House on the Rock

July 25 was once a day that I couldn’t wait to arrive: the prepping, planning, hospital-bag packing, the eager expectation of that slightly-too-fast drive down 465, to finally get to park in the hospital loading lot like so many pregnant women I’d watched before, rather than twisting through mazes of parking garage floors. To bite back breathless groans of contractions while being wheeled into a delivery room, changing into a green-and-gold gown and bringing our precious child into the world at last.

Then all too quickly, July 25 became a day marked by dread. Our baby slipped peacefully from my womb to eternity, and the onesies we acquired were stowed tightly into a box where we would never accidentally see them — sealed with packing tape and shoved in the garage. I grieved the loss of dreams, the way July 25 turned so sour so soon, and the fact that we would have to pass by that once-exciting day when we wouldn’t be anywhere close to delivering a baby.

As if it weren’t already heavy, we get to commemorate a package deal of this woeful weekend: July 26 of last year was the day our lives were abruptly jolted from calm to chaos. Mom started noticing a little cough that we blamed on Covid or Canadian fires. And while it seemed so minor at the time, we can look back and see that day as the one when fluid began pooling around her lungs. Pulmonary embolisms lodged themselves in her chest, and a devastating diagnosis was in our midst. Not only does July 25 mark the day our baby was due; it’s also the anniversary of the last day of life as we knew it. The last blissful moments of healthy pre-cough Carrie. In a tiny sense, the last good day.

But it’s July 25 today, and I woke up to gorgeous yellow light bursting through the double windows of our finally-furnished home. I cuddled up on our couch with a coffee and ran my hand over the tiniest bump beginning to emerge in my belly. Grief, absolutely. But so much goodness I can finally see.

I flipped to Psalm 31, a prayer of lament penned by David as Saul pursued his very life. It’s a place I hunkered down from August-March, mostly because of these verses right here:

Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am in distress;
    my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
    my soul and body with grief.
¹⁰ My life is consumed by anguish
    and my years by groaning;
my strength fails because of my affliction,
    and my bones grow weak.

Yep yep and…yep. I remember those mornings of waking up with eyes so puffy I could hardly see, affliction so heavy I could hardly lift my head. Sometimes they still come, but they’re rarer now. Much healing has happened over the past ten months. The scars of trauma are fading to far-off memories that we’re able to talk about through tears. And we’re seeing a God-given turning point from weeping to worship. The moment where He lifts us from the pit and we, like David, can proclaim:

But I trust in you, Lord;
    I say, “You are my God.”
¹⁵ My times are in your hands…

If it were up to me, I’d be delivering a baby today. Mom would be by my side for the hand squeezes and pep talks. She’d be the first person I’d let hold our precious child. I’d ask her to stay for a week or maybe seven, imparting all her wisdom and relieving us from restless nights.

But Psalm 31:15 does not say that my times are in my hands. They are in His hands, and in His perfect wisdom, He allowed these heartbreaks to befall us that we might be made more like Jesus.

As time goes on, it becomes easier to see how God’s timing was truly best. Even with the loss of our child, I recognize His mercy in it: We would have been cramming a newborn into our tiny second-story apartment. Working to wheel a stroller up crumbling stairs while secondhand smoke from nearby neighbors wafted into infant lungs. Not that a house could ever replace a baby, but we see His goodness in providing this new neighborhood– bursting with babies and stay-at-home moms, a not-so-small-or-smoky stomping ground where we can paint olive-green walls in a gender-neutral nursery and never have to climb a single step.

I also see the healing He’s done in me. I would have been in absolutely no place to carry a baby back in January, when the grief of losing Mom still ripped through my guts like a stomach bug. I was so weighed down by anguish that there’s no way my hostile womb could’ve housed a growing life. My progesterone back then was dirt-level low as I clawed my way up from a pit of post-traumatic stress, and what’s the best way to increase progesterone? Eliminate stress.

This is not to say that God took our baby from us so that we would be in a house and more emotionally stable. I don’t think that’s how He works. But I do know that the world is fallen and death is sure, and He’s lifting the clouds so we can see His mercy in the madness.

In his commentary on the Psalms, Tim Keller writes that “many events are evil and grievous, yet God overrules them and works them all together, in the long run, for good.”

My times are in His hands. Things often don’t pan out the way I would plan it, but we can celebrate that our times – our days, our years, our heartbreak and tears – are in the grasp of an omniscient God who loved us so deeply He sent His son to die.

My times are fully in His hands, and that is overwhelmingly, abundantly, infinitely better than if they were in mine. Even if it hurts like crazy.