Do you remember the feeling of your skin or the color of the walls or the sound of your gasp the moment the bottom first dropped out?
For me it was an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in April inside a tiny, windowless room where a still, black screen confronted us. It should have been alight with the fluttering heart of our thirteen-week-old baby girl. But it wasn’t. It was silent.
I had experienced anguish after Judah’s prognosis, yes, but his heart was still beating. We had hope for his life.
This was different. This screen left us with nothing.
Scarlett was dead, our first miscarriage.
While curled up on the bottom of our shower that night, choking on my own snot, I felt no more equipped to live or die than the refugees of war spread across the evening news. How does one survive this terror? Suffering is the great equalizer. So this is what a broken heart feels like? I became kindred to a hurting world that day. Am I dying too?
The pain of losing a child starts by breaking your heart and then courses through every single vein and vessel, consuming your body until your bones ache.
All of the events that would make up the next few days are mere details: the newborn’s cry echoing in the hospital hallway while I waited for my D&C, the argument over gender testing with the insensitive surgeon, the dollar store dolphin print hanging crookedly above the examination bed, the nurse with the kind eyes who loved me, the way my husband looked like Jesus and reminded me I was not alone, the statistics and charts and pumping of needles, the shuffling in and out of clinics, the homemade cookies on my doorstep, the words spilling from my fingers, the whisper from heaven shattered around my feet, the image of Jesus carrying me in my exhaustion. These were trivialities propped up like matchsticks on my mountain of grief, folding together to make a story I hated—a story bearing my name.
How does a mother learn to breathe again after her baby dies? One breath in. One breath out. And then again. And again.
Suffering does not choose the weak or the strong, the faithful or the faithless. It chooses the human. When you are caught by waves that are larger than your capacity to stay above the surface, you’ve got to allow your heart to feel the pain all the way down to the bottom, so that when you get there you can see you’re still alive. There’s still hope. It’s from the bottom that we can begin to heal our way back up to the surface. The human heart is fragile, yes, but it’s also more resilient than we give ourselves credit for.
The deep is not our enemy or a thing to be resisted. But it does command our attention. No matter what form it takes, suffering always commands our attention. It will not be alleviated by comparison to greater or lesser suffering, or even your perception of it. Your pain is your pain and it deserves the dignity of recognition, for that is where healing begins.
My most recent pregnancy resulted in the birth of a healthy son, Micah. He was born full-term and a million pounds strong. (Perhaps not a million, but nearly ten, which is basically the same thing.) In addition to the concoction of joy, anxiety, and fear of being pregnant after recurrent miscarriages, I also experienced debilitating physical pain all throughout the pregnancy. In layman’s terms, my pelvis was falling apart. It felt like my whole body was coming unhinged.
I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t climb stairs. I couldn’t sit on the floor with my children or sit on the couch among friends. I couldn’t push a loaded grocery cart. I couldn’t clean. I couldn’t take walks around our new neighborhood that I yearned to explore. Even with physiotherapy and braces, exercises and stretching, the pain was relentless.
In a season where I wanted to enjoy a pregnancy progressing as it should after three heartbreaking losses, I felt crushed under the suffering I experienced in my physical body. All the very worst news stories about planes plummeting through the sky or the Ebola epidemic ripping through Africa didn’t cancel out what I endured within my own body and soul. I was suffering, and in my worst moments, all I could think about was my pain.
C. S. Lewis put it this way: “Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.”1
I struggled with a false sense of guilt, feeling resistant to naming my suffering for what it was. How could I call this “suffering” after having three miscarriages? What right had I to name this “suffering” when barren women would give anything to trade places with me?
Naming our suffering does not mean becoming defined by it. Rather, it means honestly acknowledging our need in the presence of Jesus. Our humility frees us to receive his grace. It’s his beauty for our ashes—the great exchange, God’s answer to our pain.
Our present suffering is the best reminder that life dishes out more than we can handle, which is exactly why we need Jesus.
Thy Will Be Done
When Jesus showed us how to pray, he acknowledged within his prayer that God’s will is not always done on earth, yet we’re to pray it will be.
Babies die before they’re born. People are exploited for sex, power, and money. Violence ravages communities. Prisoners are beaten and tortured. Nations turn a blind eye to genocide happening next door. Racism kills dreams and claims lives. Abuse destroys families. Ego corrupts governments. Carelessness and apathy wreck oceans and forests. Disease steals children from their mamas and daddies.
We can watch the news and see that God’s will isn’t always happening; it seems obvious that monstrosities like the horror of war don’t represent God’s heart or intention. But what about when it’s our life, our baby? Do we believe it then? Do we believe Jesus’s prayer is still relevant? Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
We suffer because we live in a world where things are not as they should be. This is not God’s design; we weren’t created to suffer. The human story begins in Genesis chapter 1, not chapter 3.
Suffering exists, but not because it’s God’s intention or will for our lives. It exists because he created us with the capacity to love, and love always requires free will—it cannot be forced. With humanity’s free will came the wonderful, awful ability to rebel against Love. Our rebellion in the garden set the world in motion toward suffering, and it still spins today, leaving brokenness in its wake.
This was not God’s will then, and it’s not God’s will now.
All these years after Eden, we’re still groaning under the weight of sorrow. Jesus has come, but we’re still waiting for him to come again. He’s saved us from ourselves, and he’s still saving us as we awaken to his purposes and movement in our lives. The kingdom of God is at hand, and every day it’s further established as we live into it and allow God to heal us and heal creation through us.
