Prayers

I was reminded this morning that life can be a difficult, heart-rending, painful experience.  Still flying high on a successful and, for once, celebrated Valentines Day, I opened up my facebook account this morning to see that a girl that I used to visit teach had gone to her 38 week prenatal check-up and been told that her baby had no heartbeat.  It's the kind of thing that you read and then immediately go to the comments hoping that you misunderstood the message she had posted.  And then once you find out that it is really real and that there is no way you can change the realness of it no matter how good you are at pretending, you feel like crying.  And then you feel mad.  And then you go out for a run and you really do cry because you remember that she is going to have to deliver that 38 week fetus without a heartbeat.  And there is no way you can deliver it for her, or make it all just disappear.

That she was 38 weeks pregnant, that the baby could have been taken from her safely a week before if only there were really thick rimmed glasses that we could put on and view the more important parts of our future, that would be frustrating enough.  But this girl had struggled with infertility for eight years before getting pregnant.  When I met her she was extremely kind, but undoubtedly fringed in sadness in the way I imagine Sarah or Hannah of the Old Testament wore their longing.  Once she was pregnant her joy was palpable.  I'm sure people who passed her in the hall at church who might not have been looking up must have felt like there was something good going on nearby.  She deserved this baby and this baby would have been one loved, cuddled, well-dressed, kissed, adored little thing.

It stabs a person right to their belief system.

I had these same feelings, even more keenly almost four years ago.  A best friend, one of those folks that you know you knew before you knew them, had her own walk of sorrow and frustration with infertility before she lost twins at 20 weeks gestation.  Oh I felt so angry.  I'm not one for getting after God, but I never didn't understand him more than on that day.

My friend held on to her faith though.  I think it was a thread at first, but she made it a thick rope.  She climbed through her grief and made it to a vista of hope again.  Despite the mounds of pain that she went through, and that I think she still experiences in more mild pangs, she kept believing.  Her story ends happily.  She has two boys now, one that she and her husband adopted and one that came to them naturally, and she is pregnant with their next.  And she still laughs a lot.

Tonight I can't help but wish I could rush this girl who has just lost her baby through this painful time.  I wish I could roll her hospital bed down the hall one or two years and deposit her next baby in her arms.  Not that her next baby would replace the little girl she lost today, but just to give her a place right now to put all that mother's love that I know must be aching for a receptacle to fill and flood.  But I suppose by going through the next one or two years slowly she might become something more beautiful than she already is, the kind of beautiful that is like the red rock country I love, something so powerfully stunning I sometimes feel choked just looking at it.  I have to say that I look at my best friend and read what she has to say about her experiences with that sort of awe.  But gosh that is such a hard road.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you are in the praying mood tonight, if you could include Monica and Micheal Lowery in your prayers, I think that would be good.  Because I really do believe, despite the messed up-ness of the whole situation, God is there for them.