Miracle Child (Miraculous Version)
[This story is about the birth of our child and why I think it’s a miracle. If you don’t believe miracles are possible, this other version has the same events as told from an alternate perspective.]
The text came through on May 18th at 8:07 AM.
It was from a usually trustworthy source — my wife. But I didn’t believe it.
We’ll come back to the message soon. But let me first tell you why I knew it was wrong.
After years of infertility, she had recently gotten pregnant under unusual circumstances that seemed miraculous.
You might say “near-miraculous” or “statistically improbable” if your worldview doesn’t allow for miracles.
I haven’t always believed in miracles myself, but I do these days. This is perhaps unusual for someone like me who works with data and measurement, but here we are.
So what’s a miracle?
“A surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.”
Miracles are impossible, by definition, if you’re convinced the natural world is all we have.
But if you believe in miracles, you believe there is more than the natural world. You believe there is a supernatural realm that can break through and touch the natural.
Here’s why my wife and I considered this pregnancy a miracle.
Reason number one. We had dealt with infertility for years and years. Technically, infertility begins after one year of unprotected sex without the ability to conceive. We were somewhere around 6 years of trying unsuccessfully for another child. That would be 7 years less the 1 year when we were debating whether our family was in a healthy enough place for another child.
At 12 ovulation cycles a year, that works out to 72 misses before this hit. Getting pregnant now, without IVF or therapeutic treatment, was a long shot. You could argue that it was a 1.4% chance given the 0.0% hit rate over the prior 72 months (1/73). Perhaps not a near miracle on its own, but still a surprising and welcome development!
Reason number two. The second reason was an unexpected message my wife believed she had received from God shortly before finding out she was pregnant.
She says that He wanted her to write down her prayers. She says she did not want to do this.
If you don’t believe in miracles, this is of course, already nonsense to you and there is nothing I can say that will convince you otherwise.
All I will say is that my wife is not a credulous person. She is a doctor. An OB-GYN as a matter of fact. She’s actually kind of a superwoman with skills in everything from painting to refinishing furniture to solving unsolvable household problems.
She does not believe in miracles simply because she wants to. It’s because it is the most plausible explanation for integrating the evidence she has seen. When events cannot be explained solely by the laws of the natural world, there must be another explanation.
In any event, my reluctant wife eventually assented to what she thought God was saying.
She cracked open her dusty journal and first read about all she had prayed about in the past. She saw all the prayers she had prayed and saw how they had been answered over the years.
It seemed He had answered them all.
Except one.
Except the biggest one on her list. No pregnancy.
That was, until the very next day when my wife took a pregnancy test on a whim.
Boom. She was pregnant.
She wrote all of this down soon after she found out. You can read her story here if you’d like.
If you’re like me, one of your first inclinations might be to calculate the odds of a natural explanation. I’m with you there. There’s almost always a natural explanation for things.
Here’s how I’d try and account for the natural explanation.
We’d start by considering that we are dealing with a crazy lady. This person, despite being a highly trained and competent medical professional, believes God speaks to her sometimes.
This happens rarely (countable on the fingers on two hands, perhaps), but when it does happen, she listens. Over the course of 6 years of infertility, this lovely but unhinged medical professional, believes she hears from God one time related to answered prayers and infertility. Unbeknownst to her, she is, in fact, pregnant at that very moment.
She discovers this the following day when she takes a pregnancy test.
Let’s say we assume the crazy lady was going to be pregnant at some point. What are the odds that this pregnancy happens in conjunction with her completely imagined divine message / episode of lunacy? Well, you could say the odds are 1 out of the 2190 days (6 years). That works out to 0.046%.
Those are really long odds.
And if you multiply that by the 1.4% odds from reason number 1, the odds grow longer still.
You may consider it a miracle, near-miracle, or simply a statistical aberration out on the fringes of the Bell Curve of life. I am firmly persuaded the confluence of events in the whole situation point directly to the supernatural.
And that’s why I didn’t believe the message staring up at me from 8:07 AM.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve miscarried.”
I just looked at it for a while. My brain did not respond.
Error. Error. Does not compute.
I finally rebooted and came to what seemed like a possible explanation. The only explanation I was ready to accept at the time.
My wife, my brilliant and eminently capable wife, had made a mistake.
She was human after all. I had known this woman to be a gifted artist, talented surgeon, capable locksmith, marathon runner, and solutions engineer for any and all household problem. But as great as she was at so many things, she was wrong here.
That didn’t really check out given what I knew about her, but the alternative seemed even more impossible. There was no way that God would basically tell her that she was going to get pregnant after years and years of infertility, that she would then be pregnant, and that the end of the story is she would find out about a miscarriage in the 11th week of pregnancy.
That seemed more cruel than never being able to conceive again. After all, that was what we had both assumed would happen. We hadn’t thought there would ever be another pregnancy at all.
He wouldn’t do that to Paula, would He?
And He wouldn’t do that to our sweet seven year old daughter, who wanted nothing more in the entire world than to be a big sister. Sweet Evy, who started crying the instant she found out that Paula was pregnant because she was overcome both by how excited she was and how afraid she felt that this long-hoped for sibling might not arrive.
