My in-laws came to see us. The hospital chaplain arrived. Everyone stood around my bed as I held Levi, and I had the strange sensation of looking up as from a grave, with mourners gathered around. I did not like the chaplain, but that may have had more to do with the Scripture she produced. "Let the little children come to me," she quoted, and I bitterly thought, NO, as though Jesus himself was trying to pry this baby away from me.

Remember that plan I’d made? The one where everything went smoothly, and I brought my son home in the car seat? We left the hospital the next morning with a shoe box of mementoes provided by the hospital and the car seat stashed in the trunk. I felt played for a fool. Why had God just watched as I blundered around, convinced this pregnancy would end well? Why hadn’t He warned me I was heading for disaster? 

I couldn’t pray for a long time. It felt too close, too vulnerable. Over the years, though, I’d built up a habit of studying my Bible every morning with my coffee. I kept drinking coffee. So I kept reading my Bible. The automation of that practice helped me stay in the Word even on days when my emotions urged me to do otherwise. Sometimes it took me a few steps backwards before I could make any progress, but that time with God, suspicious of Him though I was, kept me from staying stuck.

For weeks after Levi’s death, I wrestled with the broken identity of losing my child without having had him first. You lose your spouse, and you’re a widow. You lose your parents, and you’re an orphan. You lose your child, and there’s no word for that. Usually you’re still a mother. But what if you didn’t get to be that first? What are you? The enemy told me I didn’t belong anywhere. He told me my life was over, and he laughed while he said it. 

But the Lord in His kindness brought me to a small group of moms farther along in their loss journey. We met in a fire station, and they told me their stories, and listened to mine, and assured me I was most definitely a mother. I was not a fraud. They helped me realize I just belonged to a subset of women, a club within the club, whose mothering involves death certificates and memorials and grief no parent should have to endure. They showed me that having a different experience doesn’t invalidate it.  

I began to examine the order of things. There were the obvious rules of life we assume apply until they don’t: you’re supposed to have a birthdate before your death date. You’re supposed to die before your children. But on a deeper level, I learned our order of relationships matters, too. The Lord taught me that if we define ourselves primarily by relationships with other people, those identities will always be incomplete. They will always fall short of God’s purpose for us. When those people die, when our children die, we fall apart. We pour our foundations of personhood on sand, and then comes the storm. We’ve got to understand that motherhood is a component of our God-given identities as His children. It’s not the end-all-be-all. We are His family first, and second, we are our children’s. 

To really know who we are, with or without our children, we have to know Him. We have to build our houses on the impermeable foundation of who God is if we want any hope of surviving that promised storm. I grew up in a Christian household, and don’t remember a time I didn’t know Jesus. But different seasons in my life have caused me to know certain parts of Him better. This season of affliction and grief brought crucial, overlooked characteristics into focus, and the Lord opened my ears by adversity.

First, He is a God who suffers alongside us. The day Levi was born, the Holy Spirit drummed up this phrase in my heart: Overwhelmed with sorrow unto death. I heard it over and over. It described exactly how I felt before I could put any words to it myself. More importantly, it descried exactly how Jesus felt in the garden of Gethsemane, betrayed by his closest friends, about to be murdered by the very people he came to save, and on the precipice of enduring unimaginable, undeserved suffering. God Himself knows the pain of losing His child. He knows the sting of separation by untimely death. He knows the agony of injustice at the dirty hands of this world. He knows the depths of our sorrow because His runs deeper, having loved our children more than we ever could.  His presence in that delivery room swept me in to the eye of the storm, and comforted me with the knowledge that I was not alone, because my savior had felt this way, too.

Jesus doesn’t tell us to look on the bright side, move on, have another kid. Instead, He speaks the truth in love. He knows the sound of heartless words like clanging gongs and clashing symbols, and he chooses the refrain of love. He is patient with us as we rage and sob and doubt His goodness. He is kind to us though we are unkind to Him, and to ourselves, and to whoever we blame for our child’s death. He doesn’t hold His power over us like a weapon, but uses it to shield us from the threat of eternal separation. He rejoices when we cling to the truth. He endures all things even when we can’t take it anymore. He never leaves, though we run and hide and try to bury ourselves alive. Singer-songwriter Stephen Wilson Jr. calls grief "love with no place to go." How thankful I am that the Lord offers Himself as the place to go. 

The second facet of Himself God brought into focus for me was that He has every right and reason to give and take as He sees fit. The Holy Spirit stirred up another phrase for me the day Levi was born, from Job 1:21: "The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord." This was Job’s response after the enemy destroyed everything and every son and daughter he had. If I lost so much of my life in one day, I don’t think this would be my first, original thought. "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord." The logic of that first phrase always made sense to me — if you have the power to give, then you have the power to take. It was the "blessed be his name" part that made me grit my teeth.

I kept reading my Bible, looking for answers, for something that would make me less angry. Something that would help me make sense of these words. Proverbs 3:5-7 says, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil." This is how Jesus taught His disciples to pray, and how He addressed His Father in the garden: "Not my will, but yours, be done." To approach Him like this, verse 8 says, is "healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones." Similarly, Romans 8:6 says that "to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace." Cautiously, I began to do the work of confronting my perceptions, conclusions, and questions about everything that had happened with His words of truth. 

We were made in the image of God, and as such, we deeply long for the things that resonate with our Maker. This includes justice. We want goodness rewarded and evil punished. We often ask: "Why do bad things happen to good people?" But embedded in that question is an assumption not based in Scripture. We are not inherently well-behaved with the best of intentions, as the question presumes. The Bible tells us we were born into sin. The idea that we’re all "basically good" leads to feelings of entitlement instead of humility. It’s easy to forget what it is we truly deserve. 

So when you remember that the wages of sin is death, that we earn separation from God, and that in His mercy He doesn’t give us what we’ve earned, you stop asking that question. When you realize what a freeing, life-changing gift it is to be offered eternal, loving companionship and life everlasting with the king of the universe, the question changes. You start asking, "Why does such good a thing happen to bad people?" You’re able to see that it’s because of the mercy and grace born of a Father’s love, demonstrated in the willing sacrifice of His Son, whom death couldn’t bind, and who does not let death bind His brothers and sisters. While the enemy schemes and destroys, Jesus offers us life to the full. He invites us to place our broken hearts in the palms of His love-scarred hands. He urges us to accept the answers He chooses to provide, and to trust Who He Is with the rest. When we remember Who He Is, we can remember who we are.

I know my time here is not defined by the deaths I experience, but by the life spent walking in the footsteps of my savior. God loves you so much He willingly suffered the greatest loss most of us can imagine; that of losing His child. He endured that pain in the short term to show us how powerful He is in the longterm. If there was no resurrection, it would’ve been for nothing. But there was a resurrection, and another one’s coming. Death does not win because He is in control. For that reason, I’m able to say, "Blessed be the name of the Lord."

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