I’ll Still Bless You
How can you trust and praise God when he takes away the very blessings he gave? Here is our family’s story of loss and hope.
One of the more enjoyable aspects of the very much altered last year and a half has been listening to music as a family. We have more time together which, for us, has meant more time listening to music and kids dancing in the living room. A song our family has listened to countless times is called ‘Promises’ by Maverick City Music. The song is a helpful reminder of the promises of God and it carries an anthem we’ve bellowed out together so many times that I’ve lost count.
Great is your faithfulness to me. From the rising sun to the setting same I will praise your name. I put my faith in Jesus. My anchor to the ground. My hope and firm foundation, He’ll never let me down.
The music video is incredibly uplifting, with men and women from different backgrounds coming together to sing of the goodness of God in any and all circumstances. There is a poignant moment towards the end as the beat slows down. ‘I’ll still bless you’ the singer declares, ‘in the middle of the storm, in the middle of my trial. I’ll still bless you, when I’m in the middle of the road and I don’t know where to go. I’ll still bless you. I’ve got a reason to bless you. You’ve been so good, you’ve been so faithful.’
One of my many reasons to bless the Lord is the blessing of being a father, having 2 boys that each feel very much like a gift. Getting pregnant has been a roller coaster for us. Our first came naturally after much waiting and our second required minor infertility treatment. There were countless times we wondered if we would be able to have children and then if we would be able to expand our family. For two people that always wanted several children, these 2 boys feel like a rich blessing.
As 2020 came to a close we agreed to start trying for a third child. Given our past history we endeavoured to try naturally while we sit on a waiting list for further infertility treatment, with the British healthcare system being weighed down significantly from COVID-19. In late January of this year we told a few friends we were trying and asked for prayer. Miraculously by the start of March we were pregnant. I’ll never forget the Friday night we took the pregnancy test. We could hardly believe it. We expected it to take months and within a few weeks we were expecting our third child. We sat together on the couch in disbelief. Excitement quickly turned to trepidation. Three young children in London? What were we thinking? We were overjoyed. We shared the news with friends and anxiously planned for a November delivery.
This was news that we had to secretly keep from our family for a month. We were scheduled to travel back to the U.S. in early April for a family wedding and wanted to take advantage of being able to share the news in person. We were so excited to tell our family when we got home. They all knew we were hoping for another child but didn’t expect the news when we returned. It was a wonderful gift to be able to share with them, as it always is. There are few joys like that of telling grandparents and extended family that a child is on the way.
We returned to the U.S. at 10 weeks pregnant and would complete the first trimester while there. We talked with the family about how we would manage three young children in the city, how we would maintain our traveling lifestyle being outnumbered (3 kids vs. 2 parents), and we showed them larger places in London that we would need to move to with our expanding family. Underlying the entire time was a celebration of the goodness of God. Conceiving a child is not a guarantee for a couple. The pursuit of pregnancy can be a difficult and painful process. We rejoiced at this gift from God, in the face of significant infertility challenges. We gave thanks to be able to parent another life. It was a joyous time.
The night before was like any other night. We ate dinner, we laughed at goofy things our boys said and then we were in bed by 10pm, exhausted from another day. My wife woke me up early the next morning. She had noticed some bleeding and was concerned. We were nearing the end of the first trimester, a time when the risk of miscarriage is drastically reduced, but can and still does happen. We resolved to watch it throughout the morning and call a doctor if things worsened. That morning was good as things stabilised. The family did a tour of a local Air Force base while I worked. They came home and we had lunch together. The sting of that afternoon will never leave me. My wife bursting into the office in tears while I was in a meeting. She assured me we needed to rush to the emergency room. The bleeding had significantly and quickly worsened. We dropped everything and rushed to the closest hospital.
While we prayed for a miracle, deep down we both knew what was happening. We’ve had family that have miscarried. We’ve had friends that have miscarried. This brutal fact of life is sadly all too common. Before we knew it we were in a hospital room speaking with a nurse and soon my wife was wheeled back to a room for an ultrasound to check on the baby. Per hospital policy the results of the ultrasound had to be shared by the ER doctor. The nurse administering the scan was not allowed to tell us what she saw. She didn’t need to. This was our third child. We’ve seen countless ultrasounds. We know what looks normal. We know what doesn’t. We know what a healthy heartbeat looks like. We know what a flatline looks like.
Upon completion of the scan we were wheeled back to our room, left alone to wait for the result that we already knew: we had lost our baby. We wept as our minds flashed to the same places. The November delivery that would never come. The boy or girl that we were already in love with that would never join our family. No birthdays, no bike lessons, no late night ice cream with dad.
Alone in a hospital room in Dayton, Ohio we cried out to God in devastation and confusion. Why would you give us this life to celebrate if only to take it away a few months later? We don’t have that answer. What we do have and what we have felt since the moment we lost our baby is an overwhelming sense of the presence and nearness of the Lord, walking with us through the literal valley of the shadow of death. What we have found in our deepest heartache has been God’s love and care for us.
In C.S. Lewis’ classic Narnia book, The Magician’s Nephew, a boy named Digory has an encounter with the mighty Aslan. Digory’s mother was sick and he had gone to Aslan for help. As the nervous and heartbroken boy meets Aslan, Lewis writes:
Up till then he had been looking at the Lion’s great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself. ‘My son, my son,’ said Aslan. ‘I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that. Let us be good to one another.
In Digory’s moment of great pain he sees that the mighty Aslan feels the same pain and carries the same sadness as he does. As my wife and I both wept in that hospital room and have since walked in the sadness of losing a child we have been reminded of the promises of God to walk with us through our most difficult trials. We have been reminded that he is most near to us when we are broken hearted (Psalm 34:18) and that he heals the broken hearted (Psalm 147:3). As with Digory and Aslan, we serve a God who when we pour out our hearts to him in our times of suffering can say to us ‘I know.’ He doesn’t offer us a cheap pick me up. He offers us Himself. Our suffering is not foreign to Him. He is deeply aware of it. Jesus Himself was the Chief Sufferer. The prophet Isaiah tells us that He was despised and rejected. He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, and that He carried our sorrows. He was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. What is most profound is that Jesus endured that suffering out of a love for us and that is the good news we need when we walk through life’s most difficult moments. On the cross Jesus suffered so that the penalty of our sin could be paid. His life for our freedom. His love poured out for us on a cross. It is a love that meets us in our time of great sorrow.
As we walk through the pain of miscarriage we have found immense comfort in this suffering and loving Saviour. It doesn’t mean that we don’t feel deep pain and broadly it doesn’t mean that death, sickness, and disappointment are not devastating. It doesn’t trivialize their impact. But the beauty of the good news of the gospel is that the suffering is not the end of the story but rather by faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus we have an eternal hope far greater than this life’s most difficult challenges. The love shown to us in Jesus is a love that transforms lives. We believe He loves our baby infinitely more than we ever could. We believe our child is now in heaven, basking in the warmth of His love and grace. We look forward to reuniting one day.
Until then we press onward, clinging to the hope we have in Jesus, praying that one day we will be pregnant again, and resting in the love of God perfectly shown to us in the life of Jesus. What hope that is during the best of times. What hope it is through life’s monotony. What hope it is as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Blessed be His name.
