The Joy of the Storm

When I was 13 years old, I was introduced to the concept of the joy that comes after every storm in life. At that time, I believed that concept was true in regard to all of our storms. God could take any circumstance and turn it into something good, right?

Then I grew up and was hit by the biggest storm I could have ever imagined... There would be no joy in my storm. There could be no purpose in struggling to get pregnant and losing a child.

I was angry and filled with fear. I would find any excuse to disagree with scriptures that "proved" that God would make something good out of our loss. I would actually get angry when I read something that promised good because nothing good should come from my baby's death. God had simply let us down. We were forgotten and ignored.

But I was also searching for a reason. I needed to understand why! What good could come of what had happened? I read books, prayed, tried doing a study of the book of Job.

The only thing I could come up with was that God was going to use me to minister to another mourning mommy who knew the same loss. And that WASN'T fair! There were so many other women who had been through this! Why did God need one more of us to minister to other women?!?

However, in February 2009, almost three months after we lost Angel, I came to a realization: My husband LOVES me. I mean, not just the infatuation love that you have when you fall into "love". He truly LOVES me. The kind of love that took care of me physically and emotionally for months when I didn't care enough to take care of myself. The kind of love that sacrificed what he really loved doing to spend time with me laying around watching movies and TV series on DVD. The kind of love that ignores the absence of sexual attention I was able to give him while I recovered.

He loved me like that after I tried to leave him ...when I was completely unlovable ... and while he was also hurting because of the loss of our child. And he still loves me like that.

I had read about miscarriages ruining marriages before lost Angel, and I was so afraid of how our loss would would affect our marriage. But God used the time I was recovering from our miscarriage to restore our marriage.

It took me about a year to really admit to anyone that God had used the loss of our child to heal our marriage because I was afraid that people would blame us for having marriage issues before we got pregnant. I had that fear because I believed it we were to blame, at least for a while. I now have a much better perspective on it though. I do not believe that God caused the miscarriage to heal our marriage, but I do believe that he used that terrible thing in our lives to make our marriage something much more beautiful than it was before we got pregnant.

The Joy of my Storm was the healing of my marriage. The storm still sucked, and it still hurts to the core of my being. There is still a part of me that is with my Angel in heaven. But at least something wonderful came with all of the bad.