She had been the one who had reminded us every day to pray for the baby.
Before we started eating dinner each night she would chime in: “And don’t forget about the baby.” And right before she went to bed each night she would add the same postscript to prayers: “And the baby.”
But as the days and weeks had passed by, she had been getting over her initial fear and was in the realm of anxious anticipation.
So there’s no way God would do that.
And He wouldn’t do that to me, either. Not after what I had just been through with Him in my own life. He had led me into and through a dark and confusing period of nearly 2 years of struggle.
Despite what I had thought of Him in those hard days, I was convinced He was not capricious or uncaring or disinterested. Instead, I knew Him to be ever present and invested in my life.
And a miracle pregnancy followed by a shocking miscarriage did not seem compatible with what God had shown me about His character. Yes, He had shown me that His grace covers both the good circumstances and the bad, but I also knew that He wasn’t out there just to mess with us. That’s what this seemed like.
My brain was working slowly. The error message was asserting itself again. I decided it was too tough to call.
Neither explanation was acceptable. My wife was unlikely to be wrong. But God would not do this to us, would He?
I looked back at the phone.
I read the next message from my wife.
“I’m going to go for a formal ultrasound at 11 to confirm at high point”
I called her.
She was matter-of-fact. She had her own patients to see that morning. She was in the middle of seeing them at that very moment. I could hear the suppressed devastation behind her businesslike tone.
She had long desired another child more than I had. One child had felt pretty good to me. But this mysterious adventure had completely changed my perspective. I realized I would be crushed for myself as well as for her.
How sure was she of her self-diagnosis?
99%, she said.
Long odds, I thought. But as we got off the phone and I assured her I would meet her at 11, I was already recalculating them.
If she thought 99 to 1, I decided this impossible situation was more like 50 / 50.
I knew what I needed to do. I would pray. I would pray and ask others to pray as well.
I would pray for what I believed could be true. I would ask God boldly. I knew that He could do it. Perhaps He was setting Himself up for the best news story of the day. Perhaps He was taking our miracle story and adding even more drama. He could do that if He wanted to. I knew that He could.
We met for the ultrasound. My wife, looking sad but still resilient. Still tough. Still a superwoman.
She told me she had revised her estimate of miscarriage up from 99% to 99.9%. That didn’t bode well for my 50 / 50 chances. It was now almost impossible for her to be wrong, but miracles can still happen. I mentally made it 75 / 25 in my head.
A tougher thing, but still possible.
Pray.
The ultrasound didn’t take long.
I saw the compassionate look on the technician’s face. I saw my wife’s face. And I finally knew. I was compelled to believe what I could not seem to believe otherwise.
No heartbeat.
We left the building and spent a few moments together, holding one another. Finally, my wife could let out some of the emotion.
There were only a few minutes before my superhero wife needed to go back to work to take care of her own patients again.
Before she left she said something to me that I will never forget. As we stood outside those glass doors on that concrete walkway, she looked at me with a fierce determination defying the tears in her eyes.
“This is still a miracle.”
She was right.
I knew it too. It was a confusing miracle. A painful miracle. And nonetheless, it was still very much a miracle for both of us.
In the days ahead we would try to make some sense of what had happened.
That always ended up being a task too tall for my brain to fully process and ended in grief from being confused and disoriented by this God.
And yet it was undeniable that the Bible is full of people who went through dark times. It’s clear that God is not the author of pain and suffering. But in this beautiful yet broken world we all live in, He does allow it.
I don’t understand how it all works, but I know messages like this one from Tim Keller were helpful.
At least, somewhat.
Mostly, we just grieved. We grieved the loss of the baby that would never get to breathe on Earth. We grieved for our seven year old daughter, who was as devastated as we had known she would be. Our hearts broke for her childlike faith that was getting rocked.
There was, though, one other small miracle that took place in those days.
My wife, who was in such pain that she often couldn’t talk to me, or anyone, about the miscarriage, sent out a group email sharing what had happened to some family and friends.
She didn’t share because she wanted compassion or messages. In fact, she made it clear that she didn’t really want to hear from anyone. She certainly didn’t share because she wanted people to know.
She would have preferred that no one knew, so convinced was she that no one would understand her complicated feelings of grieving the loss while still being amazed at the miracle of what had led up to miscarriage. In fact, I am pretty sure that she would have preferred almost anything to sharing about the situation.
But she somehow felt as though she was supposed to.
She believed that this miracle-working and confusing God had put it on her heart to do so. So as painful and bitter as it was, she begrudgingly hit send on an email 12 days after that ultrasound.
Here it is.
And then, as anyone who has gone through hard times does (also known as all human beings), we did our best to get back to life.
People at our church were kind and compassionate. We received prayer, meals, support, offers to be there for anything we might need. We made new connections with people we were just meeting. We forged deeper ties with people we had already met.
We have some wonderful friends who have their own painful stories of miscarriage and loss. We connected with them and are grateful for them. Some stories end with another baby that is carried to term and a safe delivery. Some stories end with more miscarriages or other tragedies. Some stories end without any other positive pregnancy tests.
