Between Grace & Glory

Long before Graceful Fertility & Wellness came about, I started a blog. It was a creative outlet while I was fresh in my grief. A safe space to tell the world about my babies and what God was teaching me through them. I had grand plans of writing often and making it a full-blown resource for women experiencing miscarriage, but I never ended up writing much. I was stressed, depressed, exhausted, angry...and I think at some point, I just decided I didn't want to face those feelings anymore.

But now, I face these feelings every day while I sit with women who have experienced this same unbearable pain. I'm a bit more removed from my own painful days now. I don't cry much anymore. I'm not bothered by pregnancy announcements as much. I smile and laugh without guilt. But it's a beautiful thing to reflect on that season and remind myself what it was like to walk in the valley. Because the women I help need me to remember. They need someone willing to walk in THEIR valley with them.

So today, 2 years after the first due date of my first baby when I made my first blog post, I'm taking the time to remember. Everything I have built and will ever build with Graceful Fertility started here. What a beautiful journey it's been. And I know the Author of my story is just getting started...

My Story, posted on June 4, 2024:

I’m writing this on June 3rd, the day before I wanted to post. I’ve been trying to write something for the past few months in preparation for this day and the start of this blog, but I always get a few sentences in and never really like how it’s going. Yesterday, I was out with a dear friend who was taking some lovely photos of me for the blog, and I was sharing how I’ve been struggling to write. I have so many plans, but it is such a challenge to figure out exactly what I want to say first. I want to write everything down into a neat little book and tie it up with a nice little bow. Well, the more I think about it, the more I realize that is just not how this blog is going to go – because that is not how life goes either – and my Enneagram type 1 perfectionist heart just needs to get over that. After wrapping up our photo session, my friend reminded me that some of the best blogs are also some of the most honest and real ones. We don’t always find the greatest encouragement from someone who is “on the other side” of their struggles. Sometimes, encouragement comes from seeing other people’s messy lives. Not because it makes us feel better about ourselves, but because it makes us feel less alone, like someone else get’s it. So that is what I am here to do. I am here to share my story, my heartaches, my grief, my guilt, my highs and lows, my lessons learned. I am here to be the real one when social media paints everyone else so perfectly that you feel like the most unlucky and unblessed person in the world. I am here because I see you and your mess, and I want to speak life and light and truth – hard but beautiful truth – into you. I’m not going to try and put a flimsy band-aid over the gaping hole in your heart or tell you just to turn your frown upside down. I am here to turn your eyes (and my own) upon Jesus.

So now that you know what I am here to do, I suppose it would be a good time to share with you how I got here. Spoiler alert: I call it “my story”, but really, it’s God’s.

It was Friday, October 20th, and life was going great. We had a beautiful home, a goofy but well-trained dog, a snuggly foster puppy, great jobs, great friends, and the icing on the cake – a sweet little baby on the way. We had been a little nervous when we first found out we were expecting, but after a few short weeks, we were finally starting to get excited about becoming a family of 3. We felt ready. That morning, Daniel (my husband) hopped on a virtual call after his boss asked for a quick chat. He thought it was an odd request but figured it was just going to be a project or to-do list update. After a few minutes, I could tell the conversation was over so I walked into the office to see how it went. “They’re uh, they’re letting me go.” WHAT!? I immediately burst into tears. How could this be happening? He was supposed to be getting a promotion soon and we had a baby on the way! A few phone calls later and we found out his company was merging and they let go almost everyone on Daniel's team. This simply could not be happening.

Or maybe it could be. Maybe this is all just a part of God’s plan to provide for our growing family? Daniel never would have left this job to look for something better, so maybe this was God’s way of taking care of us? That’s what I told myself that weekend.

Tuesday, October 24th. Four days later. I was 8 weeks pregnant, and I had been waiting for this day for exactly 4 weeks and 1 day. It was finally the day of our first ultrasound. I was so eager to meet (through a black and white screen) the newest member of our family. I had booked a pregnancy announcement photography session for a few weeks later and had an Etsy cart full of onesies that would tell our friends and family of our exciting news. Aside from Daniel just losing his job, we had not a care in the world. Life was still good because we had the most important thing: our baby. The ultrasound started and within a few seconds I could tell something was off. The doc was looking around way too much. Finally, he turned the screen around and said, “so the first thing I always do is make sure the pregnancy is in your uterus, which this is, so that means you are safe.” That doesn’t sound like the first thing you would tell a new mom, does it? I don’t care about my safety, doctor! Just show me my baby! Next came a blur of words between Daniel and the doctor, but all I caught was “not viable” and “miscarry”. All I remember on the car ride home was repeating, through uncontrollable sobs, “I just can’t believe this is happening to us”.

