What If Your Facebook Status Told The Truth?

Compared to the celebrities of yore, you and I are staggeringly more prolific. Through E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we can publish our photos, videos, and writings daily — and broadcast them instantly.

The trouble is that as we’ve acquired the messaging power of celebrities, we’ve begun behaving like them too. We use our megaphones to hyperbolize, promote, and celebrate.

Never to talk about hardships.

Never to ask difficult questions.

We’ve chosen to silence ourselves with our own voices. And that’s what my friends Kirsten and Benjamin Watson want to change.

Benjamin’s been an NFL tight end for fifteen years now, and in that decade and a half, he and Kirsten have attracted a more familiar kind of celebrity, the kind that gets your name in the paper every week. The kind that comes with hundreds of thousands of social media followers.

But even from the center of that tremendous network of friends and fans, the Watsons feel just as lonely and isolated as the rest of us — particularly when navigating hardships. And never has that been clearer than this past year.

In January, Kirsten lost a pregnancy.

It was the middle of the football season, and the family was spread too thin to wrap their heads around what had happened. Kirsten was homeschooling their five children, and Benjamin was on the road with the Ravens. They had told nobody about the pregnancy, and they told nobody about the miscarriage. And they took no time to grieve. They just tried to move on with their lives and forget what had happened.

But then, four months later, Kirsten had another miscarriage — this time during the off-season, when she and Benjamin had more time to process the loss. “That’s when we realized that we had never really grieved the first loss,” Kirsten says, “so the pain became twice as big.”

They knew that the second baby would have been a girl, and that left the Watsons wondering what sort of girl she would have been — what she would have looked like and what sort of woman she would have become.

And they couldn’t help but wonder what they’d done to deserve this pain. “I just kept asking the same question over and over again,” Kirsten says. “Why me, God?”

But for all those challenges, the Watsons found that the most difficult part of grieving was the guilt — not a guilt they felt for losing the babies, but a guilt they felt for grieving.

“I think that’s the hardest thing about experiencing a tragedy,” Kirsten says. “The isolation. We look at the people around us — the people online and the people on TV — and everyone else seems so happy that it makes us feel ashamed for being so sad.”

That shame kept the couple quiet about what they were going through, and it made Kirsten feel all the more lonely when she went back to her OB’s office for a follow-up appointment. Suddenly, she found herself in a waiting room full of pregnant women — women who were enjoying precisely what Kirsten had just lost.

And Kirsten decided that she was sick of going through this alone. So she reached for her phone and typed this message:

As I sit in a crowded room of pregnant women, I wait to see the doctor 2.5 weeks after my second miscarriage in 4 months.

I rest on 2 Corinthians 12:9. “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”

I know that I’m not alone in this room. The sadness of losing a baby has been felt by many women who live on without uttering a word about it. They suffer in silence. Today, right now, I rejoice with women who are carrying life within their bellies, and I cry with those who long for it.

Then a nurse called Kirsten’s name. She posted the message to Facebook, put her phone back in her purse, and stood up to follow the nurse. An hour later, on her way out of the doctor’s office, Kirsten checked her phone again.

She had more notifications than she could count.

Today, that Facebook post has more than two thousand reactions and more than a hundred replies. Many of those replies have come from women with similar stories — women who’ve lost pregnancies and said nothing, quietly suffering alone. Some of them for decades.

Kirsten says that experiencing tragedies of this magnitude has put her in a position to start conversations and create community for women who’ve felt alone until now. And in that discovery, Kirsten’s begun to see God at work.

“We all want our lives to be easy,” she says. “But God doesn’t shape our lives to be easy. He shapes our lives to look more like His.”

For Kirsten, that means weathering challenges in order to learn how she can serve. Only now that she’s experienced this suffering can she begin fostering compassion for women in similar situations. She’s discovered that she can’t move forward by forgetting these tragedies. She can only move forward by remembering them and honoring them.

So, in the next few months, she’s going to be taking on a new role at a not-for-profit that speaks up on behalf of voiceless women. And in the meantime, she’s encouraging those whose voices can be heard to use their voices well.

She hopes that by talking about our hardships, we can start building communities instead of networks.

She hopes that we will stop growing apart, and start growing together.