Where Is God When I Experience a Miscarriage?
Sometimes it's the most painful situations in life where we experience the depth of God's goodness.
C.S. Lewis said in his book, The Problem of Pain, "We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
The result of God getting our attention may be like shouting, but often, how we experience it is more like a whisper. Only in hindsight do we see the subtle ways God was speaking to us through others and His Word, teaching us and comforting us in our pain.
Such was my experience when my wife and I lost our first child.
The Day We Never Thought Would Come
We were staring at a small, 5-inch, granular black-and-white display resembling an appendage of a bean, with a small, flickering light in the center. My wife and I were in our late twenties and eagerly preparing for the arrival of our first child. We were fortunate enough to get pregnant without difficulty, and with the unbridled optimism of 20-somethings with no prior experience, we looked forward to the coming months of hassle-free preparation and a new life.
This visit would be different than what we expected. The flickering light of our little heartbeat wasn’t quite right. Not visually, but the doctor informed us that the number on the screen was not optimal and we should prepare ourselves that this may not be a viable pregnancy. With the tired callousness that I have since often observed in the medical community, she kind of shrugged off what was happening as no big deal and nature’s way of dealing with problems. She wasn’t wrong, but we were crushed.
I knew of many people having miscarriages, but in my young naivety, I did not realize that this word meant, essentially, giving birth to death. I didn’t know that my wife would begin to have contractions and give birth to the death of a dream in tissue paper on the cold tile in the middle of the night. I didn’t know you could mourn someone you never met. I didn’t know that you could see a future so clearly that would never be realized.
The Value of Others
We buried our child in the back corner of the property where we lived in South Africa, where the setting sun cast long golden fingers through the grass. We were devastated and confused. I had never heard anyone describe what it was like to lose a child in this way. My mother-in-law dropped everything after a phone call that morning, jumped on a plane from Cape Town, and was there with us.
I don’t remember how they found out. I don’t remember if they reached out randomly or if I initiated contact, but our Pastor at the Anglican church we attended at the time, Rory Middlecote, and his wife, Linda, found out. He didn’t call us up to pray over the phone or come by in a suit and tie with a thick Bible under his arm to give us chapter and verse on why this was better and God’s plan.
He and his wife, Linda, drove the 30 minutes to the small farm we lived on in the Free State and came with tears and laughter and pizza to share with us in our earthly sorrows and to commiserate with us amid our pain over the ache of something that was not God’s plan, the death of a child.
Though God can and does use multiple ways to get our attention and speak to us through painful situations, there are two that I have experienced many times and one in which I can also be a part of God’s voice.