I crawled into bed and didn’t get up for the rest of the day. I woke up countless times during the night, crying, and then countless times cried myself back to sleep. The following day, I read the entire book of Job in one sitting and all I could think was that, if my story was like Job’s, I had two possible outcomes: 1) God wasn’t done allowing bad things to happen or 2) He was done and now he would give it all back. (Okay, I know that is a pretty faulty take on the book of Job, but that is how I felt, and don’t worry, we’ll cover this in a later blog post). So with those two outcomes in mind, I decided all I could do was wait for God to pick one.

While I waited on God, I also waited on my body. There are truly no words to describe how it feels to hold a baby in your womb knowing you will never get to hold that baby in your arms. For two weeks, that was my motherhood experience until I miscarried on November 7th.

I always get to this part in the story and never know what to say. I feel like I should explain how I was feeling or what I did or what other people did, but I think my mind has blocked out most of the weeks that followed our loss. I know it was a dark time. And I don’t remember much else.

At some point during the darkness, Daniel had a series of interviews with a company (yep, we still had to think about getting him a job amidst all this), and to our surprise, he got a job offer! Wow! Less than a month after being laid off and he already had something else lined up. We went out to dinner to celebrate, and we were hopeful that this was the start to things looking up again. Maybe God was giving everything back to us. After all, this was probably the quickest job turn-around in history. That next morning as Daniel was about to call his HR rep to ask about a few things in the job contract, she called and let him know that they were retracting the offer because of a sudden hiring freeze across the company. I know – you think I’m kidding. I am not. It shook us even more than we thought we could possibly be shaken after all that had already happened. Apparently God had picked option number 1 and was going to keep letting bad things happen. It truly felt like he was playing a dirty game with our life.

So we entered the following week, the Thanksgiving holiday with my birthday being on Thanksgiving day, having nothing at all to be thankful for, at least in our minds. The day we were supposed to be sharing the exciting news of our baby with our families, or celebrating at least this new job, ended up being more stolen moments for us to grieve over.

After all this, you are probably wondering how we could start to move forward. Some days I felt really good and felt God was near. But mostly, I fought with God…a lot. I literally threw tantrums and screamed at him so much and so loudly that I scared my husband. I learned what it means to “angry read” your Bible. I would angry pray, feel nothing, and then ignore God for days at a time. Then get a glimpse of the truth that He is still good. Psalm 13 perfectly describes my wrestling:

“O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand? Turn and answer me, O Lord my God! Restore the sparkle to my eyes, or I will die. Don’t let my enemies gloat, saying, ‘We have defeated him!’ Don’t let them rejoice at my downfall. But I trust in your unfailing love. I will rejoice because you have rescued me. I will sing to the Lord because he is good to me.”

I had that scripture hanging on my bathroom mirror and I read it almost every day. I wish I could say the last part about God being good to me would instantly make me feel happy and dry my tears – but I’d be lying if I did. I slowly started to come to the realization that regardless of my circumstance, God had rescued me because He had sent Jesus. I learned what God’s compassion feels like in the midst of hurt. I learned some beautiful truths, and when I really dwelled in them, it was all that I needed – God was all that I needed. But as anyone who has been through loss knows, it is HARD to have both joy and pain, and oftentimes, we lose sight of God and the pain wins.

Despite all the truths I was learning about Jesus being my answer, I was still telling myself a major lie: I believed that, in addition to God rescuing me through Jesus, He would also “rescue” me like David talks about in so many psalms and like He did giving Job new wealth and more children. I thought that “rescue” meant God would finally start on outcome number 2: giving me back what had been taken. I thought he would give me another baby. You know…to really make this whole thing come full circle.

