“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12
Grief and sorrow are strange things. They are strange not because they are rare, but rather because they are foreign to the original design of this created order. “Truly, this only I have found: that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes” (Eccl. 7:29). Those schemes effected the exchange of God’s blessed communion for His just wrath and curse. They made us all liable to every kind of misery in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever (WSC 19).
Sorrow and grief are also strange because God can use them in the most remarkable ways. As the sculptor chisels away the unneeded material from his project, so the wise hands of the Potter shape and mold the redeemed into vessels prepared for glory (Is. 64:8). Most remarkably even the Lord Jesus Christ entered into this misery. Though He was a Son “He learned obedience by the things He suffered,” never once murmuring or rebelling against the painful sorrows that His Father had appointed for Him (Heb. 5:8, Luke 22:42). It is for this reason we can sing and pray, though it be through tears, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I may learn Your statutes” (Ps. 119:71).
Toward the end of 2022, my wife and I had announced that we were expecting our (then) eighth child. The joy of that announcement soon gave way to the grief of another one. In God’s wise providence, we experienced the sadness of a miscarriage for the second time in our marriage (the first was in 2011). This happened on Tuesday, December 13. As we wept and grieved, we remained thankful for the comforts that God had given us in His Word and the encouragements we received from our brothers and sisters in Christ.
This miscarriage was quite different from the one we experienced in 2011. However, the fresh pain from that week provided an occasion to reflect more deeply upon the tearful ordeal of miscarriage, something I know has been part of many lives. Here I will limit my thoughts first to the nature of grief that attended that hard providence, and second to the God who has wisely directed and brought that providence to pass. I will conclude with some reflections on hope.
Losing a baby in the womb is certainly difficult, and that difficulty varies depending on aspects like the varying effects upon the mother and how far along the baby has developed. Yet we all know that it is a different thing altogether from losing a baby already born and a child already grown. I have settled upon the language that the difference lies in this: the loss of a child is the severing of a bond already forged; a miscarriage is a hope extinguished. We have not personally had to experience the former, though we have walked with several who have. Yet if and when God is pleased to bring either of these hardships in our lives, I am convinced that the next part of my reflection is the foundation upon which we must stand, if we are to grow and even flourish in the midst of sorrow.
It is entirely appropriate to have called this a miscarriage of a pregnancy, but not a miscarriage of providence. The former occurs with sad frequency in this sin-cursed world, but the latter never does. On that Tuesday in 2022 we told our children the sad news right after reading Psalm 139 for family worship. In the 16th verse David wrote, “Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.” My family never did get to see the substance of that little one, but we take comfort knowing that our Father in Heaven did. I tearfully explained to our children that sometimes the Lord writes down that we will have many days in this life; at other times very few, as in that case. And in all of this we can confess without reservation, to the title of one of my favorite hymns, “Whate’er My God Ordains is Right.” Indeed, “Here shall my stand be taken. Though sorrow, need, or death be mine, yet am I not forsaken. My Father’s care is round me there, He holds me that I shall not fall, and so to Him I leave it all.”
I do not say this to draw any attention to ourselves, but to direct your hearts upward to the God who knows the end from the beginning (Is. 46:10). We are weak and know so very little. As such, we must learn the lesson that Nebuchadnezzar learned, “No one can restrain His hand or say to Him, ‘What have You done?’” (Dan. 4:35). Far from a cold fatalism, this calls us to a firm trust in the One “of whom, and through whom, and to whom are all things. To Him be glory forever and ever” (Rom. 11:36).
I find the Bible’s discussions of the word hope a fascinating subject. Especially in Romans 8, we find it bound up in cosmic pregnancy language. The entire created order is groaning in labor pains, hoping for the promised deliverance from its bondage to corruption (Rom. 8:21-22). That promise—though certain—is not yet realized. As part of this creation, and as recipients of the Spirit of New Creation, we respond in like manner. We do not grumble, as the unbelieving generation did in the wilderness, provoking God to wrath. But we do groan, along with creation, and along with the Spirit, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our bodies (Rom. 8:23). In a small but significant way, the extinguishing of the hope of another life drew our family more powerfully to the inextinguishable hope of glory.
We know that our lives are hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). By His grace we only have a deeper and more thoroughgoing appreciation for the promise that God will be a God to us and to our children (Gen. 17:9). Do not allow the strange and uncomfortable sorrows of this life to harden your heart against the God who sends them (Ps. 66:10-12). Rather, draw near to Him who will one day wipe away every tear from our eyes and remove heartsickness forever. The day draws nearer when hope will no longer be deferred, but only wondrously realized. One day soon, all the redeemed will stand in the presence of the throne of God and of the Lamb. There, on either side of the river, will be the tree of life, and its leaves will be for the healing of the nations, and every tear will be wiped away (Rev. 22:2-3, 21:4). Though our hearts may be heavy and even sick, this remains our hope. We invite you to make it your own.
