Grieving With Hope After Miscarriage And Loss By Adriel Booker

Into the Deep

Scripture: Lamentations 3:19-24

Maybe your grief is fresh and raw and you’re still reeling from the suffocating blow of a recent miscarriage. Or maybe you’ve long ago buried a secret grief but something within is probing you to lean in to the pain once again. I can’t answer the cosmic “why” of your miscarriage, but I can validate and help you understand your pain and grief. I want to link my arm with yours in hope as we look together toward the day when Jesus makes all things new. 

I discovered something in the early days after my first miscarriage, when grief came pounding with incredible force: If I didn’t dive deep, the waves of grief would absolutely pummel me. In surfing, this is called a “duck dive.” The apostle Paul calls it being “hidden with Christ” (Colossians 3:3).

I call it survival. 

As I began to practice my own deep dive after losing our daughter, Scarlett Grace, to miscarriage, and then losing two more babies, I discovered this was actually more than survival. It was an invitation: Would I find Jesus in the deep? 

It’s normal to be filled with questions when experiencing personal trauma. What have I done to deserve this? Is this my fault? Why would God let this happen? Is he punishing me for something? What if God isn’t who I thought he was? How can I go on with life as I once knew it? Will I ever feel normal again? Is God—or his goodness—even real? What if my whole faith is a sham? 

Because the grief of miscarriage often goes unspoken, these types of questions can eat away at the soul and confidence of a woman as she tries to shoulder the burden of them in secret. But I must tell you this: It might seem impossible, but you can do this. You can lose and grieve and hope. The power of grief can, and sometimes will, sweep us off our feet. But we can learn how to breathe under the deep. We may even learn to open our eyes there. We can grieve with hope. We may be brokenhearted or even crushed, but we will not be destroyed. We might even find that, in our weakness, we’re stronger than we think. 

What questions do you have right now about your loss? Consider writing them out.

The Wildness of Grief

Scripture: Psalm 69:1-4

I remember the days of wanting to crawl into a cave, find a place to curl up there in the quiet, and never wake up. It wasn’t that I actually wanted to die, it’s just that I didn’t know how to live under the weight of my sadness and collapsed expectations.

Out of nowhere, sorrow would hit me like a heat wave, pressing on my chest, leaving me desperate to peel off layers so I could find some relief. But even while experiencing intense loneliness, I also remember feeling the sweetness of God’s presence in some of those shadowy hours. Something told me his quietness wasn’t abandonment—it was companionship. 

This isn’t to say I could always feel his presence, or that I didn’t long for something more tangible—a touch or a word. (A billboard in flashing neon lights with a backdrop of double rainbows would have been nice.) But even when I felt like I was groping in the dark, I somehow knew there was a God acquainted with pain who stayed with me in mine. 

Maybe this hasn’t been your experience at all. Maybe you’re wondering how your soul will ever rest after what feels like endless grief or a faith that never quite recovered. Maybe God seems absent or quiet. Or maybe those words—“no heartbeat”—have just been uttered in your direction and you’re looking for a lifeline. Maybe you’re wondering if you’ll ever feel close to God again or if your faith is even worth holding on to while you wait. Maybe you just want to know you’re not alone. 

I wish I could tell you that you will “feel” Jesus near when you need him most, but I cannot. Who am I to presume my experience will translate into yours? I will not. And this, friend, is the truth of grief: It’s wild. Grief does not follow a blueprint. It minds no flowchart. It doesn’t tick off boxes, it will not be contained in your favorite list app, and it most certainly won’t stay put on the calendar. 

Grief is wild like the sea, but it doesn’t need to destroy us. We can’t conquer it, but we can navigate it, and we can find Jesus there too. 

How has grief been wild, rather than tame, in your life recently?

Beauty for Ashes

Scripture: Isaiah 61:3

You’ll find this as you grieve: Some days you’ll have the strength to dive deep into Jesus—and he’ll meet you there. Other days you’ll barely manage a nudge in his direction—and he’ll meet you there too. God’s grace is big enough for both. 

He isn’t dependent on our strength, stamina, precision, or spiritual muscle. All it takes is our slightest desire, our faintest yes, and he draws us in. Our weakness releases his strength. His might is manifest in our dependence. People have a remarkable ability to endure hardship when they tap in to their inner strength, but when the source of your inner strength comes from something— Someone—greater than yourself, the reservoir is more vast than you dared imagine. 

