draw near to Him.
He in the drivers seat and me bowed down to His will.
That's where my kind and loving, gracious Father has had me the whole of this past year and I can only pray that He uses all these wounds to bind up those of another in His time because I want Him to be glorified above all!
"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too."
2 Corinthians 1:3-5
Jesus suffered...for me. Jesus died...for me. Jesus bled...for me. He calls me to imitate His example.
"By this we know love, that [Jesus] laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers."
1 John 3:16
Through the pain and loss of our God-given babies (brothers and sisters in Christ), through the waiting to release them back to Him, through the physical sufferings of
miscarriage after miscarriage, I can honestly say that the Lord has proved Himself more than trustworthy and comforting in our deficits and loss. He is faithful when our faith fails. He knows exactly how we feel when no one else possibly could. He is that friend who sticks closer than a brother. That is Jesus and it's who He is in the storm...calm and in control and He has shown Himself to me in new ways through the decision to trust Him wholeheartedly with our fertility and with the decision to wait on His timing to miscarry naturally. We praise Him for answering our prayers, both for new life, and also to begin the miscarriage process in His right timing...all through the mourning and all through the waiting.
He's used it all for worship.
Praise the Lord! I can trust Him today and I will trust Him again in the future because everything He does is good
and it's a gift to experience His kind of good
on His terms, often so different from my finite view.
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts."
Isaiah 55:8-9
So today, as I sit here this morning by the lit Christmas tree which reminds me of what Jesus came to do...for me, awake before dawn after another night of "laboring" in the privacy of home and in the arms of the Lord, I'm deeply thankful for lessons learned, with many more to come I'm quite sure. But had I missed the truths the Lord has shown me through the trials of my miscarriages, I'd be searching for them I bet, because I'm always wanting more...
More of Him, less of me. That's the road I'm traversing by faith. Albeit, a little wobbly at times, but strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might, His joy in my lack. When I fall, He picks me up. When I'm tempted to turn right or left, He is right there to remind me through His Word to keep my gaze forward, fixed on Him and I quote to myself,
"Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in His wonderful face.
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace."
Truer words could not be spoken. How blessed, how cherished these words are to me.
"Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."
Psalm 73:23-26
Eyes on Him. Don't look down.
"You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.
Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock."
Isaiah 26:3-4
Trusting the Lord with all our hearts and leaning not on our own understanding or wisdom, but placing all faith in His...This is where I want to be. Always. No matter the cost, no matter the loss, Jesus is worth it. May He be glorified above all, through it all, because of it all as He is faithful to teach such invaluable lessons.
"I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God,
to present your bodies as a living sacrifice,
holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that by testing you may discern what is the will of God,
what is good and acceptable and perfect."
Romans 12:1-2
