Hope in the Midst of Losing Children

 

"Dia de los Muertos" by Glen's Pics is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I know a lot of people who have lost children. 

Some have lost older children. I know someone who's lost a toddler, and two or three others who lost a child in high school or college. I know of children lost in a stillbirth. I know of many, many children lost in miscarriage, including one of my own. It's honestly to the point that I think parenthood to a greater or lesser extent is synonymous with loss.  

I think about those lost babies and the countless lost children before them, stretching back through the years. And I think about the idea of seeing them in heaven once we die, some of us for the first time and others seeing them again. The whole point of the Resurrection is that God takes death and turns it on its head; He takes the ugly and works through it. I can't know what Heaven looks like, "eye has not seen, ear has not heard." But I look at all the loss and I wonder.  

A common pro-choice talking point is that most zygotes, a human baby's earliest form, don't make it. That a woman's body rejects most of the children created and they die while still just a few cells. "If human life is so precious, than why does so much of it die? Is just tossed out by our bodies without a second thought?"

 I've struggled with how to answer in a way that makes sense to me. To be clear, it's a bad argument from a logical or even a biological perspective: the commonality of something occurring doesn't change the reality of what it is. Those babies that die unknown are still human persons with souls, even if it happens frequently. But I've struggled with how good could come from this. Countless children dying before they see the light, some of them completely unknown by their parents.

I have this sort of idea, very faint because I have only the vaguest notion of what this would look like, of marriages between a man and a woman of standing right outside a sort of gate. And they things they do on this side of the gate, and the known and unknown children they lose, building a sort of family or kingdom on the other side. So that when they go through it at the end of their Earthly lives there's something grand waiting for them. That even if they never met any of their children on this side of the gate, or knew of them, that they'll come home to a sort of family or kingdom that they built on the other side. 

Of course, this is all conjecture (incredibly vague conjecture at that). And life is so very messy and painful and tangled here. A vale of tears. I don't know how adoptions or family brokenness or complete infertility or parental abandonment would factor into it. 

Would that anything were simple. 

But I do have very real hope that death will ultimately be turned on its head. That the loss of our little ones, whether we got to meet them here or not, and the grief that comes with it will ultimately be turned on its head into a joy beyond what we could have hoped for. 

That hoped for joy doesn't change the fact of the losses now. Things don't get fixed and it never goes back to the way it was before. Even with the Resurrection, Christ still had holes in His hands and feet- it didn't "fix" the crucifixion. We don't hope for restoration of what was; we hope for God's grace to work through a grief to make something completely new out of it. Better than what was there, but fundamentally different. And those losses are real, and deserve to be mourned. You don't get to skip to the end, and it's an absolutely horrible idea to try. You have to walk through the vale of tears and carry the cross first rather than deny it's there or you risk being completely crushed and destroyed by it. 

But it sometimes helps to know that there is a point to it all at the end, even if we can't currently see it.