Imago Dei in Motherhood - Part 4 - Mourn & Rejoice
**Trigger Warning: miscarriage, stillbirth, loss**
My father-in-law was a small-town pastor for much of his life. He is wise and caring, but he is also very North Dakotan, which, for those unfamiliar with the type, means that in addition to loving things like hotdish and lutefisk, North Dakotans are generally a pretty steady breed. Their ups and downs are gentle rises at worst, and they generally keep the peace with an emotional plateau. My husband caught those genetics, which is what makes us a perfect pair: when I ride the wild roller coaster of emotions, he is standing there steady on the ride platform, ready with a shoulder to lean on and a barf bucket after I exit the ride dizzy, nauseous, and exhausted.
My father-in-law has done a lot of counseling over the years, and the stories he hints at run the parallel to the wide spectrum of life itself: the joy, the celebration, the absurdities, the challenges, the despair. Once he told me of visiting a couple from his church in the hospital after they lost their baby during delivery. Thirty years later, he says, he can still hear the way that mother cried: primal and ancient, from the depths of her soul. The way he describes it, I can imagine an almost animal wailing, a deep grief that will always be part of her.
In the past several years, I have had friends lose babies at six weeks and forty weeks and at almost every point in between. I have seen four friends bury their babies. I have walked alongside friends who are fighting the good fight of IVF, going through rounds and rounds of hormonal upset in their journeys to become mothers. I have borne witness to friends who have embraced the heartache of foster care, to friends who have jumped through the fiery hoops of adoption, and in all of this there is this unbearable, undeniable, sometimes unfulfilled longing to mother.
I see this same motherhood ache reflected in the heart of God.
Jesus speaks of it in terms his friends would understand in Luke 15. He paints a rich picture of a flock of sheep, nestled inside the safety of the fences, safe and accounted for. All but one. There is an ache for that missing lamb that compels him. So what does he do?
He leaves the comfort and safety of his flock to search for the missing one, and, on finding it, rejoices.
He says it again, but this time with money...and he asks the crowd what they would do if they lost a valuable coin? Wouldn’t they light the lamps and sweep the floors and stay up all night until they found it? Jesus asks the crowds what they would do once the coin was in hand. And their answer? Rejoice.
When I was about seven months pregnant with our oldest, my husband and I were using an envelope cash system to budget. It was near the beginning of the month, so our envelope container was loaded with money. I had stopped by Target after work and came home to make dinner, but when I began to unpack my day bag later that night, I couldn’t find the cash envelopes. A frenzied search began. I breathlessly called Target and asked, without much hope, if anyone had turned in $475 in cash while I ran around the house like a lunatic, flipping cushions, opening drawers, leaving our home ransacked. I finally sprint-waddled out to the car and found the envelopes, slipped down between the seats of our Toyota Corolla. I came in, sweating, crying, and wheezing, holding the envelopes over my head like a WWF champion belt. And we rejoiced. (And shortly thereafter switched to a debit-card system.)
This is the picture I have of the prodigal son’s dad. In Luke 15, we hear the son’s side of things: the women and the gambling, the pigs and the mud and the slops. But we are given no timeframe. We do not know if his father spent years mourning the loss of his son, or how often he waited by the window, looking down the road, or if he sent letters to distant relatives, asking if they’d seen him or if they knew if his son was alive. But we pick up his plot line as he is sprinting down the driveway, robes flying behind him like a cape, to wrap his wayward and smelly son in an embrace before ushering him inside for a feast of rejoicing.
We mothers know the waiting well. We take too many pregnancy tests too early; we comb the internet for hippie advice for how to get pregnant, and we know well the wistful look down the road for any sign of hope. We hold our breath in the early days of pregnancy, hoping the toilet paper won’t show any blood, and we know the mourning too. Many of us will carry our lost lambs until our own dying days.
It is my sincere hope that each of you reading who have felt that ache have also experienced the rejoicing. That each of you have pulled your just-born baby to your chest and felt that strong love, that compulsion to bring your baby near you, almost back into you, because I believe that is how God feels about us.
Even while we wander, lost and away, he is laboring as he looks out the window, sweeping under carpets and lighting all the lamps like a lighthouse for us on a dark and weary road. He is longing for us as a mother who has lost her child, as a mother who longs to mother because she was made to mother.
That is our God - longing to mother us, longing for the chance to pull us into his arms, longing to tell the servants: “Rejoice! Let us feast! My long lost love is here!”
It is no wonder he uses the language of birth to describe our salvation: born again. He tells us this himself: “I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:10). Our God rejoices in you. He feasts in celebration over connecting with you.
And for those of you for whom mothering is tender and raw because you are still longing to mother or because you have lost a little lamb, I see you. And so does our God. After we lost our first baby, I combed the Bible for proof that God cared. And I stumbled across this passage in Isaiah 65:
See, I will create new heavens and a new earth.
The former things will not be remembered; nor will they come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create,
for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy.
I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people;
the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more.
Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days.
I remember reading that for the first time and absolutely weeping….that of all the world’s ills - war and refugees and starvation and oppression and torture and murder and slavery and disease and death - that the Lord would list this first: the loss of a baby. In those words I found a God who was mourning with me, who understood the deep pain we experience as mothers who are longing for our children. So if mothering holds a shadow for you too, sit alongside him at the window, and look with hope for the bright coming of the New Earth.
