Lately, Marissa and I have suffered the loss of a miscarriage. Now, one thing that I’ve noticed in the Christian community is that when loss happens, they try to diagnose it. Things haven’t change so much since the days of Job. The most useful things that friends said in that time was, “I’m so sorry, I can’t imagine what that is like. I’ll pray for you.” We were quite encouraged, also, by those who tenderly offered their story. It’s always hard to know what to say when someone experiences loss. Some people offered secondhand advice, while I know they were trying to help, it was usually not helpful because they aren’t us: they aren’t missionaries on the Apache Rez, they aren’t our ages, they don’t have on their inside what we have on our inside…as Frederick Buechner puts it into words: they don’t carry our world inside of them. Marissa and I know statistics of miscarrying on your first pregnancy, we don’t need another person to tell us, cheapening the forming in the womb. We don’t need heartless advice. We need to do life and walk it out with God, and we need friends who will just walk out life with us.
Years ago, someone I had known committed suicide. Someone connected to me at the time gave me the horrid advice of: “You just need to get over it.” (!) That’s the worst possible advice to someone who is grieving, it just invoked shame upon the loss. In tragedy we change, for the better or the worse we change. You don’t “get over it”, you change in the forward movement of the journey. You move on, changed.
In our current journey the Lord has put the words of Elihu on my heart: “God is mighty and does not despise men; God is mighty and firm in His purpose”. We carnal minded humans so often try to figure God out from our frail point of reference. What we know of God are the eternal attributes of who He is. Attributes that do not define Him, but that He Himself defines. The all-loving, all-just, all-sovereign One has a plan. Even a plan for little-ol’-us. A beautiful plan. It’s His counsel that we cherish. The Jesus-shaped community that we are thankful for is the one that is walking out passion and longing for that God plan with us. So when there is suffering, hold the tongue and start praying. Do life. Let God be God, and be a friend, a neighbor, a fellow traveler. Help your brother/sister stand – not by explaining anything away, but by letting them know that you are there to talk and pray with.
We thank those who have come alongside of us. Thank you for you for your story. Thank you for your compassion. You have been Jesus to us.