I have a friend with the ministry of tears. She once sent me a card that said, “If you need someone to cry with, I’m here. That’s what I do.” She’s in good company. Jesus had this ministry too. We all learned when we were kids that the shortest verse in the Bible is John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” Jesus wept because his friend Lazarus had died. Of course Jesus, being Jesus and all, had the advantage of knowing He Himself would raise Lazarus in a matter of minutes, but He still cried right alongside the other mourners because He had the ministry of tears.
I don’t so much have this ministry. I’ve been known to bring other people to tears (in love, of course), but I’m not much of a crier. When I do cry, I prefer to do it alone. God, however, wanted something different for me. He has tears for me to share, tears I didn’t discover until I lost Catherine. Losing a baby has given me the ministry of tears for other women who endure the same thing, particularly stillbirth. It may not be surprising that my stillbirth experience has had this effect on me, but I am always caught off guard by the intensity with which these emotions wallop me.
It happened again this week. It happens more often than I ever knew, though statistically speaking, stillbirths occur in only one in 200 pregnancies. But each “one” represented by that statistic is a lost first tooth, first step, first day of school, first date, to the parents who dared to dream such dreams for their child.
I was thinking of this as I drove around today, listening to my ABBA CD. Just then these words belted out of their Swedish mouths, from the song “The Winner Takes It All”:
“The gods will throw the dice,
their minds as cold as ice,
and someone way down here
loses something dear.”
How sad is that? If that’s really what I thought happened to Catherine—that some cold, uncaring, impersonal gods somewhere just threw the dice and struck her unlucky number, my unlucky number—if I thought that was what her life and death were all about, how could I go on? If I believed whoever’s running the show was really that capricious, who used us all like meaningless pieces in a board game, why would I want to go on? Where would my hope come from?
My hope comes from Jeremiah 29:11–13. “ ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me.’ ”
As much as it hurt to say goodbye to that baby and all my grand plans for her, I knew God’s plans for me, even without her, were far greater. His plans for Catherine were grander than any I could have dreamed for her. And I also knew that as I cried and cried for her, my loving God cried with me.
