My 18-year-old daughter called yesterday and asked me to pray.
Her best friend had just miscarried, her first pregnancy. She and her husband were devastated. My daughter’s heart was broken for them.
I promised to pray, and I have. When I shared the news with my wife, she asked if I thought my daughter and her siblings ever thought about when their mother miscarried.
For a moment, I was lost. I had, once again, forgotten.
The day my first wife told me she was expecting our fourth child, she then started crying and said she thought she was losing the baby. I rushed her to the hospital, where we found out she’d been pregnant with twins just hours earlier.
Now, one had been lost — very early on — and one remained, apparently safe and healthy.
That child is my youngest daughter, now just shy of her 16th birthday. She is apparently very aware of a twin connection to someone who is not on this earth. She has mentioned more than once that she’s excited to meet him or her on the day she herself arrives in heaven.
Though I know she thinks of the child we haven’t met yet, I don’t know if or how often her siblings do. I don’t know if or how often her mother does, either. I’m sure she does, sometimes.
But I don’t want to ask. I don’t want to bring it up.
I have friends who have lost children in the womb and many years later. A teen son lost in an ATV accident. Another son lost in a similar wreck. A preschool daughter in a car rollover. Children lost to illness, accidents, homicides and suicides.
When I think of all the people I know personally or indirectly who have gone through such great loss, I rarely think of my own. I never held that child, never looked into his or her eyes, never called her or him by name. I didn’t know he or she was alive ... until he or she was not.
But God knows the name of that child to whom he gave life, however brief. He knows all their names, and the hurt and loss of those left behind who still ache and still ask why.
Life is precious and should always be seen and treated as such. From the womb to the grave.
Strange how a person can be incarcerated for accidentally causing someone to miscarry, but someone who takes the life of their own child in the womb is lauded.
No one who champions abortion was aborted. No one who champions euthanasia plans to be euthanized.
If life really is precious, support it, fight for it, protect it. It is hard missing someone, but it is right. Life lost should be mourned.
Because life is short, it should be celebrated. Comfort should be shared with the mourning. And the end of life should be anticipated and plans made for what happens after.
I am a believer in Jesus as the only Savior of humanity, and that every person who comes to a realization of sin must be saved. Heaven awaits those who accept his free gift of mercy and grace. Hell awaits those who do not.
Prepare now. Trust in Jesus yourself and tell others about him, too.
Life is very precious.
