LifeDate Fall 2024 – Hope and a Future
by Grace MacPherson
God is not unreasonable. But He created reason, and He also transcends it.
Recently I received the news that a dear family friend lost her eight-week-old baby to miscarriage. I was quiet at the time. I gave what comfort I could. And later, I cried.
Curled under a blanket, I cried for the baby its mother would never get to nurse. The baby its family would never get to hold and touch. The baby its parents would never bring to Baptism. And as I cried, I asked God why. Not why He had let that baby die—but why He had let it live. Why it had ever been conceived if only to cause this grief.
Sometimes it’s easy to see the beauty in pain. When my grandmother was terminally ill with dementia, my family brought her into our home, and for several beautiful and excruciating weeks, we read to her and sang with her and prayed for her as we watched her memories slowly slip away.
As a young teen, I babysat a little boy with Down syndrome. He never learned to walk or talk in the time I knew him, but he brought such joy to me and to his mother with his drooly smiles and soft cuddles.
When the world looks at those lives, it sees nothing worth preserving, nothing worth embracing, nothing worth celebrating. It only sees lives unworthy of life. Never mind that my most precious memories of my grandmother, now in heaven, are from those weeks, or that that little boy with Down syndrome is statistically shown to be happier than the rest of us. Their lives were imperfect. Flawed. Unworthy.
Yet they brought so much joy.
And when I think of that tiny baby who died in its mother’s womb just days ago, I don’t understand why. I see how God worked through the pain of my grandmother’s death to pull my family closer together, to teach us patience and unconditional love, to give us moments of joy in the most unexpected and startling of places. I see how that baby boy with Down syndrome, so full of smiles and baby cuddles, brought unspeakable joy to his mother’s life.
But I don’t see the hidden good in letting a baby live for two months, only to die. I don’t see happiness in that, only pain and grief and loss. I only see the agony of every other mother who has lost an unborn child. I wonder if there is any way for me to escape that pain if I’m blessed with marriage.
Why would a loving God allow so much suffering? Why would a just God close the wombs of godly women who have begged Him for a child? Why, if God is good?
But why would a loving God send His Son to die? Why would a just God forgive the wretched sinners who have been washed in His Baptism and fed at His table?
God is not unreasonable. But He created reason, and He also transcends it.
I still don’t understand why. But I trust that a God who would sacrifice His own Son for me, for that precious unborn baby, for his grieving family—I trust that that God would not do it without a reason both wise and loving.
He has taken to Himself my grandmother, who lived so many beautiful years on earth before her death, and He has taken a tiny nameless baby who never even drew a breath. Who can know the ways of God?
It wouldn’t surprise me if right now, in heaven, my grandmother was holding that precious baby—or if he was playing with my own miscarried siblings as my grandmother and her own parents and sister look on.
I still cry for my loss. For the far deeper loss of that baby’s family. For the hours of cuddles and laughter and play that might have been.
But every life is precious. Why God let that baby live and die, I don’t know and will never understand. But I know that on the day I meet my Creator, I will meet that baby too. For now, I do the only thing I can do. I look with Job into the whirlwind and say:
“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21, NKJV).
Grace MacPherson lives in Casper, Wyoming, with her family. She is the author of The King’s Sword and Domitian.