My Life Doesn't Look How I Wanted It To
contending with death when we were created for life
We planned to paint the room. The flat white was stacked by the door, paintbrushes and rollers propped against the cans, waiting for us to move the furniture out so we could begin. I had a vision of this being a family project, a good memory our children could think of fondly in years to come. When we called the family together to work, it was clear that not all of them were willing to make this a pleasant experience.
The first thing we moved was the cradle our youngest child had used. It was the one I kept stored away with the hope that I’d rock another baby in it someday. One of my older children hauled it from the room with a bit of grumbling. They didn’t mean to slam it into the doorway, but still it broke. The antique wood just splintered, and the rocker shattered. I stared at it in shock, using my foot to push at the pieces that now littered the floor. My husband looked at it for a moment, then sighed and told our oldest to take it outside to the burn pile because it wasn’t fixable.
One part of my mind knew it wasn’t the end of the world. It was just an object. But another part of me felt like I had been punched in the gut. In that moment all three of the babies that my body had conceived and miscarried over the previous two years were there in the hallway with me, dying again in front of my eyes, my fingers grasping toward them but unable to reach them.
Our story with loss started long before that day in the hallway. My husband and I had battled infertility for years before walking away from treatment plans to pursue older child adoption instead. We watched God weave together a family for us that included two adoptions and then, many years later, a miraculous pregnancy that added a biological child to our mix. I loved our family. I loved our story.
In a barren wasteland of infertility, God had provided springs of water. Hope that bubbled up and poured miracles into our lives. I wanted to just wade into those pools and soak in the goodness of God—the knowledge that he saw me and heard me and responded to my heart’s cry.
Yet, somehow life, or rather, death, has a way of finding us. Less than two years after our surprise pregnancy, I was pregnant again. I remember looking at the faint positive on the test and thinking, “Oh, I guess I just have babies now. It must be my body fixed itself.”
When I miscarried a week later, I felt disoriented but okay. I snuggled my youngest closer, rocking her to sleep as I cried, then kept going.
By the third miscarriage, it was clear that my body had not fixed itself. In fact, maybe it was more broken than it had ever been.
As it turned out, miscarrying babies wasn’t the only thing I had to face during that time. In the middle of my season of miscarriages, our two older children also hit rough patches that threw our family into turmoil. We knew it was likely they would struggle deeply as they hit adulthood. When they were younger, we would periodically deal with behaviors or fears that we knew they weren’t emotionally mature enough to fully deal with the root issues yet—and as we would help them regulate and calm down, I would hold them and pray over them and know that someday those things would need to be dealt with again.
I just never thought we’d be facing their losses with them at the same time my body was bleeding out baby after baby.
Just when I felt the driving need to be steady and unshakable for my children as they struggled, I was the most unsteady I had ever been in my life. “God is enough for even this,” I was telling them as their memories and questions interrupted their dreams for their own lives, and then in my next breath, I was anxiously asking God, “Wait, are you enough? I can see you showing up for them—but what about for me?”
This led me to the moment when I was holding pieces of a broken cradle that somehow symbolized the brokenness my body was experiencing and any strength I might have had shattered like the wood that had once held the evidence of God’s goodness in our lives. I helped clean up the mess, then rushed into my room to collapse on the floor and sob. I was crying for the antique that I had loved, but mostly because my dreams and hopes had splintered and weren’t fixable. I was crying for the days I’d spent trying so hard to cling to joy and hope, but I still felt sliced open, bleeding my sorrow all over myself and those around me.
“I’m trying to trust you,” I told God with my face pressed to the carpeted floor in my bedroom. But the truth was, it felt like all I was getting for my trouble was a life that was nothing like what I wanted. Don’t misunderstand, I wasn’t devastated over not getting a “picture-perfect” life. I was upset because instead of being strong and whole and beautiful in the face of loss, I felt like I was a shadow of myself. The weight of grief marked the lines of my face, heaving sorrow into the places where I just wanted laughter and freedom and joy.
