The Promise After the Sorrow
Twenty-eight years ago, I lost something I thought I could never recover from. At eighteen years old, I experienced one of the most heartbreaking losses a person can endure: the death of my baby daughter. The day she died, a part of me died with her. I won't sugarcoat what followed. I wanted to die. There were moments when I thought about taking my own life because I could not imagine a future without my little girl in it and in the middle of that pain, I rejected the idea of following a God who would allow something so devastating to happen to His child. So, my husband and I did what many hurting people do, we tried to numb our pain with what the world had to offer. But a life without hope only produces more hopelessness. For years, I found myself chasing after the wind, trying to fill a void that nothing could touch. Then came another kind of grief: infertility.
While I was still grieving the daughter I lost, I had to grieve the possibility that I might never experience motherhood again. I had lost my baby, and now I feared I had lost my chance to ever become a mother again. I felt like I was living in a desert. But, in the middle of that desert, my husband's colleague invited me to meet someone special. Reluctantly, and carrying a heart full of pain, anger, disappointment, and bitterness, I agreed.
That someone was Jesus. I didn't come to Him with everything figured out. I came with my baggage, I came with my questions, I came angry, I came broken, and somehow, in the middle of all of it, I felt loved, accepted, and seen.
For the first time, I began a relationship with Jesus that was real and personal, not based on what I had been told about God, or what I did or didn't do, but on actually knowing Him. Little by little, He began transforming me.
I eventually came to understand something that changed the way I viewed my story: God had not caused my pain, but He had met me in it. The very loss that had nearly destroyed me became the doorway through which I found Him and around that same time, I became pregnant. I knew in my heart that this was God.
After you experience the loss of someone you love or walk through a season of profound suffering, you begin to see life through a different lens. You can ignore the pain, or you can allow it to change you. You can drown in it, or you can search for purpose in the middle of it. I chose purpose. My relationship with Jesus changed the way I saw myself, my family, and my life. In many ways, I became the mother my baby girl deserved for me to become.
Today, I know something I could not have understood at eighteen: I would not be the mother I am today without the loss of my beautiful daughter. Her life, though far too short, changed mine forever. Her loss taught me not to take motherhood for granted. It taught me to make my family a priority. It taught me to treasure ordinary moments because I know how quickly they can become memories.
After losing a baby, being told I might never become pregnant again, and walking through years of infertility, I was blessed with not one, not two, but three incredible boys, all God's miracles, but the pain never completely disappeared. It whispered in the background. I would wonder what her quinceañera would have looked like. What dress would she have chosen? What would she have worn to prom? What college would she have attended? What would she have become? I mourned the daddy-daughter dances my husband never got to have. I mourned the shopping trips I would never take with her. I mourned all the ordinary mother-daughter moments I had imagined but would never experience and perhaps most of all, I mourned never getting to help her prepare for her wedding day or walk her down the aisle. For twenty-eight years, those were the things I believed I had lost forever.
But God is a promise keeper. He is a sustainer in our pain and sometimes, His restoration doesn't look like getting back what we lost, it looks like receiving something we never imagined possible. God gave me a daughter-in-love, and through her and my son, I am now preparing to become the grandmother of a beautiful baby girl. I have been a complete hot mess trying to wrap my mind around it.
Twenty-eight years ago, I experienced a loss I was certain I would never survive. Today, I am standing in a place I never imagined I would see: rejoicing in what feels like God's immeasurably more. The little girl I lost can never be replaced. Nothing could ever erase that loss. But God has shown me that grief does not have to be the end of the story. Pain can make us bitter, or it can make us better. Pain can isolate us, or it can lead us to purpose. Pain can become the place where we lose ourselves or the place where we discover who we are becoming. I cannot change what happened twenty-eight years ago. I cannot rewrite the story or experience the moments I once dreamed of having with my daughter. But I can choose what I do with the pain
and now, the things I once believed I had missed forever, the mother-daughter moments, the shopping trips, the celebrations, the wedding preparations, the little girl growing into a woman, I get to experience them in a different way. I get to experience them through my granddaughter. What I once saw as the end of my story became part of the story God was still writing, and now, after twenty-eight years, I am learning that sometimes restoration doesn't mean getting back what was lost. Sometimes restoration is realizing that God was writing the immeasurably more all along.
So, here’s to my rainbow grand-daughter-to the promise after the pain and to my promise keeper- Jesus Christ.
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