Every May without fail, Mother’s Day comes and goes. For some people, this is a day of celebration. Maybe the kids make mom breakfast in bed or help her by cleaning the house, or maybe they even buy her some presents and bring home flowers. But for some, Mother’s Day is a reminder of loss. Losing a child is painful and gut wrenching. In the midst of everyone celebrating, it can be easy to get lost in the mourning. The Gospel Coalition’s Kyle Porter wrote on this topic just three weeks after his wife gave birth to their daughter Kate, who was stillborn. We respect you, mothers. Mothers who have earthly children, but also heavenly children. We hope that Kyle Porter’s blog may bring some peace during this tough season.
“Charles Spurgeon once said this about suffering:
It would be a very sharp and trying experience to me to think that I have an affliction which God never sent me, that the bitter cup was never filled by his hand, that my trials were never measured out by him, nor sent to me by his arrangement of their weight and quantity.
Those are some of the most sobering words I’ve ever read. A month ago, I could not have known their depth nor their weight. Now I can. Here is the story of how we lost a daughter, and gained so much more.
Our pastor, Matt Chandler, always says: “Your life can change with one phone call. You’re not exempt.” The problem is that I always thought I was. I thought my friends were, too. This is an illusion, of course, and about 100 minutes later I got that phone call from my wife, who said the midwife wanted her to get a sonogram because she couldn’t find the baby’s heart.
If we’re being honest, we didn’t need the sonogram. It was a formality. We both already knew. We both knew as we drove to the hospital. We both knew as they put her in a wheelchair. We both knew as they went through two sonogram machines thinking one was broken. The doctor didn’t even need to say it, but she did anyway. Two words that change the rest of your life. There might not be two more devastating words.
No heartbeat.
All of the emotions.
Our friends, family, and church were spectacularly gracious in the days that followed. It’s impossible for me to stress that enough. They were unbelievable. The weight was not ours alone to shoulder, which made tasting the unfolding nightmare at least palatable.
John Piper once wrote that he “loves the ready tears of strong men.” I now have some old T-shirts that would agree with him. My friends came and held me, and we wept. Their wives came and held my wife, too. It was a spectacular outpouring of God’s grace in giving us deep and enduring friendships.
Stillborn births are not necessarily unique. That doesn’t dull the sting or erase the pain, but it at least reminds you many parents have walked this path. My mom had a stillborn child. Some of our friends’ parents did too. One out of every 115 pregnancies ends with a stillborn.
We don’t want to cry out “Why us?” when this is so common to so many. Instead, we want to say “Yes, us—and thank you to everyone else before us for walking this path with grace.”
For a lot of us (myself included), Christianity has come easy. There’s been no suffering. There’s been no pain. There have been few questions. There’s been no reason to not trust God and to not call ourselves Christians.
And now there is.
Now we have known unimaginable depths. The sorrow that flowed that week is an unspeakable thing. And we can truthfully say the Lord is good in both the joy and the sorrow, if not greater in the sorrow. That was what we tried to point to all week.
Jen says that means our faith must not waver because God didn’t change. He didn’t waver. The only thing that has changed is how much of him we carry with us. We lost sweet Kate, but we got so much of the Lord. Not in spite of, but because of her.
Don’t mistake what I’m saying here. We lost a lot. We lost a child. It is every parent’s deepest fear and greatest nightmare. I honestly can’t, off the top of my head, think of anything worse in terms of sheer traumatic force applied to two married adults. But we gained even more than we lost. This is a bittersweet reality. One too complex for me to understand in full.
This is only a small portion of the blog. Here is the full version if you would like to continue to read.