The God Who Turns Graves Into Resurrection Beds

I have five siblings in Heaven and four of them – Honor, Miracle, Trust, and Promise – were taken to God before birth.

I wept and grieved our three previous miscarriages, but this most recent miscarriage to our sweet baby, Promise, had been the most emotionally overwhelming to me.

Isaiah’s passing was devastating. Earth shattering. Crushing. It still is. Nothing will heal that pain until glory. But even in some of my darkest moments in grieving his death, I can still see slivers of what God was doing through it all. I have never doubted all this being for His glory, and cling to His promise that for those who love Him, He works all things for good. I can see the ripples of His work through Isaiah’s life and death, touching people’s lives in ways we could only begin to know about. We still hear stories of his testimony even drawing people to our Lord for the first time, or back to Him again after years of estrangement.

But this new death – this most recent miscarriage – felt so….different. I never knew this sibling, so the grief is different and the love is different, but the death in itself felt…senseless. This baby was a comfort. It was a way of God saying: I love you. I haven’t forgotten you. Here. You’ve walked through the pain and the sorrow and I know it’s still there, but here’s a fresh salve, here’s fresh love, here’s new life, here’s another joy and future. 

And my aching heart was so ready for that. So ready, and anxious and longing and feeling such a confusing myriad of joy and sorrow and hope all at once.

But God just snuffed it out. No heartbeat. And it felt almost like a senseless loss. I remember lying curled up on the floor, heaving sobs and crying out to God in my thoughts: What are you doing here? I see no ripples. This would have blessed us so much and cost You so little. You didn’t have to give us this fresh comfort or hope of joy. You could have just let us keep walking in You as we were, in the daily sorrow…but trusting. Moving forward. But You didn’t. You gave us a sliver of happiness and it was becoming such a comfort and so beautiful and something to look forward to and praise You for.  And now it’s just made the road all the harder. This road never felt good, but I KNEW it was good. But now this just feels like a tease. Like a horrible, gut-wrenching tease. 

Terrible theology, I know. I knew it at that moment too, as I took my brokenness and my anger and my sorrow and held them up to Heaven with open hands. I knew God was still good. But what was He doing? None of this made sense. I had already thought myself past the breaking point, but this was not just another wave of grief – it was another sorrow.

This wasn’t supposed to be a part of the grieving process. The day after the eight-month anniversary of Isaiah’s death, I wasn’t supposed to be grieving two siblings instead of one. The single thought pounded my mind for days: Why couldn’t God have just let us have the baby?

As our family – eight of us – but feeling so small and broken, stood around Isaiah’s weeping willow, we wept, and sang, and buried our newest little sibling. We sang one of Isaiah’s favorite hymns, Joy to the World, which we had sung as he took his first breath of glory. We sang the doxology, and held hands and cried, staring at the freshly turned earth and the stone that marked the life of one precious sibling, at the foot of our memorial to the other.

And that’s when Dad whispered in a broken voice: “If what you’ve just had to do here feels wrong, that’s because it is. This is the curse, and Jesus felt the full weight of this curse on the Cross. But because of Him, we are heading to glory. We just made a new resurrection bed.”

Grieving with Hope

Jesus wept at the grave of Lazarus. He wept at the side of a dead body that He knew He would make alive again in a moment of time. And yet He wept. He wept because death is tragic. Death is terrible. Death is wrong. He wept because death screams out in one, final, ghastly cry that this world is broken and cursed.

And it is good to weep at what is wrong with the world. It is good to weep when your soul is screaming This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. It is good to weep with loss, and pain, and the unshakeable burden of grief. It is good to weep when the weight of sorrow seems to stifle every possibility of life and wonder ever breathing again in your soul. It is good to weep with Jesus.

Death is an enemy. Death is real. Death is a sign the story is not over yet.

For the last 10 months, I have hardly written on anything except this topic. Pain, grief, doubt, the hope to which I am clinging – little else has filled my mind. When I pray, this is what I sob to Jesus. When I sleep, this is what fills my dreams. When I work, this is what runs in the back of my head. When I write, these are the words that flow from the keys.

There is a saturating gluttony in grief. It steals whatever it sees. It feeds on every part of you. It not only makes you think you’ll never be full again but makes you feel that you don’t even want to be. After all, how could you be happy when you’re in this part of the story? How could you ever be happy again and actually trust it?

How can you be happy until the book is over and God lifts your broken body off the ground, presses the cork into your precious bottle of tears, smiles and says:  It is finished.

God is still showing that to me. But ultimately, the answer lies in the fact that such a day is coming. One day, this will end. Think about that. Let it seep into every aching joint, every cancerous cell, every screaming breath, every pang of guilt, every agony of sorrow, every anguish of loss, every stab of memory, every weight of sin, every pound of shame, every cry of the soul. One day, this will end.

We serve a God who has endured death, who has suffered death, who has conquered death. We serve a God who knows what it is to cry in pain, to suffer physical torment, to be betrayed and forsaken by those closest to him, to bear an anguish undeserved – a weight so heavy God would forsake God.

We serve a God who weeps. We serve a God who lives. We serve a God who is victorious in a world that seems to offer only pain and defeat.

And so death lives with an oxygen mask. His days are numbered. His end is sure.

And that victory is given us. A day will come – for the Promise-keeper has promised – when the grave will open and be closed upon us no more. Because of Him, the grave is not final. It is not ultimate. It is a marker of the spot where, in a moment, God will raise the dead.

Soli Deo Gloria,