The contractions were only minutes apart. I could not believe this was actually happening. Was I really in labor? “I am not ready for this,” I thought, “not now.” Neither was the baby. At only twenty weeks gestation, the baby’s lungs were not fully developed. If I gave birth now, she would not be able to survive. The physical pain began to overwhelm the emotional pain as I heard the doctor say she thought the baby was going to be fine. “What about this excruciating pain?” I thought. I wanted to have hope. I wanted to believe that the baby would live. Only moments later, we had our answer. I delivered our first baby, twenty weeks too soon. I could see her little heart beating and her chest rising attempting to take a breath. She was unable to take that breath with such tiny lungs. My husband and I held Elizabeth there in our arms until her heart took its last beat.
Over one decade and five children later I consider myself blessed. The Lord has blessed our family tremendously over the years and I am thankful for each and every provision. Though now on the other side, I will never forget the pain my husband and I endured to get to this place and the hope we carried along the way.
Hope is not a six-year-old crossing his fingers tightly wishing that he will get a new bike for his birthday this year. It is much more than that. The reason hope brings us encouragement and strength is because it is what shines the brightest when life is at its darkest. Hope gives us the ability to move forward. It gives us the power to move on.
Years after our miscarriage, the loss of our first child, a friend who had been there with me during this difficult time confessed what she had told others about me while I was grieving. She said that she kept on telling people that it seemed as though I was doing, “…too well, considering what I had just gone through.” She said that she had been surprised to see how well I handled such a loss. I looked back and remembered the feeling of being torn apart yet having a sense of hope on the inside. Only a few weeks after everything happened my husband and I were asked to minister, several miles away in New Orleans at an outreach there. Though broken, we agreed. This spoke volumes to the people we traveled with and the people we visited. They saw a strength in us that can only come from the Lord, not ourselves. They saw a Christian hope, not a six-year-old’s optimism.
“Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God’s own commitment, that the best is yet to come. ~ J.I.Packer
Jesus had a hope within Himself as He ventured into His darkest hour. We know this because he shared with the disciples what was about to happen. He was not entering His suffering blindly. In Mark 8:31, Jesus spoke of His coming death and His Resurrection,
And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. (ESV)
The pain He endured was real. It was not something he took lightly. He even asked the Father to take the cup of suffering away, but that was not in the Father’s ultimate plan. Suffering was in the plan. So was the resurrection. A resurrection that would provide hope for sufferers for years to come.
Jesus tried to share with His disciples what was to come but they simply did not grasp the gravity of what was about to happen. When my husband and I experienced the loss of our daughter, we could not explain the hope that we had as went through that dark time. Others tried to understand but they were grasping for the right things to say and the right things to do, to no avail. Only the comfort of the Lord and His Word gave us the strength that we needed. The strength to keep on going. The pain we endured was hard, yes, but it brought us to where we are today.
As we focus on the beauty of the empty tomb let us not forget before the resurrection. Let us not forget the cross and what it means to us as believers. Without it, the empty tomb would be meaningless. Since His battered and bruised body was laid there, for us, we can now rejoice in full understanding and in full hope that He will be there with us through thick and thin. Regardless of the pain we endure in this life, we can know that we can hold onto a hope that lies within.
