Do me a favor: take about thirty minutes and head to the ClearView Church page or the ClearView podcast page and listen to March 18th’s message: “When The Rain Comes”. Be prepared for difficult truths on grief and growth but know that I do not lightly or often recommend people listen sermons. It is not 100% required listening, but if you want to fully understand where my next series of blog posts is coming from, you’ll want to listen.
Okay, done? I hope so! And I hope you found it as relevant as I did. I’ve listened to that message four times over the past few months and every time I listen, certain people come to mind. I’d like to tell you their stories over the next few days. These are not happy stories, so please bear with me as we talk about the hard stuff–the storms of life, if you will.
First, the story of a woman, pregnant with her sixth child, who was found via ultrasound to have multiple abnormalities. Upon referral to a specialist, her child was diagnosed as having birth defects “incompatible with life”, probably consistent with Trisomy 13 or maybe 18. She was encouraged to terminate her pregnancy but her belief system was not such that she would consider that. Instead she decided to give her baby life for as long as she could, enjoying the bumps and kicks for as long as they continued. In late summer, those bumps and kicks quieted. Her suspicion that baby was no longer with us was confirmed, again via ultrasound, and her daughter, Faith Surrender, was stillborn via c-section on a beautiful Monday morning.
As a health care provider, I referred her to the appropriate physician, then became an observer. My specialty as a midwife is “normal” and her pregnancy had taken a devestating turn outside of normal. As an observer, I felt powerless to help, but not to learn. I learned so much from this mother and her family as they walked something I would love for no one to ever have to walk ever again.
She once told me that she felt people were almost (politely) frustrated with her because she did not act as they expected her to. She was not angry, weepy, depressed, or questioning. There was no weeping and gnashing of teeth. There was no “why did God do this to me?” Now, please do not mistake me…she was grieved and anyone paying attention could see it, but her grief was quiet, internal, resigned, surrendered. A believer, she sought refuge in the Word and for those weeks of uncertainty that preceded Faith’s respective death and birth, she clung to Isaiah 55:8-9: “‘My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,’ says the Lord. ‘And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.'” As she meditated on this passage, in the midst of a storm of grief and pain fighting to swell up and consume her, she prayed for clarity and saw her prayer answered completely. Her path through this experience was laid out for her through that prayer and its answer. When she told me people didn’t know how to respond to her grief, she told me that she was not grieved as they expected her to be because she knew that whatever God’s purpose was for Faith, it would be accomplished, that He would work through her short life, and that “his ways are not our ways”. Those words became her anthem, the words she would say to remind herself that this was about more than she could see. She also said to me more than once, “his ways are not our ways”, an immensely humbling experience for me, as I was not expecting to be on the receiving end of anything during our times together. And yet, I was.
As I watched the storm rage and the flood waters lap at the foundations of her marriage, her family, her faith, and her home, she and her husband learned the heartbreaking lesson of surrender and I dare say their house, built upon the rock, stood firm. They allowed God to use their experience, along with all their grief and pain, and were a steadfast example of faith in the process.
I was blessed to be witness to it.
The Beginning of Wisdom 