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“Expecting” is an appropriate appellation for a pregnant woman. As soon as she sees the positive pregnancy test, she will likely calculate the due date and look at the year ahead with a whole new set of expectations. In the next few weeks, she expects to feel that bone-deep, wearying exhaustion of the first trimester; she expects to feel her body begin to change, her ligaments loosening, her belly burgeoning by the month; she expects appointments and blood draws and ultrasounds; and she expects all these things to build toward that pinnacle moment of a screaming newborn baby placed on her chest. “You are four weeks pregnant. Your baby is the size of a poppyseed”—that’s all it takes for a mother to begin imagining the day that she meets her child. So when the cramping squeezes her abdomen into knots and when the flash of crimson signals death, the mother has lost not only her child but all the expectations that came with that positive pregnancy test.
permission to grieve
“But it’s very common.” “It happened so early.” “At least you know that you can get pregnant.” “It was only a cluster of cells.” Women who have experienced a miscarriage may have heard variations of such comments. When we are in the midst of grief and disappointment and when we have gone from eager expectation to dashed dreams, comments like these make us wonder if we are allowed to grieve. Maybe we’re overreacting; “it happens to one in eight pregnancies,” after all. Perhaps we expect to hear these words coming from a world with such a low view of life in the womb, but when we hear some of these platitudes from the church pew, the sting is more potent. Maybe it’s time to swallow the sobs and wipe away our tears.
In the loneliness that often accompanies a miscarriage, there is only one place to turn to feel truly understood: God’s never-changing, infallible Word. Scripture assures us that we’re not overreacting when our babies die in the womb and that our deep sorrow is entirely appropriate. We weep over the death of our little ones because they are valuable, as God’s Word affirms:
You formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth. (Ps. 139:13–15)
Our babies had dignity from the moment of conception because they were made by God, and that is why a miscarriage is such a profound loss. It doesn’t matter how early in the pregnancy our babies died, which developmental milestones they had reached, or whether they were medically fragile. They were still image-bearing, soul-possessing human beings whom the God of the universe had intimately woven together, and therefore they are precious in His sight and precious in ours. So when the formidable enemy of death snatches them from us, it is right to feel the same grief and indignation as Jesus standing at the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus felt no weakness to weep in public. It isn’t a sign of godliness to bite our lip, lift our chin, and paste on a smile after a miscarriage. As our tears flow after our Lord’s, they are valuable enough that God collects them in a bottle, every single drop (Ps. 56:8).
our loss, their gain
When my daughter died in the womb, all I wanted was to have her back. She had been given to me for such a short time, and then abruptly taken away. My arms ached to hold her, and my mother’s heart longed for the privilege of raising her. Eight years later, my arms are still aching, and my heart is still longing, and yet I have come to see that what was my deep loss is my baby’s great gain—a gain so great, I wouldn’t choose to call her back, even if I were given the choice today.
Job experienced the consequences of the fall perhaps more than any other sinner. His suffering was unimaginable—the loss of all his material possessions, his health, and worst of all his ten beloved children. In the raw, early days of his loss, his heart broken and his body bleeding, Job cursed the day of his birth. He looked with envy on those who had been spared the sorrows of life in a fallen world:
“Why was I not as a hidden stillborn child,
as infants who never see the light?
There the wicked cease from troubling,
and there the weary are at rest.” (Job 3:16–17)
Have we paused to think about all that our babies have been spared from, by virtue of being called home from the womb? In God’s great kindness, there are countless joys in this life, but the pilgrimage to our heavenly home is characterized by suffering. Jesus made this clear: “In the world you will have tribulation” (John 16:33). Those of us who have living children know that it doesn’t take long for them to feel the effects of the fall, for them to experience sadness and disappointment, sickness and pain, weariness and trouble. We try to protect our children from harm, but we often feel our helplessness, knowing that we cannot give them absolute protection. There are wicked people on the earth, and sometimes they afflict those we love. Our babies still experienced the curse of the fall when they died in the womb, but in the brevity of their journey on the earth they were spared so much suffering. What’s more, think of what they received when they arrived safely on the eternal shore of that celestial city. They are now with God, where there is “fullness of joy” and “pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11). They are now safe in the arms of Jesus, who continues to welcome little children, “for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:14). Yes, we have to live in the anguish of their absence, but they get to live in the joy of God’s presence. Better by far.
our loss, our gain
It’s a wondrous thought that our babies finished their earthly race and gained the crown of heaven. But what about the aching mother left behind? What about those of us who are finding the pilgrimage too hard, who are wondering what God is doing in the midst of this painful providence? Has our Father in heaven given us a stone?
After my own loss, some well-meaning people reminded me of Romans 8:28: “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Initially, I recoiled from this verse. In the early, raw days of grief, when I was being buffeted by wave after wave of sorrow, I didn’t want to hear that God was working good through the death of my baby. But even though I wasn’t a willing participant, God wasn’t wasting any of my suffering. He was using all of it to conform me into the image of His Son (v. 29), to loosen my grip on this temporary world, and to reorient my heart heavenward.
Samuel Rutherford, a seventeenth-century Scottish minister, once wrote to a bereaved mother:
Men do lop the branches off their trees round about, to the end that they may grow up high and tall. The Lord has this way lopped your branch in taking from you many children, to the end you should grow upward, like one of the Lord’s cedars, setting your heart above, where Christ is, at the right hand of the Father.
When we long for our children, our hearts are drawn upward to our Savior, who is with them in heaven. When we feel their absence, we remember that this world is not our home. As we part with the physical remains of our little ones, we cling to the enduring hope of the Christian life: “the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting.”
future gain
Even though our babies are in heaven and we are here on earth, we still have one thing in common with them: we are all waiting. Just as our story isn’t finished, neither is theirs—the saints above and the saints below are all looking forward to the day when Jesus will return and make all things new. It’s a different kind of “expecting,” one that will not end in death this time:
Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. (1 Cor. 15:51–52)
Our babies didn’t get to inhabit their earthly bodies for very long—a few months, maybe even only weeks—before their bodies perished. But when that final trumpet blasts its victory note, they will be raised to receive their imperishable, glorious, powerful, new-creation bodies—bodies that will never die again. The same is true for us who follow in the footsteps of our risen Savior. And when that happens, the last enemy, which stole life from our womb, will finally be swallowed up. Then will come to pass the saying: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (15:55). And your tears that were once collected in a bottle will be wiped away by God Himself (Rev. 21:4). For death will be no more.
But, Lord, ’tis for Thee, for Thy coming we wait,
The sky, not the grave, is our goal;
Oh, trump of the angel! Oh, voice of the Lord!
Blessed hope, blessed rest of my soul! (Horatio Spafford, “It Is Well with My Soul”)