A Life

When Samuel was just about one and a half years old, I miscarried. I was eleven weeks along and when I went to the doctor's office they were unable to locate the baby's pulse. I later learned that the baby had ceased development at eight weeks and died, but my body had not yet recognized this fact. I endured what is called a missed miscarriage. My body literally missed the baby's death and I had to wait for it to catch up. I was sent home to rest and wait for nature to take her course. I was told it could be hours or it could be weeks before I would miscarry on my own. Still, I preferred this to surgery. So, I rested and took care of Samuel and cried and ate ice cream. Andy was on his way out of town to be the best man in a dear friends wedding and we both decided that he should still go.  I thought I might make it until he returned from the weekend away before all the pain set in. As it turned out, everything happened pretty quickly and he was gone for the worst of it.  This experience was my first taste of the grief I would later come to know so well, but right then, in that moment of time when all my excitement was stolen away and I felt great sadness, it was all fresh and new and bitterly memorable.  

I distinctly remember taking a long shower after the miscarriage was over, laying down under the hot spray of water, and having a conversation with God. I told Him that I didn't know how to praise Him when He takes things away. I told Him I didn't want to hope in ruin and plan a life meant for destruction. Actually, my conversation was pretty one sided. I cried until there weren't tears left in me. Then I started thinking about the story of Huckleberry Finn. 

It's true. No lie. I started thinking about Huck Finn. I read Mark Twain's classic in high school and also in college but one thing stuck with me the most from my study of this novel: Huck Finn couldn't be trusted. For instance, he often talked about his father in the nicest of terms, but Twain made it clear that Huck's father was a drunken scoundrel. Huck's assessment of life and people and situations was unreliable. He was an unreliable narrator. It's a literary term that has continued to hold much fascination for me. I find it a clever convention to require the reader to think for his/her self. My favorite author, Susan Howatch, uses this convention often. 

But there in the shower, with my face pressed against the fiberglass tub and hot water beating on my shoulders, I thought about Huckleberry Finn, and how I too am an unreliable narrator...of my life. I claim to be wise and discern what is best for me but I often mess that up. I am often more led by my own desires than anything else. If God, in His infinite mercy, is good; if He, in fact, defines love; if He is writing my story...shouldn't I trust that story? I got up from the floor of that shower with the assurance that despite all the things I would never understand, God was a better author of my life than I could ever be. 

I realized that God is good. Very good. And instead of trying to define God's goodness by the things I received in my life, I wanted to allow God's goodness to define my life...whether I received anything at all. 

That said, I grieved the loss of that life, just as I grieved the loss of Andy. Honest grief has a time and place. A season. And then there are the seasons of life and peace. Amidst them all there is the unchanging and mysterious truth of God's goodness, and His ceaseless machinations of redemption.