Recently I was asked, when have you been moved from death to resurrection? There have been many times. However, this one stands above all others.
I was 28, living in Mississippi, in graduate school, and pregnant for the first time. I didn’t have a faith in God. In fact, I was pretty sure there was no God.
Then, at about the fourth month of the pregnancy, I lost the baby in a grim three-day process that ended in an over-night procedure in a hospital to stop the bleeding.
I was devastated, and so was my beloved husband. When I came home, I tortured myself further with the belief that I had caused all this trauma by having dragged a bag of fertilizer out of the back hatch of the car and letting it fall into place on the floor of the carport the week before. (I recently learned from a genetic work-up that my forty-something son recently had done, that there is a gene, that would be fatal to a fetus, floating in our shared genetic make-up, the more likely cause of this loss.)
My hormones all geared to pregnancy were in turmoil, wreaking emotional havoc from within. I cried constantly in grief for several days straight. Harry was so worried about my state, that he sent for his mother (a four-hour drive away) to stay with me while he was at work for fear that I might harm myself. I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t because up to that moment I had never truly believed that anything in my life could go that wrong. I had led a pretty charmed life up to then. I was desperate, so, when all else failed to calm me, I, an all-but-confirmed atheist, actually prayed for help. Imagine my shock, when God responded.
How do I know it was God? Because the event began with a miracle. I went from out-of-control distress to total serenity without any transition time. Compassionately but without words, God made me aware of three truths. First, the baby was fine and had been ever since it left my body. The child was in God’s loving care, the implication being that I never possessed the ability to kill it. Second, what I was mourning, the imagined joy that I felt sure the future held for Harry, the child, and I, was at its heart, nothing but an illusion. Third, I still had a real future. It just wasn’t going to be the future I had imagined. My crying largely stopped from that moment forward.
Harry and I still are saddened by the memory of that loss. That doesn’t change. However, there is also the memory of divine compassion, of a healing and of a profound change of perspective.
When have I ever experienced moving from death to resurrection? Well, this was not the only time, but definitely the most dramatic one.