All those stories give me some awareness as to how sensitive this ground is. Because we all have different stories. They are meaningful and are all charged with emotions ranging from pain to joy, and sometimes both simultaneously. They all matter.
I also know that my feelings, while real, are not as intense nor as experientially visceral as my wife’s. She was the one who had carried the baby. She was the one to whom God had communicated these powerful and confusing messages. I was crushed and felt lost, but Paula felt it more deeply.
So while it was hard for me, I knew how much easier I had it than her.
Maybe that’s why, after 8 days of being back in a dark and doubting place, I found I could trust God again.
Perhaps it was just the realization that I had no other realistic choice. If I really believed that God had led me through hard times before to help me see that His grace is for the good times and the bad, there was only one option. He was still real and good. He still loved us despite what the circumstances suggested to my finite brain.
I believed it because I needed to. A little like Simon Peter in John 6:68, when he tells Jesus that he’s sticking with him because there’s nowhere else to go.
And the Bible says that God can use all things for good.
Romans 8:28 says it this way: And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
So I believed something good was going to happen. Of course, I didn’t know what the good thing could be. My wife and I assumed we might never know what the good was. The Bible says there will be good, not necessarily that we’ll ever know what the good is.
But I had some ideas.
We’d get to meet the baby some day in heaven. That was a big one. Going through suffering could teach us to be more empathetic and caring people. That was another. And despite the current grief and confusion, Paula still believed that God had met her in a personal and powerful way. We didn’t understand Him, but that shouldn’t be too surprising for us in dealing with an infinite God.
And I could see that He almost certainly was growing our faith through this. Growth is painful. But when we look at the lives of the individuals in the Bible, we see that it has always been that way. God could do anything to work this into His story for good.
What I did not expect was Paula walking into the kitchen the following month looking confused and holding a pregnancy test.
That July morning, she held the test in front of her eyes and said softly:
“Ummm…this technically says I’m pregnant.”
The test was faint, but she knew what it said. She just didn’t believe it.
Once again, there was no IVF. No therapeutics. Just a positive pregnancy test.
After going 0 for 72 ovulation cycles, Paula and I went 2 for 2 the next two times up at the plate.
The first of those was our miracle baby, who never lived outside the womb. I believe we will see her some day, in a place where there is no more sorrow and death.
The second child was conceived in late June. We found out about the miscarriage on May 18th. A week after my wife and I were at the hospital for the post-miscarriage procedure, crying together. Several weeks later, once it was medically safe to try again, she was pregnant.
We didn’t know until the following month. It was a complete surprise.
As convinced as she was of the miracle of the earlier pregnancy, she also knew the medical odds of a couple with such a long history of infertility getting pregnant again so soon. She knew that even though some people think that it’s “easier” to get pregnant after a miscarriage, the medical data doesn’t back that up. She knew that the medical math said she actually might not ever get pregnant again.
But there it was. Looking us in the face.
This time, we didn’t start laughing and crying as we had before. Maybe we were too shocked. Also, the pain of the miscarriage was still fresh. Especially for Paula.
Both of us were amazed and excited and scared to hope. It was whiplash. A good kind of whiplash, but disorienting nonetheless.
For the next several months she grappled with the competing emotions of grief for the miscarriage and gratitude for the new child growing inside of her.
Some days, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of God. What on earth was going on?
But as confusing as it all was, one thing seemed very clear:
God wanted Paula, wanted us, to know that He is there regardless of whether we go through times of heartbreak or jubilation.
I don’t understand it, of course. How God’s sovereignty and omnipotence works along with the problem of evil and with human agency and free will. I can’t sort it, but I know He was in all of it. I know He was, and is, somehow holding things together when we were not.
I know I see the truth in the lyrics of the song we listened to at the hospital after the miscarriage. I know they are just as true whether they are tears of despair or tears of joy.
I see you, child
Though you can’t see me
And I know your thoughts
Before you even think
I heard every last prayer you prayed
Though answered all the time
You just didn’t hear my reply
And I know it’s not easy
Don’t you give up on me
Of course it feels easier to believe in a good God when there is good news. And I thank Him for this miraculous news. But regardless of what I might want to think of Him, I know He is good in the good times and the bad times.
And I know it’s not random, regardless of whether or not it all makes sense to my brain.
There is a God out there who wants to be part of our lives. He’s not a safe God or a tame God, but He is a good God.
The kind of God who would come to Earth to be born and live and die. All so that we could be in relationship with Him and so that He can have ultimate victory over the suffering and death of this world.
That’s still crazy to me. That I believe that the God who made the universe is real and wants to know people like you and me.
He knows that this story — and the stories of friends and family who have suffered through miscarriage and death and tragedy and joy — also also have stories of significance.
And the God of the universe is working to redeem those stories. He is real even when He seems distant. He is good even when He seems asleep at the wheel. And He loves people like you and me through all of it.
[Hello there and thanks for reading. If you’re interested in reading the same story as told from the perspective of someone who does not believe miracles are possible, you can compare it here.]
