Saying Goodbye to Our Little Joy Baby

“The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;

may the name of the Lord be praised.” - Job 1:21 (NIV)

I had calculated in my head that this would be about the time when we would be making the announcement; right around Lu’s first birthday. We were so excited to announce that she was going to be a big sister! We wanted to shout from the rooftops that we’d be welcoming our 3rd child into the world in early February. Instead we spent the Fourth of July holiday saying goodbye and walking through our 3rd miscarriage.

I thought about writing a piece on some “Do’s and Don’ts” of walking with a friend (or even an acquaintance) through miscarriage and I thought about writing about the details of “What No One Ever Tells You About Miscarriages”, but after spending some time in prayer, I felt the Lord do a MIGHTY work in my heart and change the direction of not only this blog post but my perspective. So here’s where we are...

We have been blessed. The joy we experienced when we found out we were pregnant right before my 30th birthday blessed us...OH how it blessed us! Handsome totally outdid himself in the surprises and celebrations this year but this...this was the best 30th birthday surprise of all! Just a couple of days before we found out we were on a date talking about how we really felt surprisingly ready to start trying for another and laughed about how we were going to scrounge up the money for a minivan. Those first few days or weeks when just the two of you know that there is a life inside of you, they are so sweet. Those moments when we dreamed together; imagining life with 3 (so close in age!), talking about names, realizing we only had a couple of months before we’d need to move the girls into the same room so that they’d have a few months to adjust. These moments brought us joy! Celebrating with family and a few friends that we “slipped” to :) was so much fun!!

Even over the Fourth of July weekend while we were losing the baby, the Lord gave us many moments of joy - dinner outside with sweet friends on a beautiful summer evening; an S and Momma date where we snuggled in a booth and ate donuts together while I told her all of the things I love about her...JOY! And playing Duck-Duck-Goose in our front yard with our little family of four when Daddy was really the only one that could run or that S could tag “goose” (as L is a baby and I was in no physical condition to be running) - hilarious!

It was a blessing to carry that sweet baby for 9 weeks. In those 9 weeks we experienced joy that we did nothing to deserve...nothing! We now have more babies in heaven then we do here on earth but what’s beautiful is that for the three we’ve yet to meet, Heaven is all they’ll ever know. And here’s what it looks like in Heaven:

“Blessed are those who dwell in [God’s] house; they are ever praising you.” - Psalm 84:4

So I choose to JOIN our little one(s) in praising God; for who He is, for what He has done, for what He will do that we still don’t know but trust is for our best, and for the JOY that He blessed us with for those 9 weeks!

Hear me say that we were and still are devastated to lose this baby, words cannot express our sadness. But I pray that you see this supernatural work of God in our hearts and our perspective for what it is - a work of GOD. This is not my natural response, nor is it me mustering up my own energy to find the strength inside of me to pull myself up by my bootstraps and move on. I also hope you can see that it’s definitely not me/us putting on a facade that we are doing ok and trusting God when deep down we are not doing ok and we are hurting but feel like “real” Christians don’t show weakness. We feel genuinely thankful for those sweet 9 weeks and for the unexpected and undeserved joy we were and continue to experience. God is the only one who gets the credit for this. We are thankful, and humbled, and longing for Heaven all the more! 

We celebrate you, sweet baby! We celebrate you and God's goodness. And we miss you every day.