In honor of Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, this post today is dedicated to all of the mommas and daddies who have lost a child, whether from miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant loss. If you have experienced pregnancy and/or infant loss, my hope and prayer is that these words encourage and comfort your heart today.
I’m not sure how long your little one lived for. Your sweet baby may have lived for 4 weeks in the womb or 4 months in your arms. He or she could have been born sleeping or lived for 45 minutes.
However long or short your baby lived for, his or her life mattered and brought and still brings glory to God.
I’ve always viewed all human life as precious and beautiful, but after carrying a baby who was deemed “incompatible with life” (see my last two posts here and here for more about my pregnancy with my daughter Hannah Grace), God showed me this truth in a very personal way. Every single one of our babies were made personally by a loving God who knit them together exactly how He designed them.
Psalm 139:13-16 says:
“For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.” (ESV)
God doesn’t make mistakes. He doesn’t mess up. Your baby’s existence was not an accident or mistake. You may have only known of him or her for a few days before you miscarried, but that doesn’t make his or her existence any less beautiful and meaningful. God’s works are wonderful, and our babies are some of the most intricate works he has ever created. And that truth brings me great joy!
We may never fully understand why our wonderful work, our baby, had to die. We certainly may never understand this side of Heaven. In 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, Paul, who wrote that passage, says that we look not to the things that we see, but to the things that we don’t see.
What we see is that our baby passed much, much sooner than we would have ever wanted.
We see the loss of not just our child now but our child in the future, in every age and every stage.
We see the loss of our dreams for our baby.
We experience the physical pain of our miscarriage, the emotional pain of telling family and friends, and the loss of getting to hold our little one.
Or we experience the heartbreaking shock of our stillborn and the ensuing grief of not getting to take our baby home from the hospital.
Or we experience the sudden loss of our infant, whether from known causes or unknown, which leaves us with empty arms that long to hold our baby one more time.
What we may not see, though, is how God is using our baby’s life for his purposes and glory. We may not readily see the glory that our baby’s life achieved, but this verse gives me hope that Hannah and every single baby have brought glory to our God.
Through their life and death, our God is working out a glory that outweighs our sorrow and grief. And more so, while our pain is temporary until we see our babies again, God’s glory is eternal. I don’t pretend to understand it all, but that’s okay. I trust God and the truth of His Word, even when it doesn’t fully make sense.
A couple of weeks ago, early in the morning, I went onto my back porch and gazed at the star-studded sky. It was particularly clear outside that morning so I could see quite a few stars. In that moment I thought, “Why did God even make stars? What purpose do they really serve? Was he just showing off how awesome, creative, and powerful he is?”
Now, you and I could debate the science behind stars and their purposes, but at the end of the day, what can’t be debated is that the sheer number of stars in the universe is incredible. Some sources estimate there are around one billion trillion to ten billion trillion stars! Basically, that just means that there are a whole lot of stars!
To think that God created each star, decided how large it would be, its exact temperature, its exact color, and its life expectancy. And now all of these years after the very first star was created, he is still making new stars every single day.
If God has perfectly crafted each star for it to exist for a set time in a set place, how more does he craft each person to exist for a set time in a set place? The amount of precision that he uses to create each star’s most perfect detail cannot be compared to the precision he used to create each of our baby’s features. Even more so our babies are made in God’s image, something that no star could ever boast.
There are many, many unseen, eternal ways that Hannah and every single baby have brought glory to the Lord. I take comfort in knowing that their lives had meaning and purpose. I feel joyful that their lives, no matter how short, accomplished so much. And I’m filled with hope that we will see our little ones again one day, and I cannot wait to see more fully the tapestry of glory that God has woven from their lives.
Pressing on in faith,
Jennifer