Keeping our eyes on Jesus

“And I realized something, as I tried to untangle my sadness and anger and confusion.  I had believed that the miscarriage was an open wound that would only be healed by a healthy pregnancy.  So I’ve been waiting on a pregnancy to move me out of this terrible season of loss.  And I’ve been weighing down a pregnancy that doesn’t even exist yet with truckloads of expectation and pressure.  I realized that I need to close the wound now and that it’s unfair, to me and to an unknown future, to leave it open any longer.”  Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet

I said to Ellen about a month after we lost the baby how I just wanted to be pregnant again because that would make it better.  She responded in true Sue Ellen fashion with, “I know your heart well enough to tell you that one life will not replace another.”  I cannot even begin to explain how true those words are.   I wanted to be pregnant again so bad because then it would all just go away.  A baby would be coming again, the pain would go away, and we could move on.  That’s not the way it works though.  When you bury the hard parts of life, they always come back, believe me…they always come back.  It was not until God completely broke me down to the point that I had to let go, that He brought us another baby.   My close friends who had had a miscarriage kept telling me that there would be a moment when God would take it away.  Now that is not to say that I would forget, but I would feel a peace and be able to move on.  I told every single one of them that I didn’t believe that was ever going to happen for me and then I was completely caught off guard when it did.   It was Easter weekend and God just broke me down.  BROKE ME DOWN.  It began at Good Friday Service as I was worshiping beside my dear, dear friend who had lost her baby two weeks before me.  We raised our hands and we worshiped amidst deep, deep pain and loss.  Then the clips from The Passion began.  I could barely even watch them.  I don’t even know how to describe what happened in my heart during the following 9 minutes of that movie but God just broke me.  He also freed from a lot of bondage that I didn’t know was still there. 

The Lord wanted me to go through that, He needed me to go through that.  He needed me to be released.  Once I was…on Easter Sunday we would find out we were pregnant. 

“Nine months ago, the world was so different. I was so different. The concept of pregnancy was so different to me, so innocent. Of course I knew women who had miscarried: my mother, my cousin, my friends. But like anything, when it happens to you it’s like waking up to a conversation you’ve heard before and only now grasp, and you realize entirely anew what they were talking about, what they were trying to find the words to describe.” Shauna Niequist

 I was not at all prepared for how losing a baby would change my life.  I didn’t realize that it wouldn’t go away.  I honestly thought when we miscarried, “okay this hurts like hell, but I am sure in two weeks I will be fine.”  Its 5 months later and the pain has subsided but it has not completely vanished.  I still have every email and text message that was sent to me on the day that we lost the baby and the weeks that followed.  I cannot bare to delete them.  I am going to carry this pain for the rest of my life.  That is the part I wasn’t prepared for.  We are not going to welcome a baby into our home in two months.  He got to go HOME sooner than I expected.  I just don’t know that those words will ever come from my lips without tears in my eyes.

I also wasn’t prepared for the emotion being pregnant again would bring.  We have had 3 ultrasounds in the past couple months and I have not looked at the screen until Matt has seen the heartbeat and told me to look.  I have literally felt a weight taken off of me in the last week since the doctor told us we are now in the safe zone.  I have finally begun to think and dream about a nursery.  Miscarriage took away the innocence of pregnancy to me.  Before, I always assumed we would have a baby in 9 months because that is how it has always happened.   Surely after being a single mother and encountering all the loss that entailed, God will not take a baby away from me.  That is not the way that it works…that is not the way God works.  How can He make us stronger people if we never go through anything hard, excruciatingly hard?  The family verse that hangs in our living room and that we pray over our children every night is, “Let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.  We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith."  Matt read that to me on our wedding day and we truly believe that is a calling that God has placed on our lives as a family.  It doesn’t say we will run the race til we don’t get what we want and then we will quit.  Because then it would be easy wouldn’t it?  The race isn’t easy, I didn’t sign up for an easy race so I could collect my trophy and go HOME.  I signed up for the hard race, the race that is worth running, the one that you have to run with endurance and keep your eyes on Jesus to finish.  Because we are choosing to run with endurance I now have two more eyes in heaven that I can keep my eyes on.