Living In The Tension

 Most mornings, I wake up in a melancholy state.  

Another day farther away from the last time I carried my last baby.  Another day closer to the due date of that baby, and consequently the due dates of close friends with whom I had hoped to walk through newborn days.  Now their bellies continue to swell, and my baby remains the size she was when she left this earth - before we ever got to meet her.

That baby is accompanied by eight siblings in Heaven, and I long for the day that I will meet them.  Grieving for miscarried babies brings a unique heaviness that is hard to explain.  There are no memories to relive, no stories to retell, no beautiful epitaph to read.  It's the emptiness of what could have been, and what will never be.  

It's a semi-colon, with nothing to complete the sentence.

Solomon's words express it well:

Hope deferred makes the heart sick...

But now I'm finding myself in this place of topsy turvy feelings.  You see, I found out three weeks ago that I'm pregnant again.

Being pregnant after loss...especially when your heart still feels sick with grief...is a very uncomfortable place.  I want this baby more than I probably wanted the last one.  But I also don't want to be pregnant.  I don't want to face the march of time to the next milestone, putting faith in something that has literally failed five times consecutively in the last two years.  I don't want to put myself out there again, hoping for the best but expecting the worse.

What if I have another miscarriage?  Will this be the one that lands me in a psychiatric hospital somewhere?  How much more trauma can my heart or body endure?  What if I'm not hearing from God correctly?  What if these dreams of a baby are just symbolic...not intended as a real human?

But the verse doesn't stop with the heart being sick...



Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12


This where the tension comes in.  We all want that tree of life, right?  We all want to experience the fullness of the fulfilled desire.  

So we keep reaching.

I keep saying yes.

The fear of loss is big.  But the fear of endless absence of my Father is so much bigger.  So I will continue to say yes.  I will continue to reach for the promises that my Father in Heaven places in my heart.  I will trust Him to take care of my heavenly babies for now, and keep asking him to bring me my next earthly baby. 

I will mourn while I celebrate.

I will come out of the the desert, leaning on and loving my Beloved.  I will trust Him to knit this baby in the quiet and dark place of my womb - into wholeness and life on earth.

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