The M word

I would have been 6 weeks pregnant tomorrow. Daniel & I had just found out and we were keeping quiet just in case anything went wrong. We didn't want to have to tell the world, to share the pain of losing a baby.

Yet here I am blogging about having lost our baby. Though I'm not actually blogging about having lost our baby, I'm actually blogging to publicly declare that our God is always always good. And so very faithful. Our God is personal and wants intimacy with us, wants to speak to us, wants to comfort us.While Daniel & I would so appreciate your words of encouragement and sympathy over our loss, I'd rather you walk away feeling encouraged that Jesus is so deeply in love with you and so bound to you that He aches right alongside you, as a husband or a best friend or a parent might. Whoever you turn to for comfort, Jesus is a million times better at comforting than that person might be.

Last night Jesus comforted me through a dream.

Before I tell you the dream, let me give some back story. Sunday morning I woke up with a little spotting but I spotted when I was pregnant with Isaiah so I wasn't that worried. Throughout the day though it got more and more heavy and by Sunday afternoon I found some more convincing evidence and was pretty certain the baby was gone. I went downstairs to tell Daniel (who is still recovering from a painful LASIK/PRK eye surgery. Daniel was lying on our couch with all the lights off and a pillow over his face, because he is so sensitive to light. This has not been a great weekend for the Reads.) I told him I was pretty sure I had lost the baby. He held me and I cried. He may have cried too but his eyes have been watering so much from the surgery, there's no telling. Then I got up and went about the rest of the day. I put Isaiah to bed, gave Daniel his eye drops, and then I called my parents to fill them in. There were lots more tears and my mom encouraged me to grieve the loss of this life, no matter how new it was. So I grieved some more and more tears fell. Exhausted, Daniel & I crawled up to bed.

About 4am this morning, Daniel woke up needing more pain medicine. I put his drops in and then fell back to sleep. It was then that Jesus chose to comfort me through a dream. Let me say, as a disclaimer, I am not usually a spiritual dreamer. God does not typically give me dreams that make sense, or give me dreams that have any spiritual ramifications.

In my dream I was at my parent's house (Apparently Daniel, Isaiah, & I were living in my old bedroom.) I was in my childhood bathroom and I had just miscarried but the baby came out looking like a jello mold of a tiny baby, all wobbly and see through, though I could see his bone structure through the jello-like substance. The baby was about as long as my forearm. I laid the baby on the bathroom counter and I called Daniel in so we could say goodbye. I left the bathroom to go get Isaiah and when I came back in the jello baby had transformed into a real baby. He was blinking and breathing though he was very very small. We picked him up and carried him into our room. I tried to nurse him and he drank a little. We kept saying over and over how we needed to soak up as much time as possible because we knew he wouldn't last long. We found this little blue sweater and put it on him. He kept growing too. He began to look more and more like his brother. He had the same white-blond hair as Isaiah. We called our families and they all came over to meet our little guy. Then here is where God stepped in. I asked Daniel if he wanted to name our son. Daniel said yes, he wanted to name him Reuben. My first reaction was to disagree. I wanted to say no, that people would nickname him "rube" (a slang word that means "hick") but I felt like I was just supposed to submit and keep my mouth closed. From there the dream gets hazy and the rest is inconsequential.

I woke up feeling at peace. Content knowing that there will be more babies and that this little life is with Jesus, enjoying his heavenly reward. He'll never have to go through this yucky world, he got promoted straight to Jesus' arms.

So, just by dreaming of our little son as alive and well, even if alive just long enough to love on him and hold him was such a comfort. But this morning I was still left with the name Reuben hanging on my mind. I looked it up. Initially the name Reuben (the oldest of the 12 tribes of Israel) is not that impressive. According to chabad.org, "The name is made up of two halves: "re'u" means "look" or "see" and "ben" means "son" So Reuben literally means "look, a son." But... another description from the same website says that Reuben can also refer to "a highly tuned level of Godly awareness that is so real it is as if the person actually perceives God with his own eyes. No amount of argument will convince a person that he did not see something when he did. The name Reuben expresses certainty and immediacy in our awareness of God."

WHOA.

There is no arguing with the peace and closeness I feel toward God right now. Whether He really did speak through that dream, whether that baby was a boy or not, I feel at peace and that alone is a God thing. I am very aware of God and His presence today. I am comforted and at peace. I don't understand why we weren't allowed to meet this little baby face to face or why we are now going through the experience of miscarriage. However, I do understand that my life is small in eternal significance and God has not chosen to give me eyes that understand as He understands (for that I am thankful.)

Today I am living out 1 Corinthians 13: 12, 13-

¹² We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

¹³ But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

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