When Christmas Isn’t Supposed to Be This Way: A 5-Day Reading Plan for Pregnancy Lossનમૂનો

The Christmas that’s Not Supposed to Be This Way

Christmas isn’t supposed to be like this: grieving the loss of a pregnancy you dreamed of, just as the world is celebrating its most historic birth. A season of light, but for you, it feels mostly like darkness. Joy to the world feels worlds away.

It can feel intensely painful and disorienting when your personal moment clashes with the moment of the season, especially when it’s meant to be a season of joy. I know this personally.

I warmed to the wonder of my first pregnancy during Advent, only to lose it the week before Christmas. It was Advent’s week of joy when I walked myself out of the ER. “We can’t find the heartbeat,” the doctor had said. If I’m honest, for the first time in my life, I didn’t go to the Christmas Eve service that year. I could not fathom celebrating this most historic birth when our baby was gone too soon.

I had to reckon with the dissonance of this season. I had to wrestle this out with God, and mostly, my prayers were, Why? and, How could you? I don’t have access to the “why” question when it comes to pain and death in our world, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But what I do know is that it’s not supposed to be this way. We may not know the “why,” but we can experience the depth of God’s with-ness present to us in our pain. That Christmas, I had to rediscover for myself that God was born into our world for this very reason: to be with us in everything, but most of all, our pain.

If you, like me, ever struggle to reconcile someone else’s great joy with your sorrow, it helped me to reframe Christmas that year not as some show of twinkly lit triumph, some great joy from which I was excluded, but actually as an expression of empathy for humankind in pain. Like a mother rushing to a child crying out, saying, “I’m here. Where does it hurt?” I’ve come to see the Incarnation, God with us, as God’s loving response to a hurting world.

We may never know why we couldn’t find a heartbeat, why there were abnormalities or complications, why joy comes seemingly for others, but not for us. But we can know that the God who experienced death himself through Christ never meant it to be this way. From the beginning, life was the design for all of us. And we can know that this very God is with us in all the places that hurt the most.