Suffering does not choose the weak or the strong, the faithful or the faithless. It chooses the human. When you are caught by waves that are larger than your capacity to stay above the surface, you’ve got to allow your heart to feel the pain all the way down to the bottom, so that when you get there you can see you’re still alive. There’s still hope. It’s from the bottom that we can begin to heal our way back up to the surface. The human heart is fragile, yes, but it’s also more resilient than we give ourselves credit for.

The deep is not our enemy or a thing to be resisted. But it does command our attention. No matter what form it takes, suffering always commands our attention. It will not be alleviated by comparison to greater or lesser suffering, or even your perception of it. Your pain is your pain and it deserves the dignity of recognition, for that is where healing begins. 

Naming our suffering does not mean becoming defined by it. Rather, it means honestly acknowledging our need in the presence of Jesus. Our humility frees us to receive his grace. It’s his beauty for our ashes—the great exchange, God’s answer to our pain. 

Our present suffering is the best reminder that life dishes out more than we can handle, which is exactly why we need Jesus. 

Have you felt the strength to “dive deep”? (Why or why not?) In what ways has your grief impacted your relationship with God?

Your Kingdom Come

Scripture: Matthew 6:10

When Jesus showed us how to pray in Matthew 6:10, he acknowledged within his prayer that God’s will is not always done on earth, yet we’re to pray it will be. 

Babies die before they’re born. Violence ravages communities. Prisoners are beaten and tortured. Nations turn a blind eye to genocide happening next door. Racism kills dreams and claims lives. Abuse destroys families. Ego corrupts governments. Carelessness and apathy wreck oceans and forests. 

We can watch the news and see that God’s will isn’t always happening; it seems obvious that monstrosities like the horror of war don’t represent God’s heart or intention. But what about when it’s our life, our baby? Do we believe it then? Do we believe Jesus’s prayer is still relevant? 

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

We suffer because we live in a world where things are not as they should be. This is not God’s design; we weren’t created to suffer. The human story begins in Genesis chapter 1, not chapter 3. 

Suffering exists, but not because it’s God’s intention or will for our lives. It exists because he created us with the capacity to love, and love always requires free will—it cannot be forced. With humanity’s free will came the wonderful, awful ability to rebel against Love. Our rebellion in the garden set the world in motion toward suffering, and it still spins today, leaving brokenness in its wake. 

This was not God’s will then, and it’s not God’s will now. 

All these years after Eden, we’re still groaning under the weight of sorrow. Jesus has come, but we’re still waiting for him to come again. He’s saved us from ourselves, and he’s still saving us as we awaken to his purposes in our lives. The kingdom of God is at hand, and every day it’s further established as we live into it and allow God to heal us and heal creation through us. 

But our in-between remains a tension. We hold the promise of hope and redemption in one hand and the reality of a world still infected with rebellion in the other. This is the reason we continue to pray, Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. May it be so.

Is it encouraging or discouraging to you to know that some of Jesus’s prayers remain unanswered? Why? Does this change the fact that God will have the final word when he comes again?

An Invitation to Lament

Scripture: Psalm 130:1-2

Nothing I’ve experienced has made me more desperate for the hope of kingdom come than straddling a toilet, bleeding life from my womb. I never knew I could cry so much. Or hope so much. 

While mourning the loss of my babies, I had to learn the song of lament. Lament is the language of grief tinged with the hope for deliverance. It was new to me, awkward and unfamiliar. I grew up singing about how awesome God is and how my soul longeth after him and how Jesus shines, but giving voice to anguish and brokenness—this I had to learn in the dark, arms open, tripping my way forward. 

Lament is more than just sadness; lament acknowledges injustice mixed into our pain. Almost half of the psalms are dedicated to lament—both corporate and personal—and yet it’s all but absent from our tidy Sunday morning hymnals. We’re far more comfortable celebrating Jesus’s victory than we are holding space for the reason we need it in the first place. And so, when suffering comes like a wrecking ball into our cozy status quo—as it does—we are blindsided. 

Lament invites us to a liminal space. The word liminal connotes the idea of a threshold—a space between what was and what will be. The implication is a moving forward into something new, but not without first being transformed by the in-between. Liminal spaces feel disorienting because they are. 

In the middle of grief, it can seem as if your old world is falling apart and you don’t yet have glimpses of the new one. You might feel the movements toward a new kind of faith as you realize that God’s goodness is not dependent on your circumstances or the metrics you tend to use when life is comfortable. (I don’t know about you, but I am sometimes guilty of enjoying favorable circumstances and proclaiming, “Isn’t God good?!” while forgetting to proclaim his goodness when life unfolds in ways that hurt.) 

