broken pieces

Twelve years after our last loss. Ten years after receiving the incredible answer to prayer in the adoption of our son. Two years after seeing Jesus holding a baby and not expecting one, we were delighting in the gift of a miracle. That gift grew even sweeter as we told our son that he would be a big brother, that his secret prayers for a sibling were answered, and we rejoiced in the baby girl that would make us an unexpected family of four. 

As we delighted in the goodness of this gift, life kept moving on in the most unexpected ways. We found out we were being reappointed, moving to a new community to pastor a new church, and would find ourselves loading trucks and moving boxes just weeks before our baby would be born. Delighted, surprised, and a little overwhelmed, we began our preparations, and I enjoyed every minute of feeling wonderfully pregnant. I felt her move and rejoiced in the beauty of something I had never let myself imagine feeling.

It wasn’t long before we found ourselves navigating uncertainty in our great joy and trusting God with the gift he had given us. A few months into the pregnancy, we learned our daughter might have Down’s Syndrome. And after more testing, we confirmed that fear and began to embrace an uncertain journey - but one we absolutely believed God would reveal himself in. Her diagnosis would shift our doctor's attention, and we would be placed under significant monitoring to watch her grow. Scan after scan, we were told that though she would be born with Downs, she didn’t carry many of the typical markers and looked very healthy. Until one afternoon when one (now very routine scan) took much longer than usual, one nurse called in another for a second opinion, and eventually, a pediatric cardiologist would tell us that our girl would be born with a significant heart defect; one that would require open heart surgery sometime after her birth. Experts reassured us that she was perfectly safe in the womb and that one surgery would completely resolve her problem after she was born. With nervousness, but peace, we began to tell people our news so we could prepare and they could pray. It sounds strange, even typing these words, but though her diagnosis was unwanted and unexpected, we had navigated so many hard things before, we had a quiet certainty that we would navigate this hard thing too. 

So in the late spring of 2021, we packed boxes, planned, prepared our son to leave the home he had known, said goodbye to the churches that had shared the gift of our miracle so joyfully, and prepared to embrace a new community eager to welcome us. My pregnancy grew beautifully. I felt wonderful. We saw her face on ultrasounds almost every week as we monitored her growth. And the ultrasound techs pointed out her long hair and ability to twist her feet up over her head every time we saw her. We planned to move, start ministry at our new church, say our hellos, and start maternity leave almost immediately after the move as we welcomed our daughter. 

Every day was a delight as she turned summersaults inside me and reminded me of the gift of life. And Gabe and I began to count down toward one goal. Get our family and our belongings into the new house, physically move; then the baby could come. 

With incredible support, we said our goodbyes, loaded the truck, and headed north. We crossed the finish line and unloaded boxes one hot June day. The movers wouldn’t let me lift a finger, and I pointed boxes in different directions as our son explored his new home. It was a flurry of busyness for the next 48 hours, taking our son to the last of his baseball games, cleaning up the last pieces of the home we were leaving, and finishing a semester of my doctoral work. Just as we finished our list and began heading to our new home for good, I noticed our sweet girl was quiet. We debated what it might be, and brushed it off as her exhaustion from the busyness, and my anxiety from our previous losses. I told myself I’d get a good night's rest and wake up without worry. 

But morning didn’t bring the relief I hoped for. I had a good breakfast, hoping to wake her up a bit, wondering if she was just running out of room. But as I tried to reassure myself that my worry was just that, worry, I had a more profound sense that something else was wrong. With a sense of hopeful uncertainty, I went to lie down for a while, but as I closed my eyes, I found myself in prayer again. This time, in total desperation, asking God to heal her heart, wake her up, and give her fullness of life. I confidently asked the Lord to fully heal her and reassure me now, knowing he had already worked a miracle in me. Though I couldn’t verbalize it in prayer, I had a sense she was gone, and I was asking the Lord to show up with the same miraculous power by which he had given her to me, with the same power he had revealed himself to me before, and to give life to the gift he had chosen to give me. 

And in a way I can’t possibly explain, the Lord was profoundly silent but powerfully present. I could feel him, almost see him. As I lay there, weeping and praying, I sensed his eyes downcast, like he couldn’t look at me. And I knew exactly what he was saying. His silence was everything as if, in his great compassion, he couldn’t bring himself to tell me she was gone. Three weeks before she was supposed to come home, we lost her. I lay quietly weeping in my bed while my son nervously tried to embrace his grief from moving and entertained himself in the living room among piles of boxes. I gathered myself, told Gabe what was wrong, and planned to leave for the emergency room. 

