We’re coming into my very favorite time of the year, and this year is extra awesome because, not only are we going down to work at the marriage conference, but we’re staying a couple extra nights, making this our longest kidless trip since Jenna was born.
And I can finally feel this baby regularly (despite an awkwardly positioned placenta) so it’s been weeks since I last convinced myself she was dead. She’s alive and kicking and there’s no way to forget for very long. (But I’m not to the Kill All The Things phase of pregnancy yet, so yay!)
Also awesome? I have a new niece this week. She’s 100% perfect. Well, almost. Her one flaw is location… she’s halfway around the world and I don’t have a reasonable way to get there from here to hold her tiny self and play with her big (toddler) sister and lend hands to her parents.
But also, my brain and heart are in turmoil.
See, while this week is completely full of joy and beauty, it’s also the week we would’ve expected Hope. Baby Sophia had a “cousin twin” that I was really excited about.
My due date would have been this coming Monday. My kids are all clustered around their due dates, but have gotten increasingly later (gah!), so realistically, if I hadn’t lost her, she’d still be in. I’d be at the part of pregnancy where I HATE EVERYTHING AND WHY THE HELL CAN THIS BABY NOT COME OUT NOW SO I CAN LIKE HER BECAUSE I CANNOT POSSIBLY LIKE HER AT THIS MOMENT BECAUSE I’M MISERABLE. But still, we’d be mere days away from meeting the tiny bundle of squishy pink perfection. I love newborns so much.
Also, I lost another niece last week. Ryan and Amanda lost Olivia Ann… another early miscarriage. And my heart hurts.
It’s hard to hold joy and pain together.
It’s costly.
It feels like dissonance. Like when someone plays or sings the wrong note, or when a guitar is playing with a B string out of tune (always B!) or just when there’s an unresolved chord hanging.
The emotional dissonance feels very much like the regular kind, which is to say, for me, it feels like a mild cringe.
It’s not the fresh pain of loss.
It doesn’t even detract much from the joy of the week.
But it’s there, just begging to be resolved.
That’s the thing about dissonance.
It isn’t without remedy.
The girls have Sally Lloyd Jones’s Jesus Storybook Bible and it talks a lot about “God’s rescue plan” and “all the sad things coming untrue.”
This world is fallen.
We’re stuck holding pain and joy together, and there’s a tension there that’s really uncomfortable.
But losing Hope has taught me (is teaching me?) that, while I lost Hope, I still have hope. I will see her again. All things will be put right. Jesus came that all the sad things might come untrue. Like a B string just slightly off, this fallenness is fixable, given the right Fixer.
grace enough 