Our in between remains a tension. We hold the promise of hope and redemption in one hand and the reality of a world still infected with rebellion in the other. This is the reason “bad things happen to good people.” This is the reason we continue to pray, Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Lament as an Offering
While mourning the loss of Scarlett, I had to learn the song of lament. It was new to me, awkward and unfamiliar. I grew up singing about how awesome God is and how my soul longeth after him and how Jesus shines, but giving voice to anguish and the injustice of loss and brokenness, acknowledging the pain closing in around me—this I had to learn in the dark, arms open, tripping my way forward.
Lament is more than just sadness; lament acknowledges injustice mixed into our pain. Jemar Tisby describes it as “anguish out loud,” and says it “communicates more than despair; it cries out for deliverance.”2
Save me, O God,
for the floodwaters are up to my neck.
Deeper and deeper I sink into the mire;
I can’t find a foothold.
I am in deep water,
and the floods overwhelm me.
I am exhausted from crying for help;
my throat is parched.
My eyes are swollen with weeping,
waiting for my God to help me.
Those who hate me without cause
outnumber the hairs on my head.
Many enemies try to destroy me with lies,
demanding that I give back what I didn’t steal. (Ps. 69:1–4)
O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever?
How long will you look the other way?
How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul,
with sorrow in my heart every day?
How long will my enemy have the upper hand?
Turn and answer me, O LORD my God!
Restore the sparkle to my eyes, or I will die. (13:1–3)
Almost half of the psalms are dedicated to lament—both corporate and personal—and yet it’s all but absent from our tidy Sunday morning hymnals.3 We’re far more comfortable celebrating Jesus’s victory than we are holding space for the reason we need it in the first place. And so, when suffering comes like a wrecking ball into our cozy status quo—as it does—we are blindsided.
When a mother is told her baby is growing in her fallopian tube and must be removed to save her life, she is blindsided. Is this abortion? she wonders, even though the doctor assures her the removal of an ectopic pregnancy and an abortion aren’t the same thing.
When a couple has emptied their life savings to undergo fertility treatment and IVF only to receive the word “nonviable” from the other end of a phone call, they are blindsided. This felt like their last chance.
When a mother holds a newborn in her arms and calls her by name only to have the birth mother change her mind just before signing the adoption papers, she is blindsided. This, too, is a grief inexplicable.
When a couple watches their child play alone while month after month and year after year the calendar turns with no pink lines appearing, they are blindsided in slow motion. This mother would give the world to trade her tear-stained pillow for sleepless nights, pacing the floor with a newborn. This is hope deferred, making her heartsick.
How do we give language to this agony? What words do we use to cry out for deliverance from this pain?
Nothing I’ve experienced has made me more desperate for the hope of kingdom come than straddling a toilet, bleeding life from my womb. Nothing else has made me beg for God’s deliverance, his day of reckoning, when every tear will be wiped away.
I never knew I could cry so much. Or hope so much.
Lament—it’s the language of grief tinged with the hope for deliverance.
Grace like Scarlett
We named the daughter I miscarried Scarlett Grace. Scarlett was for the pain, the suffering, the life poured out mingled with the hope of resurrection. Grace was for possibility and purpose, goodness and life—the breathtaking assurance that God can be found in our suffering. God’s promise to us is not that bad things won’t happen, it’s that he’s with us through it all—Emmanuel, God with us.
We were beginning to see it.
The ache we endured after losing Scarlett helped uncover holes in our theology—chiefly, that we did not have a theology of suffering. A theology of suffering does not mean God wills it or leads us into it. It means that when suffering comes into our still-broken world—as it will—he can be found there too. Theoretically we understood this, but our bewilderment in the face of bottomless pain confirmed our lack of praxis. Simply put, we weren’t living what we believed because we’d never had the chance to.
Although we felt sure God wasn’t the source of our suffering, Ryan and I were only beginning to learn that the very thing the enemy of our souls used against us could be transformed by the redemptive hand of God.4 This wonder-working God was in the process of transfiguring our horrible loss into an invitation to greater life. We couldn’t discern it yet, but God was hovering, preparing to create something new like he always does when all we see is dark, formless, and void.5
Scarlett was taking us deeper. But to go there we had to be willing to disarm our knee-jerk instinct to distract, numb, or overcome our pain. We had to resist the impulse to deflect our grief or fight our brokenness. We had to reject the compulsion to figure out how this could be rewritten into a success story. We had to enter in as is.
The Low Places
The spectacle of heaven is that it’s birthed into the low places. It’s revealed when Jesus is allowed to enter into the lives of those who know their need for him: a woman caught in adultery, a fraud and a cheat, a hotheaded loudmouth, a terrorist, a thief, a desperate man and his son, a diseased outcast6 . . . a mother staring at an empty ultrasound screen. Heaven is not merely a destination; it’s the Spirit of God writing a redemption story right here and now among our brokenness.
We can get so busy dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s and making sure all the hatches are battened down that we don’t even realize our need for God until something turns the world upside down. Trauma can be the birthplace of revelation if we’re willing to be exposed to our need and welcome Jesus there.
But it’s hard to be needy, isn’t it, friend? Aren’t we so much more comfortable being the helper than the helped? We’d rather be the ones lowering our friend through the roof to Jesus than being so broken we’ve got to be carried there by others.7
Choosing to walk in the way of vulnerability before Jesus and before others takes a certain kind of resolve. It requires tapping into a different place than where we store our ability to grit our teeth and sidestep pain. It looks less like scaling a mountain and more like crawling to an altar—laying ourselves bare before Jesus, weapons and defenses dropped, pride abandoned, hearts wide open asking for deliverance.
He sees our need and names it Beautiful, and we’ve never felt more loved in our life.
Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death? . . . No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us.
And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:35, 37–39, emphasis mine)
In the face of our suffering, Jesus stretches out his hand. Will we accept the invitation to dive deep under the waves rather than try to tame or outrun them? Will we understand that we are still loved?
Come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most. (Heb. 4:16)