Do not allow the strange and uncomfortable sorrows of this life to harden your heart against the God who sends them (Psalm 66:10-12). Rather, draw near to Him who will one day wipe away every tear from our eyes and remove heartsickness forever. The day draws nearer when hope will no longer be deferred, but only wondrously realized.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12

Grief and sorrow are strange things. They are strange not because they are rare, but rather because they are foreign to the original design of this created order. “Truly, this only I have found: that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes” (Eccl. 7:29). Those schemes effected the exchange of God’s blessed communion for His just wrath and curse. They made us all liable to every kind of misery in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever (WSC 19).

Sorrow and grief are also strange because God can use them in the most remarkable ways. As the sculptor chisels away the unneeded material from his project, so the wise hands of the Potter shape and mold the redeemed into vessels prepared for glory (Is. 64:8). Most remarkably even the Lord Jesus Christ entered into this misery. Though He was a Son “He learned obedience by the things He suffered,” never once murmuring or rebelling against the painful sorrows that His Father had appointed for Him (Heb. 5:8, Luke 22:42). It is for this reason we can sing and pray, though it be through tears, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I may learn Your statutes” (Ps. 119:71).

Toward the end of 2022, my wife and I had announced that we were expecting our (then) eighth child. The joy of that announcement soon gave way to the grief of another one. In God’s wise providence, we experienced the sadness of a miscarriage for the second time in our marriage (the first was in 2011). This happened on Tuesday, December 13. As we wept and grieved, we remained thankful for the comforts that God had given us in His Word and the encouragements we received from our brothers and sisters in Christ.

This miscarriage was quite different from the one we experienced in 2011. However, the fresh pain from that week provided an occasion to reflect more deeply upon the tearful ordeal of miscarriage, something I know has been part of many lives. Here I will limit my thoughts first to the nature of grief that attended that hard providence, and second to the God who has wisely directed and brought that providence to pass. I will conclude with some reflections on hope.

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