BitterSweetLife

What We Try to Do If Loss May Happen



We think our baby may be too small.

Last Tuesday, Lindsay had a Doctor’s appointment, and we learned there may be complications with the pregnancy. It is a wait-and-see proposition, an indispensable element of medicine.

“You’ll have to wait,” says the doctor, “Until we can get you an advanced sonogram.” That will happen on Monday. So the past week has been spent, well, waiting.

Waiting is active. You read a book or study or watch the Jayhawks. You talk—about life, about hoops, about whatever—with a friend. You pray, out loud, for as long as you can. You remember that sorrow may be on tap, but that the tap has not been turned. It could be hot water or cold—but now you’re waiting, and this takes an effort.

Waiting could be a gift, I think.

::

At the approach of unforeseen disaster, my impulse, at first, is to conclude, If God hands out pain now, in such large doses, he must have a unique endeavor in the works. Adventure lies ahead. Then I can smile in spite of aching, and feel, with a bright childlikeness, that hidden avenues of meaning wait to unveil themselves nearby. Some plants will only grow in the dark, and some journeys can only be carried out after nightfall. I see it everywhere in the Bible: If Christ wounds you deeply, he often has a paramount battle for you to fight.

The pain has a glowing surreality, a stinging bittersweetness.

All this comes at the first prick, at the premonition of tragedy. Then the ceiling comes crashing down and the lights go out. That fragile understanding of honored adventure gets lost in the dark confusion.

I picture the secret knowledge like a shining disc, a silver circle that reflects the sky, and my own pain in light of the sky. But the crystalline sphere gets dropped and broken in the melee of pain. The pieces are crushed and slivered underfoot. They lie there forgotten until the next bout with tragedy, when I find myself kneeling instinctively, scrabbling in the dirt of memory for the strangely polished shards.

They’re eroded and slim, sharpened by time and friction, and the main form of the object has broken down, has been worn away. They look and feel vaguely familiar.

I seem to remember that they formed a disc: a luminous sphere that reflected a hidden meaning for pain. Gingerly I fit the fragments together, and hope I will not forget, this time, what the completed puzzle looks like.

::

I debated whether to post about this, and eventually decided to go for it. Lindsay and I are deeply concerned, obviously, about the health of our baby, and painfully aware that a huge sigh of relief or gaping disappointment is right around the corner. That makes it awkward to talk about.

But this strange view of pain, a medium forcibly taken by Christ for purposes of his own, is so central to the message of this blog that I decided I wanted to write about it. Pain opens doors, mysteriously changes us, and makes us more like Christ if we can kneel instead of curse. I need to remember this.

I also know that pain is something we grapple with, live in, and rarely defeat with an ‘intuitive leap.’ That doesn’t mean, though, that we can’t learn from past ‘adventures.’ Whatever happens next, that’s one thing I hope we will do.

Now that I’ve mentioned this situation, I will most likely continue to blog about the usual things—books, thoughts about God, KU hoops, bittersweetness… Don’t feel like you need find ‘the right words’ to mention our baby—that can be ridiculously hard, and we’ll be fine with any thoughts and prayers that come our way.

Take care! Every loss or gain is in God’s hands.