Disclosure: to pay for my website’s expenses, I participate in the Amazon Affiliate Program. This simply means that I will earn a small commission from Amazon when you shop through the links on my site. However, I am not getting compensated for writing positive reviews. Those are fully honest and unbiased.
As a writer and a lover of Jesus, I’m always taking note of how God writes the story of my life.
The Great Author writes the story with unexpected twists and turns. Plenty of new developments came our way this past year! I was rather quiet on the blog and even on my public Facebook page last fall and winter as we were going through a major transition. My husband, daughter, and I moved – again. After living in the Washington, D.C. area for over 7 years, my husband was offered a job in Hawaii!
Just before Christmas in 2019, we took a trip to Hawaii to scout out the area and figure out where we might live. It was a good week, the weather was perfect, and we enjoyed exploring. We settled on a place to live and started to become familiar with our new city.
We also experienced a bittersweet element to our week, a taste of pain and barrenness in a beautiful place.
Women who are trying to conceive for a long time and travel frequently know that sometimes you pack your suitcase with both pregnancy tests and feminine products. I packed both that week – a bit of hope that we would use the tests, and because of my history, I was prepared with the other items.
During that initial visit to Hawaii, for the second time in my life, I saw a very faint line on the pregnancy test. I was pregnant! However, subsequent tests in following days only showed a very faint positive. This indicated that HCG was not rising, and I felt like something was not right. During my first pregnancy, each new pregnancy test was darker than the one from the day before (for the first several days at least). My hunch was that these continued very faint lines were not a good sign.
I called my doctor back in Maryland and made plans to get checked out as soon as we returned from Hawaii. Sadly, our miscarriage began before we flew home, less than a week after learning that we were expecting.
We were sad.
Although we were sad, we were also very encouraged that after the seven years it took to conceive our first child, we were able to conceive again.
How did I feel in the following months? We felt sad that a tiny life ended so quickly. We chose to trust God’s timing and ability to grow our family. (Looking back, I can agree that God’s timing is right.) Ultimately, we were okay emotionally, having been on this road long enough to know that God has it figured out. Also, it wasn’t all-consuming like it might have been years earlier, before we had a child running around keeping us busy. Since our miscarriage happened in the middle of such an intense few months of holidays / travel / packing / moving, it just didn’t consume our minds.
We renewed our hope.
We hoped and prayed for the opportunity to bring another baby into this world. I heard pregnancy announcements (all the time) or saw pregnant bellies and hoped to experience those things again. For all of my adult life, I’ve wanted to be a mom, and after our daughter was born, I longed for one more child. We feel tremendously grateful for the little daughter we have and we don’t take her for granted. My desire has been to continue trusting the Lord in this process.
For the past several years I’ve been writing a book about finding God’s goodness in barrenness. I desire to remind readers and myself that God can always show us something good and beautiful. He’s good to us, even in difficult or desolate circumstances. The working title of this book is Beauty in Barren Places. Although my life has been chaotic with lots of travel and a major move, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, I hope to publish it soon.
Beauty in Barren Places reminds us to pause and find God’s goodness even during infertility, financial hardship, personal stress, relational difficulties, divorce, death, loneliness. People feel barren in all of these areas. I believe that God in His goodness is still chasing us down through all of these things.
Beautiful places do not guarantee beautiful circumstances
As I thought about our early pregnancy loss during our first visit to Hawaii, I was reminded that beautiful places do not guarantee beautiful circumstances. People call Hawaii “paradise” because it is beautiful, and the weather is incredible. Yet there are so many imperfections. Honolulu feels like a busy city, not a quiet island. There is poverty and stress, especially during the recent pandemic. Countless homeless people sleep on the beach or set up regular camps in parks or sidewalks.
During my first visit to Hawaii, I miscarried a treasured baby while still soaking up the beauty all around. Yes, there is barrenness and heartbreak in beautiful places.
The day I became concerned that the pregnancy was not normal, God painted a huge, beautiful rainbow in the sky, allowing it to linger outside of our hotel window for hours. He reminded me that He is faithful.
Because God is always faithful
I have seen and I believe with all of my heart that God’s goodness is evident on a mundane, cold, gray, cloudy day in Maryland. God is just as good to me on a painful, difficult day in sunny, beautiful Hawaii. He’s the God of beauty, and He’s with us in the barrenness. I’m so thankful that He’s with us through it all.
It’s been a while since our miscarriage. Since that week, I turned 40, and miraculously and graciously, God opened my womb again. We are trusting God and grateful for the new baby due in January. (Read my announcement in this blog post.)
P.S.: As an Amazon Associate I might earn a referral fee I you choose to make a purchase through one of my links. However, I am NOT compensated for writing positive reviews, so those are fully honest and unbiased.
Monthly newsletter
I will not spam you, or pas your information on to others. You can unsubscribe at any time.
We also experienced a bittersweet element to our week, a taste of pain and barrenness in a beautiful place.
