We got the call right before the turnoff for I-5 that would take us home. We turned the car around, and from the doctor’s voice, I knew something was very wrong.
It was the hardest night of my life, with the most awful moments embedded deep in my brain. Three sets of eyes, masks covering all else, looking to me for an answer on whether to do chest compressions. A nurse pulling my mask off my face as another one settled a tiny baby into my arms. Waiting as a doctor listened for a heartbeat we all knew wasn’t there (he had been dead for hours by then). Answering my mom’s question with a quivering, “No.”
No, he didn’t make it. No, we lost him. No, he’s gone.
That night and those moments haunted me for some time–they still do, though “haunt” is no longer how I feel about it. Time heals, grief ebbs and flows.
One thing gives me more comfort than anything else, though. A balm of peace washes over horrific moments when I remember I prayed for God’s will to be done. In the long terrible minutes of chest compressions, next to his incubator, in my hospital bed after my water broke, on the table in the operating room.
I had no control or power over the blood flow of their placenta or my uterus’s response to surgery or the competency of the doctors or the efficacy of modern science or the development of newborns that are only barely more than halfway through their gestational development, so I gave it all up to God.
His will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
At the time, I was completely lost on why this would possibly be God’s will for me. With the last year, God has revealed some of it to me. I truly treasure my two living children, one of them an identical image of the one I lost. Much of the rest of it is too personal to share or too fresh, exactly one year later.
I can say universal things about suffering though, and how all of it molds us into the image of his Son. God incarnate, placed in a manger, rejected by his people, abandoned by his friends, and ultimately gruesomely killed. This is Jesus Christ of Nazareth. This is the life we’re called to emulate, to share in his sufferings as well as his glory.
Even self-inflicted suffering or suffering caused by another man fits into his will. It is all-encompassing. We may break his law, but that sin still can’t thwart the will of God.
These are bold claims for anyone who’s not a believer, of course. I know it sounds foolish to people. Most people have a bone to pick with God or with me for trusting in his will, even when it brings pain, death, illness, or calamity. But it brings me peace that many people don’t have. I know how elusive peace can be, I saw it on the faces of other traumatized women in the NICU.
Accepting divine providence is humble submission to whatever God has in store for me. It brings me a sweetness that regularly brings me to tears these days. As I sort through the visceral, traumatic impact of a death of a loved one, his goodness surrounds me and I am never alone.