When promises seem to fail

Jul 10

On processing disappointment

I have long held a strong theological conviction that pregnancy loss is never God’s will or plan for anyone’s life, and if you’re interested in exploring this idea further you can read my blog on it here: A Theology of Miscarriage.

But in this post, I also want to explore more about my personal, lived experience of grappling with this truth - because often it tends to be much easier to deal with big theological concepts and ideas, than to process the personal disappointment we can sometimes experience in our faith.

Disappointment can creep in whenever God seems to speak or make a promise to us, but then apparently doesn’t deliver (or at least not in the way we expect). Or in the nagging doubt that creeps in when we hope and believe for something, but our prayers remain unanswered. Or perhaps, most cruelly of all, when prayers initially look like they’re being answered, but the miracle ultimately still falls short…

That type of disappointment in God (or at least my idea of what God is like/does) has been only too real as I’ve walked through multiple pregnancy losses over the past few years.

How do you resolve the questions left behind when God seems to promise a healthy future pregnancy, yet your babies just keep on dying? What’s the point of praying at all, if God doesn’t answer your most important one? And how can you ever trust God’s voice, when you’ve previously misheard, or maybe even heard right but been let down anyway? How do you make peace with all the unknowns that this kind of experience leaves behind?

I obviously can’t speak to all situations, but I do finally have some loose thoughts forming on this area of disappointment for me personally, and I thought I’d share them here in case it’s helpful for anyone else wrestling with similar issues and experiences too.

On getting specific

I want to start unpacking this subject by getting a quite specific and using some real examples from my own life (as vulnerable as that feels to do), especially since so many of the signs, promises and prophecies/words of knowledge that (seem to) come from God are incredibly specific too.

Maybe that goes without saying, because if they weren’t very specific and accurate and tinged with a strong sense of the miraculous or the divine, then we wouldn’t pay very much attention to them would we? But they so often are, and so we do…

So let’s explore just a few specific examples that I can pull from my walk of faith and recurrent miscarriage story below.

1. Direct words or signs from God

I’ve felt like God has spoken direct encouragements about the hope of having another child to me a number of times over the past years - be that through physical signs or situations, or sometimes a specific scripture verse that has ‘jumped out of the page’ at me, exactly when I’ve needed it the most.

One particular example of this which really springs to mind is a rainbow appearing in the sky right in front of me just as I’ve been praying and crying out to God for a breakthrough in our pregnancy situation.

A coincidence of timing? Perhaps. But a rainbow is both the christian symbol of God’s faithfulness to fulfil his promises to his people, and also a widely accepted symbol of a pregnancy after loss amongst fertility communities too, which meant it sure felt like a sign sent directly from God to me in that exact moment with an encouragement to keep trusting Him with my future/motherhood.

2. Words of knowledge & encouragement from others

It can often be difficult to trust your own ability to hear God, especially when it’s about something that you long for so very much. How can you really ever distinguish God’s voice from your own desire?

At times I’ve found myself asking, ‘Is this scripture really from God? Or is it just my wishful thinking?’ ‘Is what I am seeing really a sign from God, or is this me just interpreting something into what I want it to mean?’ There’s always a space left for doubt…

For this reason, I think that God sometimes speaks to us through other people, especially when it’s about something we’re really emotionally invested into like pregnancy after loss. And when God speaks to you through someone else, especially someone who doesn’t know all the details of your situation, then it can really catch your attention in a deeper way.

I have so many different examples of when this has happened that I could draw on, but I’ll pick out just a few for consideration here…

For instance, the day that I shared my most recent pregnancy news with a few trusted friends, one of them said she’d felt God had been encouraging her to pray for me very specifically in the area of pregnancy over that previous week. At the time, she just couldn’t quite understand it, as she was aware that we had already shut the door on the idea of any more pregnancy… but now, here I was just a few days later, sharing that I was unexpectantly pregnant again!

In a similar vein, one of my sisters also had a similar experience during one of my previous pregnancies. She suddenly felt led to pray over me in the area of pregnancy during a worship service she was in. At the time, she didn’t know that I’d had a positive test just a few days earlier or that I was getting a scan to confirm it’s viability that very morning, as we were only planning to share this news after we’d had the scan that day, if there was a healthy heartbeat.

It was only in discussing it together later, that we realised that the moment she’d felt prompted by God to pray for us was the exact time that we were visiting the hospital to have our scan - completely unbeknown to her at the time.

Situations like this felt like such a strong reminder from God that His hand was upon my pregnancy because He was speaking directly to other people about it, even before they knew it existed. But the point was that God knew, and was looking out for us in those moments. Isn’t that incredible?

3. Promises & prophecies

I’ve also experienced moments when God has spoken some more direct and specific promises to me about having another child too. For example, somewhere between my second and third miscarriage I received a very clear prophetic word in a church setting (from someone who didn’t know my situation at the time) about a future pregnancy.

It was almost Christmas, and it was a picture of God giving me a gift and saying, ‘This one is to keep’. For me, that felt like such a clear promise from God about my longing for another pregnancy at the time, and of God’s reassurance that it would be healthy and go full term.

So then, when our next pregnancy still ended in an early loss, I found myself wondering what had gone ‘wrong’. Had I misinterpreted what God was actually saying to me in that moment, with wishful thinking? Or was the promise meant for someone else instead of me? I don’t really know for sure, although I do think God’s ability to communicate with us is much bigger than our capacity for human error so I’m not sure that the ‘getting it wrong’ argument holds much sway for me. Instead, perhaps there are also other spiritual dynamics at play…

Either way, it was so clear in my mind at the time, that it’s a promise I have found myself still wondering about from time to time…

Then when we were suddenly confronted with another unexpected pregnancy again this spring, and we found out that the due date was at Christmas, a part of me just couldn’t help wondering ‘what if’? If maybe this pregnancy could be the gift that God had promised to me all that time ago? But again, it wasn’t to be.

