Redeeming Shattered Dreams

It was back in December 2017 that my plans for growing a family were first turned upside down by a sudden and unexpected miscarriage.

My son Ben was two and a half at the time and settling into preschool, so it felt like the right time to begin turning attention toward expanding our family. We got pregnant quickly, too, just as we had with my first pregnancy, and everything felt like it was falling perfectly into place again…until I discovered some bleeding a few weeks in, which soon progressed into a full pregnancy loss.

Looking back now, it seems pretty naïve, but I never expected loss or infertility to be a part of my story. Perhaps no one ever does. I mean, I knew that miscarriage was fairly common statistically (affecting around 1 in 4 pregnancies), but I never thought it would happen to me – and so it floored me for a while when it did.

I found myself completely ill-prepared for what it entailed, not just physically and emotionally, but also spiritually. Deep down, I think I always knew that God wasn’t the author of the pain and disappointment I was feeling, but He hadn’t exactly intervened to stop it either – and I suddenly found myself facing many questions about that.

Why had we been entrusted with this new little life, only to have it snatched away just a few weeks later? What had gone wrong with my pregnancy? And why was God allowing us to walk through this pain? I just didn’t have the answers.

But as traumatic as it felt to walk through at that time, I still considered my loss a short-term detour in my motherhood plans. We would take a few months to heal, I reasoned, but then we would try again and finally be able to move on from this painful and confusing season. At that stage, I couldn’t even have begun to imagine how this temporary pause would eventually end up feeling more like a permanent stop as several more miscarriages unfolded.

At this time, I entered a particularly long and difficult season where I was caught in a perpetual cycle of grieving a loss, waiting to be pregnant again, becoming pregnant and feeling very anxious, and then walking through more pregnancy loss. It was literally grief layered on top of grief.

But by the end of that year, when I’d experienced my third consecutive loss, I found our conversations shifting from ones about waiting for another baby, to ones about waiting for medical tests, investigations, and treatments instead – and initially at least, that felt very hopeful. It felt like we were taking some positive steps towards a solution. But sadly, none of those tests ever managed to pinpoint any reasons for why the losses kept on happening or therefore offer us any real hope of a cure.

For as long as I can remember, I have always imagined having a large family with several kids running around my home. Still, as months of uncertainty grew into years, my husband and I found ourselves gradually aging out of the fertile years – still with no answers at all.

Proverbs 13:12 says, ‘Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but desire fulfilled is a tree of life’, and I can’t think of a Bible verse that better describes how the experience of loss and infertility feels.

We tend to talk a lot about hope as Christians, but what happens when what you hope for more than anything doesn’t materialize? When you desire, pray, wait patiently, and put all of your trust in God’s goodness – but are still left disappointed? When the miracle you seek – isn’t just delayed but never materializes at all, or at least not this side of heaven?

After six long years, that’s precisely where I found myself – wondering if my faith in Jesus, whom I’d known my entire life, had any substance at all. I never really doubted that God was real, but I questioned his care for me a lot in that season, and I spent a lot of time wrestling with God in prayer and the scriptures.

And I’ll be honest, I didn’t get any instant or easy answers. In fact, for a time, I felt angry with God and quite lost in my faith – but here’s where I eventually landed: There seem to be only two responses to the questions about faith that our pain can raise. Either we allow our deferred hope to cause a sickness of heart to grow and to turn into bitterness, or we take our broken heart to God and ask Him to create something altogether new with those pieces – so that it was I did.

I also started writing and blogging a lot about what I was going through and feeling during that season. Over time I began to notice something happening. God kept bringing other women who were facing similar difficulties into my path, and before long I found myself running regular online support sessions for bereaved mothers – a ministry I’m still incredibly passionate about today.

I’m not someone who subscribes to the view that ‘everything happens for a reason’ and I certainly don’t believe that God planned for me to walk through miscarriages just so that I could set up a ministry for other women facing this pain. In fact, I don’t believe that miscarriage is ever a part of God’s plan or will for someone’s life. But I do believe that God is committed to ‘working all things out for good’ (Romans 8:28) – so that even when we face the very worst things imaginable in this broken and imperfect world, it doesn’t have to be wasted. He loves us too much to let it be all for nothing, and if we will only allow Him to redeem those experiences, He will.

Like me, are you facing unfulfilled hopes for your life or interruptions to your best laid plans? Whether it’s about family plans or something else entirely, I think that choosing to let go of your own plans and trust God for a future you never imagined takes real bravery. But also, it’s so, so worth it! Because even if your future turns out to look very different from the one you had imagined, you can still trust that it will ultimately be good, because our God is so very good!

That doesn’t mean that life will always go exactly as we want it to, but right from the first chapters of Genesis through to Revelations, the story that the Bible keeps telling us over and over, is of a God who is in the business of healing, redeeming, restoring, and making all broken things new again.

That’s why I am not giving up on hope, although I am much more careful about what I place it in these days. You see, now I realize that I need a hope that is certain, steadfast and sure. I need the kind of hope that doesn’t ebb and flow with my changing circumstances or feelings. That’s why today I am very careful to place my hope in Christ alone – in who He is and what He has already done for us – rather than in any specific, hoped-for outcome, timescale, or goal, such as pregnancy.

It can be hard to shift our mindset to pursuing the Giver, rather than the various gifts we might want from Him, particularly when we live so much of our day to day lives as consumers. But as I do, I am discovering more and more that He is the gift – the real gift is simply in knowing Him, in being in His presence, and in getting to do this whole life with Him.