grief and goodness

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Believe it or not, I usually have a pretty clear head.  I’m a straight thinker.  Clear lines, logical progressions, even with the chaos of motherhood, I can usually keep my thinking fairly rational.

But this past week I have felt the person who is normally driven by reason disappear.

Grief and sorrow will do that to you.

So I’ve decided to sort out the grief and the good things of this past week.  And many hold elements of both.  Nothing is clean and simple here.

1) I feel grief and goodness that my miscarriage started while we were at the funeral of Tom’s 102 year old aunt, who was passionate for Jesus.

2) I felt mostly grief, but a tinge of goodness, when our family sat down for supper for the first time since the miscarriage and Eliza went to get napkins, and the only ones we had had a picture of baby’s feet at 10 weeks old in the womb on them.  I held back the tears as ten-week-old baby feet sat in my lap.

3) I felt mostly goodness, but some grief, when Eliza told me, with hope in her eyes, she would pray for God to give us another baby.

4) I feel grief and goodness, when many of my friends who are expecting babies, come to give me hugs and their tummies stick out into my empty one.

5) I feel incredible goodness when my friend, who’s been through this all too many times, tells me that she has a special love for and relationship with her friend’s child born at the time her baby should have been.  She is a miracle to me.

6) I feel grief and goodness when so many friends offer to bring meals and care for us in every possible way.  We are blessed with people we don’t deserve, and yet, the meals and offerings mean that something has happened that I want to pretend didn’t happen.

7) I feel grief that Tom and I are walking through this sadness, but goodness that we’re walking through it together.

8) I feel goodness when I look at the three child-gifts that came to me without complication or heartache.  I have taken that for granted for much too long.

9) I feel grief and goodness when I read or hear of other’s experiences of loss: grief and anger that I have joined their ranks; goodness that they are there, ministering to me in my sadness and denial.

10) I feel grief that my plans won’t happen.  I had this baby planned.  And now my plan is foiled.  But, I know that this is the ultimate goodness, because my plans aren’t trustworthy and good.  They’re just mine.

So I may not feel the goodness of His plan yet, but I know His plan is good and I’ll spend my life discovering and feeling the ways that His plan is better, while I grieve over the ways He has wounded me with His good plan.

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Filed under body of Christ, family, sorrow

Tags: goodness, grief, miscarriage