“I don’t expect my life to be without problems,” I prayed into the void. “I just didn’t expect it to be so sharp. I didn’t know I’d fail so much. I didn’t know I would absolutely not be okay. I thought you’d soften me, that you’d see my needs and I would feel your strength and hope despite the hardship. I thought I’d be able to lean into you and I’d feel refreshed and healed and comforted. I thought you said there would be enough, so why do I feel like I’m searching wildly but nothing is there but emptiness?”
I wrote a poem, like the lamenting psalms of old, begging God to show up in the muddled mess of emotions and sorrow that my life was rapidly becoming.
God, where are you?
I'm lost in this storm
where everything hurts and
I just need a whisper,
I just need some word—
to know that death doesn't really win,
that I'm not abandoned,
that the wounds I'm facing
aren't just collateral damage
to heal someone else
you care about more.I want to say, "Death! Where is your sting?"
But I know where it is,
It's under my skin.
So instead, “Where are you, Victor,
who slaughtered the grave?
Where are you, Life-Giver,
who turns dark into day?
I'm waiting with open hands,
For the shuddering of breath,
To break through my fears and put
death to death.”
Not everyone in the world experiences a miscarriage, and even fewer will face repeated miscarriages, but we all know the taste of death in one form or another. Death is a part of life. The death of people our hearts still long for, and the death of dreams and hopes that were woven into our being.
One of the biggest tenets of faith in Jesus is about death. If you’ve ever heard the gospel, you’ve heard the story. When sin entered the world, death gripped us. People, who were created to be eternally in relationship with God and each other, suddenly had to contend with the darkest enemy: death.
The loss of forever with the ones we love. The loss of an easy, steady relationship with the God who made us. Physical and spiritual death would mark the world. But Jesus came—He was the promise from the beginning, and he came and conquered death. We still face the physical, until he returns, but the spiritual death no longer has power over us through Jesus. This is the hope of the gospel.
The writer of I Corinthians 15 spends quite a long time on this subject and ends with an anthem, “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, death, is your victory? Where, death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”[1]
Yet, this promise isn’t complete. While the day will come when death has no power, for now, it still stings. The sharp edges of it will slice us all at some point in our lives and our bodies and minds that were not created for death will recoil in horror. This means that all of us will have a day when we look around and are forced to confront that our lives are not what we want them to be. They’re not what we were created to have.
This life, so tangled up in death, isn’t enough for hearts that were made for eternity.
That day, curled up on my bedroom floor, I was forced to contend with death. The miscarriages I had faced had been early, some crossing over into “official” miscarriages, but at least one still labeled a chemical pregnancy because it happened before five weeks.
All of them were hoped for, barely recognized, and then gone before I had time to process what was happening.
I mourned them while they bled out of me, then stood up and returned to life, doing my best to be steadfast, immovable, and always excelling at the Lord’s work because I knew that my work for Jesus was not in vain. God had given me enough, I figured. A life, a family, a ministry. Even if I didn’t have the physical things I longed for, like more children, what I wanted most was to be that steadfast, trusting person who simply walked with Jesus at each step. I would be okay, I just needed to keep going. These things were hard today, but there was enough—and if what I needed was another baby, or just enough strength and peace in my heart to move on from that dream, then God would eventually give that to me, I just had to hold myself together until then.
The broken cradle wasn’t just a piece of furniture though, it was a doorway into a part of my mind that I’d successfully kept boxed up until that moment. Suddenly, there wasn’t enough anymore. This tucked-away dream that I would eventually place another baby in the cradle that had been used for generations, would never ever happen. Sure, I could still have another baby, but that specific dream was dead.
Dead like my three miscarried babies were.
And I wasn’t strong. I wasn’t at peace.
I couldn’t hold myself together at all, let alone long enough to survive the sadness.
Not only was my life not what I wanted, but I, myself, wasn’t who I wanted to be either.
Instead, there I was on a weekday evening, contending with death and feeling like every way I turned my head, all I could see was emptiness. The truth was that no future baby could fix the fact that I’d carried and lost those three. No future thing would erase the sting of those deaths. The hope of the gospel is that death will be swallowed up by victory, but that didn’t change the fact that it felt like death was taking great gruesome bites from my heart and I was scared there wouldn’t be enough of me left to experience the victory of someday.
