They named her after me. Her middle name is in my honor. But I won’t get to hold my precious granddaughter until I meet her in the Life that is coming.

And the tears begin to flow again as I write.

My daughter in law was four and a half months pregnant when we got the call that she had begun to bleed heavily.  John and I were out of town.  Breathless, waiting for the result of the ultrasound, the only news we received was a text from our son asking, “Would you come home for us?”

So, of course we knew. We knew and we wept for them and we wept for ourselves and we wept for the little girl we were going to have to wait to know.

It is a holy and sacred place, the place of grief, the land of loss, the ache that seems to penetrate to the core of the earth let alone the deepest realms of the heart.

Most people are not alive for long before knowing this pain.  I felt it first when I was 23 at the death of my father.  The older I get, the more goodbyes I have had to say.  But this one, this one I never got to say “hello” to.

And in this place of sorrow, I am met with the knowledge that the “hello” is coming.  I will get to know my girl very, very well.  I can imagine her now in the Kingdom, alive and well with long flowing blond hair like her mother’s, her smile as wide as her dad’s.  She is tall and she is happy and she is one more reason that I am able to look forward to the day that IS COMING.

“We grieve.  But we do not grieve as those who have no hope.”

So many of you have known this loss.  Mercy to you, dear ones.  Miscarriage is not an uncommon thing but being uncommon does not diminish the pain.  It is real.  It is worth our tears.  Tears are the balm of the Holy Spirit – sacred to our Father – cleansing the deepest recesses and allowing the Comforter to come.  Healing is available.

Some children are conceived and handed directly into the hands of our Jesus – carried in this world for such a little time.  But a real time.  A time that matters.  A time that reaches its fulfillment in eternity.

We will lay in the ground our little one.  But one day soon, one day so very soon, we will rise.  We will rise and we will embrace.