Good enough to requote

There were a lot of people praying for us during that week. Once I learned the result I was scared to announce it because I felt empty-handed to encourage their faith on my behalf, because the answer God gave was "no." But in every other aspect of these circumstances my life has been covered with a "yes." How can it not be a miracle for us to know God and learn to accept and embrace His ways, a triumph of the circumstances, and the answers in God's graciousness of your prayers? Praise God for He has honored me greatly to suffer with Christ.

I don't know how much yard work you have ever done, but this last year I have had some experience with pruning. The first thing I was advised to do, once they were in the ground, was to immediately prune off any new shoots. It is an amazing thing to cut back rose bushes on a regular basis so that the plant might remain healthy and bloom even more.

And when I imagine the young or sick rose bush in my mind and yet I see that beautiful, single stalk of a rose, and consider cutting it off or leaving it, it all makes sense....

Elliot said:

"Vines must be pruned. This looks like a cruel business. Perfectly good branches have to be lopped off in order for better branches to develop."

--Certainly my lost baby makes God appear to be cruel. How innocent and perfect are babies, that we mothers would by circumstance be forced to know they could have been ours, but, just won't be?

"The life of the vine is strengthened in one part by another part's being cut away. "

--This is the secret for understanding why God redirects parts of our talent and time away from childbearing and childraising.

"The rank growth has to go and then sun reaches places it could not reach before."

--We are living, ever-changing beings just like a rose plant, and we never stay static in our relationship in Christ, either. Our services and devotions are either growing more authentic, or less, but never staying the same. Blessings that once drew us close to Christ because it made us eager to trust Him can soon turn into slaveries that draw attention to ourselves and away from Christ, which it was never intended to become. Thank God that we have not been charged with the responsibility to have the wisdom to know for sure what kind of affect each devotion can really make in us. God intervenes to lead to ensure our overall sanctification.

"A life's work--what to us is a perfectly good branch, perhaps the only "important" branch--may be cut off."

--This sentence just emphasizes the reality of how perfect our design was made, and made to be fulfilled. It is so wonderful, that blessing of being allowed to be a mother. It's undeniable and it is certainly God-given, a beautiful miracle, just as the beauty of a rose.

"The loss seems a terrible thing, a useless waste."

--Yes, it does feel like a pointless waste. No one can fathom why God would allow a woman to -know- what she could have had and then not let her have it. It appears there simply can be no good in it.

"Was it not work given *by* God in the first place, then given back to Him day by day?"

--I already know that it would be in my heart to constantly offer up and dedicate my children for the Lord's purpose, so why not my unborn ones as well? If I somehow denied Christ the opportunity to be sovereign over my children's fate, and tried to hold onto them in defiance and fear, I can easily acknowledge that I would not be treating my children healthily, nor would I be modeling my faith in Christ for them to grow up in. In fact, I'd want to take every moment to ask Christ in as the mediator between me and my child, to make up for all the inadequacies I have in loving them as they deserved to be loved. Christ certainly has received my children already.

"Things that once were counted as gain we now count as loss"

--Does this mean that if God had granted that child to us to bear and raise in our life, our relationship with Him would have suffered? That our ability to transmit Christ to the world, which includes the children we know we would love, would have failed more or less? I don't know, but I wonder if that is what He sees.

I thank God, if this is the case, that He has not let me endure in a defiance by letting me choose to have multiple children even though I'd know my devotion to Christ would have been compromised. Instead He has been merciful to intervene to spare me of the pain that would rise out of a life of not knowing Christ, which I would spread to my children and my children's children. May that never happen.