Someone believed in God and all she got was this lousy miscarriage. 

The thought popped into my mind sometime Friday, the day when the red woke me up with its rushing and seemed like it would never stop. There was humor reflected in its T-shirt-like succinctness, and maybe a bit of bitterness too. But the worst of the emotional tidal wave had passed days before the physical one. There was the empty ultrasound and the confirming phone call–it’s always a bad sign when the nurse hands you over to the doctor for the news to be delivered. Delivered. And then there was the shower scene, tears mixed with tap water, the dam of grief broken. At some point in the sobbing and release, grace broke through, clear and true, and I knew it more than any diagnosis or news delivered: however much I was crying, whatever grief I felt at this loss, it did not compare to what was felt on my behalf. There is one whose tears outnumber mine, who is so close to the brokenhearted that there is no separation, soul and spirit dancing and grieving as one.

But it still sucked.

There is not getting what you want, and then there is getting exactly what you don’t want. I am an Irish twin, born twelve months and three weeks before my younger sister, and there is a self-imposed sense of urgency to recreate the closeness of that relationship for The Kid. Every month that passes dilutes that dream, and I know that for all the work grace has done in me, I still prefer to write my plans in pen.

She called when a text was not enough, and it was the first time we had actually heard each other’s voices in over a year of friendship. We talked about the hidden fears that suffering reveals, and I realized that after all this time I still doubt his goodness. I gaze warily, Eve-like, at him, just knowing the apple will sustain me here when there is a banquet of wine and bread over there. And as the torrents of grief turned into occasional, less intense spasms, I wondered how much of my renewed hope was due to leaving a heart open to grace and how much was placed, re-placed, in a specific outcome. Next time will work. How many disappointments, how many miscarriages of hope, will I allow God before I take the reins yet again and demand my way, and in so doing betray all faith in his? How many of the tears spent on my behalf are from a heart broken over my disbelief in his love?

These are the moments when there are no bootstraps to pull ourselves up by, no amount of positive thinking that will readjust our hearts to home. I can deny the grief, cover it over with a veneer of religion and a frozen smile, or I can allow it to become a part of me in that perfect work of grace that meets soul with spirit and incorporates everything into making me who I am meant to be. Is there a narrative wherein I can grieve and hope? A story in which I don’t have to be afraid, but I also don’t have to pretend?

Fear crouches at my door, always willing to drop by for a visit or forever, and I pray the most honest prayer I know: I don’t know what to do. I believe; help my unbelief. Help. And the answer, like most good things, comes later, as I reread this and remember–am re-membered by–the truth that all is grace, and everything is a gift. Thanksgiving is the death knell for fear.

I give thanks for my miscarriage and the broken heart that came with it. And in the strangest way, I come to mean it.

My birthday approaches, and the irony is not lost on me that gifts come in all kinds of packages, but this one? Thanks for the miscarriage, God. You shouldn’t have. Did you keep a receipt? Because I’D LIKE TO TAKE THIS ONE BACK. But the mystery within which grace makes its daily movements means that I can take this gift, with its torn wrapping, alongside the others and wait for it to become beautiful.

We sit on the couch together and The Husband hands me my gift: the novel I wrote two years ago, after a job loss and with numb fingers as TK grew inside me. My words, first inscribed on my heart by Him and now put into print by him, and I hold them in front of me. A real story. I know that I am loved more than I ever dared hope. And I recall all the yeses I hoped for leading up to this moment, and how if they hadn’t been nos I would not be beside this man with our baby upstairs. All the torn wrappings that brought me here, with what will now always be my first book, placed in my hands as a gift.