We have had several miscarriages among young mothers associated with our church in recent weeks. As a man I always acutely feel my inadequacy in speaking to their grief. Kelly Needham speaks to that grief as a mother who has lost her own child to miscarriage.
I was twenty-one, a year into marriage, when those two pink lines first appeared. We rejoiced at the precious life entrusted to us. But soon after, I started bleeding and eventually miscarried in a crowded airport bathroom waiting to board a plane for Houston. I will never forget the excruciating emotional turmoil as I was forced to experience such a sacred moment in that crowded, public, and dirty place. Every person in that terminal felt like an intruder in my moment of raw grief.
Having hardly any friends who were married, let alone pregnant, I felt alone and confused. Luckily, our life was busy at the time, so I suppressed most of my emotions and moved on with an attitude of "better luck next time, I guess."
A couple years later, after losing two more babies, emotions weren't so easy to suppress. Aware of the power of God to sustain life, miscarrying shipwrecked my faith. My attempts to reconcile the promises of God with my current circumstances kept me stuck wrestling with Him for some time. Though I am forever grateful for the testing of my faith, I remember the haunting discord of circumstances crashing against truth like it was yesterday.
Miscarriage is the membership card to a club you never asked to be in; a union of women sporting badges of infertility, stillbirth, miscarriage, and abortion. Women who share your emotions, questions, crisis of faith, and isolation; women whose desire to be a parent has been abruptly interrupted by suffering. As a member of that club, here are six exhortations for walking through this challenging season.
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