Abigail Gehring Lawrence shares the pain of losing her baby girl and the struggle to trust God again. Through grief, she slowly rediscovers His goodness in community, Scripture, and the beauty around her.
I arrived at the birthing center in the evening, contractions gripping my abdomen every four minutes, adrenaline and anticipation surging. At forty weeks and one day pregnant, I was ready for the work ahead and to meet our baby girl. The nurse squirted cold jelly on my giant stomach and ran the doppler around, listened, ran it around again. Sometimes it just takes a few minutes, I reminded myself. After all, I’d had a checkup that morning and all was well.
After several minutes, another nurse tried and failed to find the galloping heartbeat I had come to know and love. I texted the women from my Bible study: “Please pray. They can’t find the heartbeat.” A doctor rolled in the ultrasound machine.
The tiny drum inside her ribcage was perfectly still. “I’m so sorry …” the doctor’s voice trailed off.
If there is anything that will make you question God’s goodness, it’s holding your lifeless baby in your arms. It is surreal, devastating, bewildering. Unthinkable.
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In the early weeks of grief, I didn’t sense God’s nearness. It felt like God had played the cruelest of tricks on me and then had left me alone to suffer.
In the early weeks of grief, I didn’t sense God’s nearness. It felt like God had played the cruelest of tricks on me and then had left me alone to suffer. It occurred to me that it would be easier to be an atheist. Believing that God existed and was all-powerful became a problem, because it meant that God had chosen for this awful thing to happen to me, his daughter, whom he claimed to love.
The grief was debilitating, and I didn’t do it perfectly. But over time, here are some things that anchored me to the truth:
Church community: I felt God’s goodness through the body of Christ. I felt his embrace through the arms of a dear church friend who had experienced stillbirth—twice. I believe God planted her family in our area for a short time to help us through the loss. I felt God’s care through our pastor, who came to the hospital to weep with us and to help navigate immediate decisions that seemed utterly impossible (“Will you cremate or get a casket?” “Will you have a funeral?”). I heard God’s voice through countless friends who checked in daily, felt his provision through those who dropped off meals, remembered his truth through thoughtful letters that pointed us back to God’s Word. I believe it was primarily our church family that kept us from taking the advice Job’s wife gave: “Curse God and die” (Job 2:9).
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The Psalms: I couldn’t read much at first, it was like there was a barrier between the words on the page and my mind’s ability to assign meaning to them. But when the brain fog lifted just a bit, I lingered in the Psalms. The songs of lament gave words to my pain, and the continual return to God’s goodness in the midst of struggle resonated with my aching heart. The Psalmist didn’t minimize his suffering, nor did he stop trusting that God was with him in it. “My heart and my flesh may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:26).
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Beauty: For the first few weeks, colours seemed strangely dull. It was yet another loss, this inability to appreciate the vibrancy of green leaves or blue skies in July. But that passed with time, and more and more now, beauty speaks to me of God’s existence and goodness. Some say that the perception of beauty is an evolutionary trait that aids survival and reproduction. But isn’t beauty so much more personal than that? The wonder and longing I experience when I observe a sky streaked with pink seem to have nothing to do with survival and everything to do with a God who knows me, sees me, and wants to give me a glimpse of himself.
I wish I could say that my faith is stronger than ever now, or that I can see how God used our experience for a greater good, but I’m not there yet. What I can say is that I have tasted and seen that God is good, even when I cannot wrap my head around his ways.
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