What I used to think …

Obviously all of these examples, and many more that I could describe besides, feel kind of supernatural and God-inspired.

And yet, here I am, still notching up loss after loss anyway.

So where does any of this really leave me?

For a long time, I used to think that unfulfilled signs and promises and words of knowledge like this just made God out to be a liar. Or at very least a cold and disinterested deity, who wasn’t half as committed to me as He claimed to be…

At times, the disparity between what God seemed to have said and the reality I was actually living through has felt so great, that I’ve wondered if I could continue to live out my faith with any real conviction or trust in God at all.

But the truth is that this kind of thinking is completely counter to what scripture says about who God is. God is not a liar. In fact, scripture assets over and over that He cannot lie or change his mind at all. (Numbers 23:19, Hebrews 6:18).

And in John 14:6, Jesus (the representation of God in human form) actually claims to be ‘the way, the truth, and the life’. In other words, God is not just honest and truthful as we understand this in human terms. He is the truth itself.

God is truth to the very core. So the idea that He could ever lie, deceive us or somehow change his mind by taking a sudden u-turn on the intention to do good to us is completely counter to His Word, which claims that this is simply not within His nature or ability.

In the middle of my disappointment, I had got my view of God a bit twisted up. It was as if God was speaking out his good and perfect desire for my life and my motherhood in some very specific ways - and then when my present circumstances didn’t match up I was interpreting it as God breaking his promises to me.

But since this thinking doesn’t stack up with the nature of God, I needed to go back to the drawing board and rethink my interpretation again…

And what I now believe…

As I’ve continued to wrestle with my questions in light of all this, I’ve realised that it’s possible to interpret moments like this through the eyes of faith and hope, instead of disappointment and doubt.

So now I think that maybe signs and promises and words of encouragement like the ones I have received are not necessarily examples of failed or unfulfilled promises which undermine the faithfulness of God, but rather can also be taken as a clear sign of God’s intimate involvement in and care for our lives.

Through all of this, there’s just been so many different situations where God has shown me how He has been ‘rooting’ for me and my family, and even urging others to act on our behalf at key moments. At times that’s involved asking them to pray and fight for us spiritually (especially when we’ve not had the strength to keep fighting those battles ourselves), and at others it has just been a timely sign or word to lend us hope or encourage us keep on going.

Maybe God doesn’t let us see all the different ways that He is working in and through our situations - I imagine it would probably be much more than we could comprehend if He did. But maybe occasionally in grace and kindness, God chooses to just reveal a glimpse. And I think for me, that’s what some of these experiences have been about.

I know that some people would probably say - but since God didn’t actually save you from the pain of losing those pregnancies, what difference does any of this actually make? I mean, what kind of God leaves you high and dry like that? But I no longer see it that way.

As disappointing as this season of failed motherhood has been, and as imperfect and incomplete as some of those moments where God has ‘broken in’ have felt, they have also been the reminders that I have needed that God is with us, and actively involved in our story - and sometimes in some quite specific ways.

The truth is that I still don’t have any answers to ‘the big why’ in this situation. Perhaps there are some spiritual complexities or powers at work in this world which we cannot fully fathom or even begin to comprehend? Or perhaps some things still don’t make much sense simply because it’s not the end of our story just yet.

I don’t know… But maybe understanding ‘why’ is simply not the point. Maybe the point was never to act as a guarantee of any specific outcome, but simply to encourage and equip us with the knowledge that God was there, and the reassurance that He cared about what we were going through.

Not having all the answers

Not having all the answers is still uncomfortable for me. I still really want to be able to know and understand and explain every aspect of my walk of faith in order to fully believe.

But unfortunately that just isn’t the way that faith works. Instead, Jesus talked a lot about having faith the size of a tiny mustard seed, or of having a simple faith just like a child.

Of course, God isn’t afraid of our difficult questions of course, especially those raised by our pain. In fact, He welcomes them. Just spend a bit of time in books of the Bible like Job, Psalms and Lamentations if you aren’t sure that this is true!

But even so, in all of these biblical examples it seems to me that asking questions doesn’t necessarily lead to getting everything perfectly explained by God. Instead, it just tends to lead us into deeper, more honest conversations with God and greater intimacy. And maybe, a greater revelation of who God is, turns out to be the only answer that any of us really needs.

Personally, I’m still learning to make peace with not having all of the answers that I want, and still learning to accept that having faith doesn’t always equate to receiving everything that God has promised to us either (at least not this of heaven). But I do take some comfort in the fact that I am in good company, as are all of us who sit in this tension space between hope and disappointment.

Just look at all the heroes of the faith listed in Hebrews 11, and all of the great feats they undertook with God. Each one of them was commended for their great faith. And yet… the final verse of this chapter says that although ‘none of them received all that God had promised’.

Not a single one of them!

Just take a moment to let that sink in...

Their lives displayed the faithfulness of God in a thousand different ways, and yet not one of them saw all of God’s promises fulfilled within their own lives.

Why? Not because God was unfaithful but because He had ‘something better in mind’. Their stories wasn’t over yet, and maybe ours aren’t either…

A final benediction

So may we learn how to hold our questions well, letting them to draw us into greater conversation and intimacy with God (instead of accusation and avoidance).

May we find how to sit in the pain and the tensions, and trust that God is sat there too.

May we know that God is for us, even when we can’t see it.

May we remember that God still loves us, even when we don’t feel it.

May we believe that God is still good, even when our circumstances are not.

And may we understand that our stories still aren’t finished yet, and hold onto the hope that one day (either here or in heaven) all things will be made right.