This coming Sunday is rough for some Moms. It took on a different feel for us back in the mid-1980s. No one knows why God puts us through such things. But, we don’t have to know. It doesn’t work that way.
It was the first crisis that we faced in our young marriage. And, my wife was on an island in the Pacific far away from the family and friends who would otherwise be her support structure. Of course, I, too, was off of the island serving on a deployment to South Korea.
A lot of people might just dismiss the event, and her doctor did. He described it clinically as “products of pregnancy” and that was what they wrote on her medical record after the miscarriage. She was treated quickly and sent home. By the time I arrived the next day, she was alone in bed and we embraced and cried for a while.
Losing a pre-born baby is like losing dreams. God uses absolute truth to paint the parents’ dream of a child on a landscape of faith. But it is that innocent look of contentment in their eyes once they are born that captures the hearts of their parents. Dr. Richard Swenson describes it this way:
“Contentment in the young does not require Disneyland. Just a book on beetles. Or a puppet drinking green milk. Just hearts with the capacity for delight, brains with the capacity for imagination, and spirits with the innocence of sufficiency. Perhaps the statute of limitations for creation wonder has not yet expired for them. Maybe in some mystical way they retain the slightest inkling of what it was like when light and energy and glory and love burst upon a microscopic spot, and suddenly they were, when before they were not.”
We were lost that day, too. I was a bit aimless and practically useless in the aftermath. We wondered what we should do and how we should tell people. I opined that God accredits us for future service and certainly He accredited me to post this today. My bride has helped many Moms through similar rough Mother’s Days.
But we determined we should make an entry in the family Bible as we had for our two older children. We didn’t even know if the baby was a boy or a girl. So, we just wrote, “Known but to God, March 19, 1986.”
This child was more than just a doctor’s clinical description or even a dream that we could envision. My bride’s third pregnancy will forever be someone known to God, for whom we may not have to search very long when we arrive in His wider reality. We have not forgotten this little one and, as we remember, the subtle smiles we share between us likely reflect the countenance of a microscopic spot that never was, save for the twinkling of light reflecting off the tears in our eyes.
With special thanks to Dr. Richard A. Swenson. Contentment: The Secret to a Lasting Calm. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2013.