I stood in the barren wasteland of loss and said in a shocked whisper, “Lord, I thought you said there would be enough?” Wasn’t that what he had promised? That he was the Shepherd who would lead me to peaceful streams and green pastures, who would prepare a table for me in the face of my enemy?
When we’re at our weakest, that’s when lies become the most difficult to refute, and between my sobs of grief, a whole pile of them began to suction themselves to my mind. The biggest was the idea that I should have just been thankful. I miscarried three babies over those two years but I also had three children. Three living, breathing, messing up my house, needing to be fed every day, requiring my attention and affection and time, children. Not only that, but all three of my children had come to me miraculously—by God’s grace and his goodness. So the lie that built itself over me was grieving what you lost means you’re not thankful enough for what you have.
Maybe, after all, I didn’t deserve to be a mother? Maybe it was all in my head anyway? Maybe those early miscarriages were a fluke and they weren’t even babies, this was all just a huge drama happening in my mind. Maybe I was failing at my whole world and failing everyone around me. Maybe the reason my teenagers were struggling was because I was a terrible mother and it was good that I wouldn’t be raising any more children. Maybe I was crying foolishly when I should have just trusted that God knows best and the best was probably for me to not mess any other children up with my issues.
The thing with lies is that they always swirl around a thread of truth, tugging on the real things until we look up, then dumping all their rubbish into our faces when we do. It makes a mess and even when we absolutely know there are lies in this trash that we’re trying to wipe out of our mouths and clean from our stinging eyes, it can feel impossible to differentiate in the moment.
Learning to weed through our thoughts and identify lies and truth takes time and patience. And maybe most of all, it takes listening to the Author of Truth.
Scripture isn’t the only place God speaks, but it’s a sounding board that the Spirit uses in our lives to help us separate and identify what we’re hearing and believing.
There are probably a hundred verses that can be a first step toward filtering out lies from our thought patterns, but my go-to is Romans 8:1. Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.[2]
When I am bombarded with negative thought patterns, it can take a while to find a deep enough breath to respond in any logical fashion, but when I do, the first thing I’ve learned to ask myself is, “Am I feeling condemned?”
Condemnation is different than guilt. With guilt, there is a wrong behavior that can be changed. It can be acknowledged and we can repent, and then we can move away from it. With condemnation, we’re “declared unfit for use”[3]. Instead of, “I’m struggling to mother well right now,” it becomes, “I should have never been a mother”. Complete disposal of ourselves and our worth.
And this kind of condemnation does not come from Jesus.
When death marks up our lives, it’s so easy to fall for the lie of condemnation. We weren’t created to face death, so when we do, the simplest “answer” is you shouldn’t have ever tasted life. But it’s a lie. It’s death that is the interloper, not life.
Once we remove self-condemnation from our story, we’re often left with a drastically different picture. The gutting emptiness we’re staring at, this barren wasteland of hopelessness, suddenly breaks open like the rocks that split in the desert for the Israelites[4], and pockets of water appear. And where water is, there is growth. Where there is water, there is food. Where there is water, eventually there will be feasting.
Our lives may not be anything like we wanted. Our journey following Jesus may leave us more hungry and thirsty than we ever imagined. Yet the deepest, most brilliant truth, is that God carves streams in the most barren of places and as water flows, life gathers force and breathes again. And the life that comes from God is the unshakeable kind.
The cradle and the dreams it represented were forever lost to me, but there was still water, still growth, still a feast being prepared. When grief is fresh, like an open wound, it takes all our attention. Our focus is latched onto the thing that hurts so we may not be able to sense the things beyond it. Yet, they may still be there—like a budding fruit tree—ready to pour fragrance and abundant food into our lives.
[1] I Corinthians 15:54-58, CSB
[2] Romans 8:1, NIV
[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/condemned
[4] Exodus 17:3-6, Numbers 20