Well he did give me another baby. In early January I found out I was pregnant again. My doctor told me I could come in for some courtesy early blood tests “for peace of mind”. Daniel was in the final stages of interviewing with a new company, and I was just SURE that my Job-ending was finally happening. This time, God was really giving it all back. I went in for my first blood test and everything looked good – even better than the blood tests I did during my first pregnancy. Then I did the second test a couple days later and the numbers were not looking so good. The doctor wanted me to wait a couple more days and then come in for a final check to confirm things. So during that time I prayed for a miracle. I prayed harder and with more faith than I had ever prayed for anything in my life. Coincidentally, I was reading Matthew in my reading plan for the new year, and I was reading through all of Jesus’ miracles. I just KNEW that God would let me keep this baby. But something I had also recently learned to pray was Luke 22:42. When Jesus is in the garden praying in his distress because he knows he is about to be turned over to his death, he says “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” Just as much as I was praying for my miracle, I was also praying, truly, for God’s will to be done. Because the craziness of our past few months had taught me that God truly can work good from all things and I had seen him do amazing things in my relationship with him, so I trusted him and the goodness of His will. On a Friday morning, I had my blood drawn, we went to pick up our new puppy Silas (yes, we thought a puppy and baby at the same time was a fun idea), and a few hours after we got home, the doctor called and told me to expect another miscarriage to start soon. The next morning I started bleeding. Four days later, Daniel got a job offer that was better than we could have ever imagined (and this time he got to accept it!). What a rollercoaster.

Even with the good news of Daniel’s job, I was so angry with God again. Angry that he didn’t save my baby. Angry that recurrent miscarriage was now the struggle I’d have to deal with. Angry that he was providing for our physical needs but not giving us a family. Angry, angry, angry. But the really cool thing about God is that even when you try your hardest to ignore him, He still talks to you. Daniel and I sat down to watch The Chosen one night and there was a scene where Little James asks Jesus why he performed so many miracles for other people, and even granted his disciples the ability to perform miracles, but never healed him of his disabled leg (which is not in the Bible but just something the writers chose to give as a back story). My attention was definitely peaked…I had literally just asked for a miracle, after reading about so many other miracles, and God didn’t do it. Jesus’ answer to little James hit me hard. He explained that he hadn’t healed him because he trusted him and because it was more of a testament for him to praise the father in spite of his weakness. He didn’t need a miracle because his faith was enough. I didn’t want my faith to be enough – I wanted my miracle. But watching that scene, I began to realize just how much God wanted me to use the story he gave me.

So to quickly summarize our story: in about a 3-month period, we lost a job, lost a baby, lost another job, lost another baby, and then got a job. You may be hoping that I’ll end my story with a happy pregnancy announcement, but I don’t have one for you. As a society, and even as a church, I think the first thing on our mind when someone is suffering is to try and give them hope that God will fix their broken heart by someday giving them what they want – that is what I had been telling myself in between my pregnancies. But friends, let me tell you, that is not the kind of hope we should be giving ourselves or others. We have forgotten about the hope we have because of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It is not a hope that says “don’t cry, God will give you a family someday soon” like God is just some genie in a bottle that makes us happy because of what he grants us. Instead, it is a hope that says, “my dear child, come to me, rest in me because I have already overcome the world. Look forward to the glorious kingdom I have prepared for you.” It is a hope that tells us good WILL come from all this, even if it is not in the way that we think. Even if you lose your job, and yes, even when death comes and takes your precious babies, God is bigger and He will redeem you. This is the kind of hope that actually brings us peace and allows us to live in contentment as a servant in His kingdom instead of being a lie that tells us the job, house, spouse, or baby we want is the answer to our broken hearts.

(Side note: I actually wrote that bit a few months ago, and boy did I need to hear it again just now)

I wasn’t really asking for this kind of testimony. I never felt like I had much of one, but I also didn’t feel like I wanted or needed one – mainly because I was scared of what I’d have to face to have one. But God, knowing me better than I know myself, knew exactly what I needed. He gave me the gift of my two babies. Two babies that were never meant for me to hold on this earth, but through even their short little lives, are playing a big role in God’s kingdom. Its not every day that I can say this, because some days my grief is too much to look past and all I want is to have my babies back with me. But many days I can say that I love my story exactly the way it is because God has formed it into something beautiful.

Romans 8:28 says that “we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” So let me tell you the good that has come even in the few short months that this has been my story: God has revealed himself to me in ways that I never imagined I would understand until I made it to heaven. His love is so much more powerful and abundant than I thought. I am in awe every day of the sacrifice Jesus made for my salvation and I am in awe of (and so reliant upon) the gift of the Holy Spirit. These are things I know God has opened my heart to understand, but has also convicted me to share, and I hope to do so in the many blog posts to come.

I know my story is not finished yet, and whether good or bad is yet to come, it can be frightening to think about. But I can rest knowing that my story is not my own. Honestly, I’m so glad its not. God, who knows all that I need and would – did – give anything for me, is the author of my story. And He is the author of yours, too. So let's walk together down this road of trial and suffering, and as we walk, let us do so like one of my favorite songs says. Let’s turn our eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and let the things of this earth grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.*

Talk to you again soon, friend!

Love,

Amanda

*Lyrics from the song, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus

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