I never would have thought it would be so hard. I hadn’t even met him. I didn’t know who he looked like—Christi or me—as if that mattered, or whose personality he would take. I had thought about hiking and playing football with him, and more importantly teaching him to be a man. But it wasn’t to be.
This past Saturday, March 15, marked the third anniversary of losing our unborn son, Micah. I wanted to write this blog post sooner, but the graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) from my eyes has kept me away from the computer screen and the emotion of the day kept washing the steroid drops from eyes. Beware the Ides of March.
Christi was thirteen weeks pregnant when it happened so unexpectedly (I have her permission to write this). Everything was okay one day, and then it wasn’t. She had an ultrasound that showed somehow, inexplicably, the amniotic sack had ruptured. We went home to pray and wait. Our prayers weren’t answered the way we hoped. The images of that next morning are seared into my memory more so than anything I experienced during two tours in Iraq, before, or since.
Devastated. Dreams lost. To make things worse, I deployed to Iraq just two and a half months later. The healing was not yet complete and now I was gone and unable to support my wife when she needed it probably more than ever in her life. Our marriage was strained and I regret that I wasn’t more understanding and supportive of her. There were so many questions. Why and how did this happen? We are good parents, so why can’t we have more children when everybody else is? We were in the desert, me literally and both of us figuratively.
In the midst of this trial, we were given the following verse:
“So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten…(Joel 2:25a NKJV)
This is God’s promise to the Israelites to restore their land following their repentance. For us, it wasn’t a matter of repentance but maybe trust. I don’t know, but I do know it was a promise from God. We thought this would manifest through adoption, which we had considered before losing Micah. We began the process and were in the midst of fundraising when our promise was fulfilled.
Our friend from church calls Abrie our “Promise Baby.” That she is. Completely wanted and loved and entirely unexpected, she was born almost two years after we lost our son. Isn’t that just like our God? Though the barrenness, the dry dreary land in which we walked, he restored to us what the enemy had taken away. While we’ll always mourn for Micah and know we see him in Heaven, we are also more keenly aware how incredibly blessed we are to have both of our girls.
Not only has the Lord fulfilled His promise, he has used our loss in other ways. Both of us have been in positions to comfort and empathize with others who have experienced their own loss. And maybe God has used earlier trials during our marriage—two deployments, losing my Dad to cancer, and then Micah—to prepare us for what we are going though now. Although our faith is nothing near perfect, it is undoubtedly stronger as a result of seeing God’s faithfulness over the last eleven years.
As I write this I am acutely aware that sometimes the promises we hope for are not what we get. But God is always good and will always fulfill his ultimate promise to be with us forever if we follow his Son, even though sometimes our definition of “good” probably differs from His. Paul says in Romans 8:28:
And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. (NLT)
Know. Not believe or hope or think. Know. We can have complete confidence in this. It’s a promise. Just as he fulfilled his promise when He gave us Abrie, we believe He is fulfilling the promise of my healing. Regardless, there is no doubt looking back over the last ten months of fighting leukemia that He is doing a good work. One day, when we rejoice with our son in the presence of the Father, perhaps we’ll see the full glory of the goodness of his restoration.
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I’m glad you named him. A few people (who’s experiences I believe are credible) who have visited heaven have said that those kids actually do go by the names their earthly parents give them, so please name them. 😉 Thanks for the post!
Thanks, Jess. It was particularly important to Christi that we name him and I’m very glad that we did.