In our unfolding darkness, the Lord was present arranging our care. I was swept right back into labor and delivery emergency care. A sweet nurse tried to find her heartbeat, and with nervous uncertainty, we both imagined she was just being stubborn and hard to find. Eventually, nurse after nurse gave their attempt, and the doctor arrived. They searched for her heartbeat forever, watching her chest for any sign of life. But as soon as he laid the ultrasound wand on my stomach, and her body appeared on the screen, I knew she was truly gone. Her little body was no longer twisting upside down in somersaults or playfully sleeping with her feet over her head; she was lifeless. They left me alone for a moment as I called Gabe and told him the news, as we talked through our options for delivering her, who could care for our son while we awaited her stillbirth, and if we should tell him now or wait. I called my mother, who cried and said, “We were so close.” And the nurses wheeled me into a private room where we would begin the process of bringing her body into the world. For two days, the doctors cared for me, helped my body with the process of stillbirth, and on June 16th, we held her beautiful, perfect body in our arms, without reason or explanation for her death. We had the gift of seeing our beautiful daughter, rocking her for a few hours as we grieved, admiring her features and weeping at the gift that seemed to slip through our grasp. 

In just a few hours, we would hand our girl over to a dear friend as we prepared to bury her. I would leave the hospital, and we would run to receive our son and break his heart with the news. We sat on the grass. And all I had to say was, “we have something really hard to tell you.” With those few words, he knew. We joined him in weeping as the broken-hearted and took him to the funeral home where we could hold her together. Two days later, we would bury her near my Father and lay her body to rest in complete devastation and absolute disbelief. Our maternity leave turned into grief leave. Our world had crumbled beneath us, and all we could do was lie in the ashes of its destruction. 

I write this nearly a year and a half after holding her in my arms. I’ve never attempted to put words to the story of her death, in part because they are a precious treasure, one that may be misunderstood as I share it. But I’ve struggled to document the story of her beautiful life and death because we’re still walking through the mystery of unfulfilled healing. We have unanswered questions about the miracle of my physical healing against a healing she didn’t receive. We continue to hold in tension the gift of life we received in my pregnancy against her death and the lifeless body we held. We struggle to understand how God has the power to give her to us but allowed her to die. And we’re learning to walk in the mystery, leaning into the reality that God knows what may never be understood to us in this life and trusting him through the mystery of it. 

I’m learning to reconcile the mystery of the pain with the promise I know to be true; that he has been so very near in every heartbreak, he has heard every cry of my heart, he has revealed himself in my uncertainty to remind me of his incredible presence, he has given us strength for moving through the evil of darkness and death, and worked to miraculously answer prayer in spite of it. The reality is he’s given me everything I’ve asked for, just not in the way I expected. I have my beautiful one. That one, my incredible son, returned joy to my life in ways beyond my imagination. God healed my heart. He made me physically pregnant. I knew the gift of life growing in me, feeling her move in a way I didn’t know with our son. He fulfilled his vision in the gift of a girl that looked just like me. I have the family I longed for now, and I will have the gift of a coming reunion with the babies lost in this life. 

But the mystery of those answered prayers came over twelve long years, in ways and times I least expected, while the answers to prayer came alongside incredible pain. Though he didn’t author that pain, his power worked through it toward redemption anyway. He used our darkness to provide compassion and care for others walking through theirs. He’s using our story to remind the church that he still speaks in visions and revelation. He’s allowed our story to point to his power to physically heal. And he’s using us at every turn to reveal in very real ways that life and death, joy and pain, uncertainty and trust live in tension - and he’s in it all - redeeming heartbreak he didn’t bring, and revealing goodness we didn’t know we wanted. 

We still don’t know how the story of her life and death will be redeemed, but we trust it will. I stand over her gravestone and worry that I will forget the miracle of her short life. I look at our incredible son and wonder why God would go beyond himself to bless us with such a magnificent gift. I wonder how God will use his life to point to his miraculous work in the world. And I stand in the mystery of the unknown - knowing more than ever that God has heard our every cry, been so very near, will redeem the pain of unanswered prayers, and will somehow be glorified in the mystery.