There hasn’t been a post in a while because there haven’t been words. Guess it goes without saying that words are a prerequisite. I’ve known for a while what I ought to write next, but I’ve been in active resistance. Sometimes circumstances become more real on paper. 

Life is full of its watershed moments. Sometimes we’re able to identify them in the moment. Other times we see them at a distance, clarified by time and perspective. And still other times, people must identify them for us. I’ve certainly had a few of my own. Every death, every loss, every broken dream has its before and after, two versions of you that existed in wholeness on each side of the mirror.

Raspberry has been the most beautiful, painful, horrible watershed. After all, I knew that Dad would die eventually. The loss of a parent, no matter how untimely or terrible, is part of the natural order. The cyclical inevitably of life and death.

But I didn’t see the loss of Raspberry coming. I couldn’t have. And that loving and losing, and the resulting absence of healing as the grief stretches on mile and after mile in my life, has changed me forever. 

So, because I’m an incurable chronicler, here are some things I’ve been learning in the past eighteen months.  

1. God isn’t good because He gives me what I want.

At some point or another, I think we’ve all been caught thinking that the point of life is to be happy. And when it eludes us, as slippery as a cat in a bathtub, it hurts. Maybe, even enrages us. There are the probing questions of why God? How could you? 

Those questions persist, especially when life flails out of control, and the heartache isn’t necessarily a result of our own poor choices or selfish mistakes. I find it easier to accept consequence when it’s the fruit of my own stupidity. I backed into the garage door? Yeah, I’ll own that. 

It’s the unfairness that hurts more. The feeling that you did everything right, checked every box, and still got walloped. 

But in a way, viewing happiness as life’s penultimate goal conveys an incredible unawareness of history and of the human condition, as if a meaningful life is only within reach of the wealthy and comfortable and educated. Those more likely to get what they want.  

Suffering and disappointment don’t destroy your meaning because meaning is more than feeling. God’s existence and His essential goodness are not contingent on the fulfillment of our expectations. 

Why, you ask?  

2. My perspective is literally the size of a nut. 

Did you know that I can hold an entire oak tree in the palm of my hand? The acorn will be fed over time by sunlight and water and soil, but no new genetic information will be introduced. Everything it will ever be is already captured inside a four-gram shell. 

If I’d picked up an acorn as a toddler or arrived on earth as some alien species, would I have told you that this nut would become a living, breathing organism that will grow eighty feet tall, weigh a few thousand pounds, and pump out oxygen like a tank? 

No, I could never have told you that. Because I can’t see it. I just can’t see it. And that’s the way it is with life and with suffering. I don’t know why Raspberry isn’t here, toddling towards his first birthday. I just can’t see it. Maybe I’ll never see it as long as I live.

Does that change the fact that the seed is able to become a tree?

No, my friend. It doesn’t. Simply because:

3. Just because I feel something doesn’t make it true.

Life is full of failures that force us to reckon with our own worth and belonging. Nothing has ever made me feel as inadequate as miscarriage and infertility. Sometimes when I’m supposed to be falling asleep, I’ll think of that final ultrasound. The absence of heartbeat. The betrayal of my body. And the idea that I’m broken or that I’m defective will come to mind, beating itself over and over like a death knell. 

We feel so many things over a lifetime. Maybe it’s the things we don’t feel that we’re scared of the most. We don’t feel love towards our spouse or our parent. We don’t feel accepted or normal. Don’t feel like life matters. We don’t feel like being kind or patient. Don’t feel like being faithful or self-controlled.   

And while feelings are valid and real and necessary, their existence does not confer inherent truth. God defines what is true. Not our emotion. 

Which can make it difficult to accept that: 

4. Sometimes the rainbow never comes on this earth.  

My house is quiet, and I hate it. I sit at the kitchen table when dinner is done, and I listen to a silence that hums in my eardrums like a held breath. When I was a naive, young thing, I wanted to live on Prince Edward Island and write novels to support my seventeen children. Some basic knowledge of biology and economics has reshaped that dream, but in essence, I’m the same person I’ve ever been.

I’ve always wanted a home brimming with little hands and voices. Then I met Tommy and I wanted them to be just like him – skinny bodies and depthless blue eyes and an indefatigable sense of humor. 

It’s not that the dream is dead. We have our foster care home study in a few days. Those little voices don’t have to share my basketball skills or the Lyvers brain. But I feel the dream shifting, taking on a new color all together.

And I have to ask – if the rainbow never comes, is God still good? 

It’s true that He gives us many good and undeserved gifts – protection, material blessings, healthy pregnancies and precious children. He sustains us with a word, our world held together by invisible hands. 

But that’s not what makes Him good. He is beautiful and faithful and true, simply because that’s who He is. With or without rainbows, He doesn’t change. On His own, without all the fluff, He is enough to fill me with joy. To infuse my life with meaning and purpose and beauty. I’m not the point. He’s the point.

My life is so tenderly finite. Here today, gone tomorrow. Whatever we endure here, we count it as nothing next to the incomparable joy of knowing Christ. Of being a part of His plan forever.

To be truthful, I miss my Raspberry. I don’t think I can ever stop. Sometimes love is learned, gained over time. And sometimes love hits us like an unexpected pregnancy test. A love that cuts through the deepest parts of us and transforms us forever. And that’s the way I loved Raspberry – gummy-shaped blur that he was. It’s one of the great mysteries of life. 

I can’t see the future. All I feel is right here, puddled inside of me, a mixture of grief and longing and joy that I’ve been given the privilege of this love. And I hope. Not in my rainbow baby, although I can’t stop dreaming, but in His goodness. His sufficiency. 

That even when I never get to watch the seed become a tree. Even when the rainbow never appears in my sky, God is still faithful. Yesterday, today. 

Forever.