It’s like learning to open your eyes under water: Even though you know it’s possible, it feels awkward, frightening, and cumbersome at first. And yet the more you practice, the more natural and liberating it feels. Eyes wide open to God’s goodness—even in the midst of loss—changes the way everything else looks too. 

What would lament in your life look like today? Have you experienced this liminal space of lament, as if you are in between life as you knew it and life as it’s going to be? (Explain.)

A Breathtaking Promise

Scripture: Matthew 1:23

My husband and I named the daughter I miscarried Scarlett Grace. Scarlett was for the pain, the suffering, the life poured out mingled with the hope of resurrection. Grace was for possibility and purpose—the breathtaking assurance that God can be found in our suffering. God’s promise to us is not that bad things won’t happen, it’s that he’s with us through it all—Emmanuel, God with us. 

We were beginning to see it. 

The ache we endured after losing Scarlett uncovered holes in our theology—chiefly, that we did not have a theology of suffering. But we were coming to a deeper understanding that when suffering comes into our still-broken world—as it will—he can be found there too.

Theoretically we understood this, but our bewilderment in the face of bottomless pain confirmed our lack of praxis. Simply put, we weren’t living what we believed because we’d never had the chance to. 

Although we felt sure God wasn’t the source of our suffering, Ryan and I were only beginning to learn that the very thing the enemy of our souls used against us could be transformed by the redemptive hand of God. This wonder-working God was in the process of transfiguring our horrible loss into an invitation to greater life. We couldn’t discern it yet, but God was hovering, preparing to create something new like he always does when all we see is dark, formless, and void.

Scarlett was taking us deeper. But to go there we had to be willing to disarm our knee-jerk instinct to distract, numb, or overcome our pain. We had to resist the impulse to deflect our grief or fight our brokenness. We had to reject the compulsion to figure out how this could be rewritten into a success story. We had to enter in as is. 

The spectacle of heaven is that it’s birthed into the low places. It’s revealed when Jesus is allowed to enter into the lives of those who know their need for him: a woman caught in adultery, a hotheaded loudmouth, a terrorist, a thief, a desperate man and his son, a diseased outcast…a mother staring at an empty ultrasound screen. Heaven is not merely a destination; it’s the Spirit of God writing a redemption story right here and now.

In what ways is your loss changing your view of God? Have you been able to sense God’s presence (“God with us”) even while you were suffering—why or why not?

Hope of Heaven

Scripture: Isaiah 43:2

Sometimes we think of Jesus as the “nice guy” who’s covering for a God we can’t understand. We secretly accuse God of causing us to suffer, despite the incarnation that shows us the opposite is true: God himself was born into our mess so he could turn it upside down. He didn’t make the mess. He didn’t “allow” the mess. He overturned it and redeemed it. 

Suffering can be the exact thing that brings you into deeper communion with Christ because that’s how redemption works: It makes dead things come alive. It lights up the dark with his light. It brings about good from what was started by evil. 

This is our promise for suffering: In our deepest anguish, he is there, present. And at the bottom of our sorrow, he is working to make all things new. We may not see the resolution of this promise in the ways or time frame we’d like, but that doesn’t negate his redemption plan: resurrection, new life, no more tears, the hope of heaven. 

Don’t ever think you’ve been abandoned in your pain. Don’t ever think he will allow it to be wasted. Don’t ever think what seems broken or lifeless can’t be reworked and transformed to birth life. Don’t ever think your lament is in vain. Don’t ever think hope is dead. 

God is present, weeping with you. He is active, shaping history toward ultimate redemption. Resurrection doesn’t render death as inconsequential; it means that death doesn’t have the final word. 

God didn’t take your baby. Death entered the world through the free will of humankind. Life entered, again, through Jesus Christ. 

Be assured, friend, that even your most awful sorrow is not beyond God’s redemptive reach. He can, does, and will draw near to you in your suffering; he can, does, and will bring meaning to it. He’ll release his grace to the exact measure you need and will use every means possible to redeem your broken heart. This is his promise.

Suffering may weaken you, but let it also awaken you as you open your heart to hope, possibility, and presence. May you find Jesus in the deep.

As this devotional comes to an end, consider writing out your own story of loss. Include as much detail as you can. Try to resist writing about lessons you learned. Let this simply be an exercise in telling your story. And then, as you do so, ask Jesus to show you his presence throughout. Give him your story. . . and ask him to keep writing.