There are times that I’m so afraid. Angry. Frustrated. I feel like – I’ve been through enough. I deserve to have another pregnancy. An easy pregnancy.

I didn’t eat the apple. I didn’t choose to live in a broken world. I didn’t ask to be created and then punished for the sins of my fathers thousands of years ago. Where is the justice in that?

Then I realize – I would have been Eve. I would have eaten that apple. Because I eat the apple every day. By choice. Still. Even knowing the outcome.

It’s hard to know I control nothing that this next year brings. That I could sit here in a year and have a baby, or not, or another loss. And things will happen I never dreamed of. Good and bad.

It’s terrifying.

And in the midst of that, is the knowledge that others have walked this journey too. And survived. Thrived.

So many others have been on a much harder road than I ever will. How can I be frightened by the one God chose for me?

I am constantly reminded by Horatio Spafford who wrote “It Is Well With My Soul.” It isn’t just a gorgeous song, it’s a testament of how deep human faith can go in the midst of unthinkable loss. He lost his 4 little girls in a shipwreck, with only his wife surviving. The song was written as his ship passed the place they died.

What an amazing thing.

And before losing the boys? I couldn’t figure out how he could have ever written such a thing about a God that let his daughters drown. I listened to the story on the radio as a child (Adventures in Odyssey anyone?) and remember being so, so shocked that he was able to write and feel such a thing after losing almost everything in his life.

I get it. My faith isn’t as deep as his, my loss not as earth shattering, but I get it.

In the midst of the mind numbing grief, there was a place of such peace, such desperate clinging to God. I felt like only He understood my pain, only He really felt how deeply I felt. He could have saved them, but that isn’t the world. That wasn’t my life. Instead He came alongside me to carry me through the grief.

Help me Lord, to remember that I don’t deserve any of this. And to keep these words in my heart no matter what path my life takes.

(Not my tattoo. Yet. )