As much as you may feel like it is your fault, it is NOT. There is nothing that could have been done to change the will of God for your life and for the life of your child. This miscarriage is not a fault of you, it is a fact of the world and a fault of sin. The world is a place full of sin and the death of your child is a result of sin, not a direct result of anything in your life. So how do we process this pain? I can only speak from the point of a mother but the pain of a miscarriage runs deep and often feels lonely. Even when we are in our most lonely moments, and our feelings drive us to despair, God’s promises still are true, and God’s goodness is still real.

*Trigger Warning This post Talks about Miscarriage
There is something about being a mom that I never fully grasped until I was well, a mom. That was the idea of having joy and pain at the same time. I had often heard of this concept but never truly experienced it. The first time I experienced joy and pain was the moment after our first daughter was born. There was such joy in holding our slippery bundle of joy that we had prayed and waited for so long. And yet, among the joy was the physical pain from giving birth. I think this is a feeling that all mothers can understand—the feeling of joy and physical pain. The combination of joy and physical pain happens often throughout motherhood. Joy may come from seeing your child shaking a toy, and the pain comes when you get smacked in the face by said toy. Joy may come from hearing your child speaking, and the pain then comes when your child screams in your ear. I could go on and on with stories of experiencing one or the other of joy and physical pain as a mother. But what about experiencing the feelings of joy and the feeling of pain at the same time?
The Unspoken Pain Mothers Carry
This pain is carried by many mothers and is carried silently. There are many reasons why mothers feel this dichotomy of joy and pain at the same time. It could be the joy created from the laughter of a toddler, while in pain from their new diagnosis. It could be the joy of seeing your child creating community while bearing the silent pain of knowing you will be moving and those friendships being made today won’t last long beyond tomorrow. There are seasons of difficulty that augment the joy and pain we carry as mothers. The times when you are grieving the loss of a loved one while still experiencing the joy that comes with motherhood. Or the even more silent pain, the pain of a miscarriage. A miscarriage that might have been acknowledged by others, or a miscarriage that might only be known by yourself. No matter the stage of the pregnancy or the amount of people who know, the pain of miscarriage is difficult and different from other pains that we experience as mothers.
Processing a Miscarriage
First, I need to start this section by stating that your baby no matter how small is a baby. Your pregnancy changed you. You became a mother even before the moment you saw the positive on that pregnancy test. The hopes, the dreams, the pregnancy sickness, the sadness, it was all real and all valid. You are allowed to say you lost a child. We have lost 2. When you read our bio you will see that we say we have 6 children and only 4 living children. This is how we open the conversation and share with others that we have lost babies in the womb.
Second, as much as you may feel like it is your fault, it is NOT.
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False teachers speak the world’s language. They promise bodily pleasure and satisfaction. They promise riches, beauty, and material gain. And they promise that by following their teaching you will win the approval of others and increase your status in this world. False teachers are absorbed in what is transitory and they speak to people whose hearts love the world and its lusts rather than God. They are in it for the money, for the status, for the pleasures they crave, and they promise their hearers that they will enjoy the same by following them and their message.

As history moves closer to the return of our Lord Jesus Christ, we should expect a rise in false teachers, false prophets, and false messiahs. Jesus prophesied about the increase of such deceivers in Matthew 24:5, 11, 23, and 24. The Apostle Paul echoed our Lord’s warning in 2 Timothy 3:13, reminding Timothy that imposters will proceed from bad to worse in the last days. Why does the number of false teachers increase as we move closer to the second coming of Christ, and how can believers identify those the New Testament cautions us against following? As we conclude our series on identifying false teachers, I want to consider how one of the final books written in the New Testament helps us understand why false teachers come and how to identify them.
The Apostle John lived longer than any of the Twelve Apostles, with many scholars dating his death near the end of the first century. He composed the letter we call 1 John some time in the 80s. He was writing to a church that had just experienced a significant split, with some in the church departing over the doctrine of Christ. These factious people taught a defective view of the Son of God. While scholars debate the specific nature of their heresy, it seems evident that they did not believe that the Son of God had come in the flesh, which also led them to deny that the Son of God had shed His blood for the forgiveness of the sins of the world. Their false teaching was essentially a denial that Jesus was the Messiah (1 John 2:22). From John’s description of these false teachers and their departure from the church, it seems that some of them wielded significant influence over members of the congregation, so John wrote to equip these believers to mark and avoid such deceptive false brothers. In so doing, John also explained where these false teachers come from.
False teachers, according to 1 John, are a clear sign that we are living in the last hour because false teachers are aligned with the spirit of antichrist. In 1 John 4:3, John says, “And every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.” John’s point is that false teachers arise because they are motivated by the same spirit that ultimately will motivate and empower the final antichrist at the end of the age. That spirit is the spirit that works in those who belong to this present world (1 John 4:6). In 1 John 5:19, the Apostle makes clear that the world is under the power of the evil one, the devil himself. The spirit of antichrist, therefore, is the evil one who exalts himself as god and opposes God and His truth. During the last hour, the activity of the spirit of antichrist will increase so that many arise who corrupt the truth about Christ and seek to keep the world in its deceptions and under Satan’s power.
False teachers come as a clear signal to Christians that we are living in the last hour and that Satan is making his final attempt to destroy Christ and His blood-bought people.
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The story of Owen and Baxter offers us several valuable lessons. Here’s one: at the outset of any conflict, we should try to stand back from the confronting issues and try to understand what other factors might be at work in our own hearts and in the hearts of those around us. Paul admonishes us: “if possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Rom. 12:18). His meaning is obvious. We are not responsible for the actions of the other person, but for our part, we should do all we can to live in peace with those around us.

When the Issue Isn’t the Issue
Recently, I found myself in a disagreement. In my work context, I have been setting a new direction. I discovered that a colleague I respect was worried it was the wrong direction, so we sat down to talk about it. After forty-five minutes of amicable and professional discussion, it was clear we still took a different view. And then something interesting happened: my colleague trusted me by opening up about her early life as the child of alcoholic parents. She explained how the changes I was proposing undermined the sense of her place in the world that she had built up over her adult years. Her honest reflection changed the whole complexion of our conversation.
I think that story illustrates an important dynamic in many conflicts: the issue may not be the issue. In other words, the concerns that we think are driving the disagreement are not the real issues at all, or at least may not be all of the issues or even the main issues. Beneath the surface or behind the immediate triggers of conflict lie other dynamics that remain out of sight to the combatants. In this case, the self-knowledge of my colleague was extremely helpful. At least she could recognize what was going on inside of her and had the courage to share that with me. But not everyone has that level of self-awareness. Sometimes we don’t know ourselves at all. As the Scriptures acknowledge, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). So when disagreement breaks out, all sorts of issues may come into play that have little to do with the presenting concerns but have everything to do with hidden realities of the heart of which our opponent has no awareness, or even we have no awareness. If that happens, we are in trouble, for who can resolve what they cannot see?
An Example from History
There’s another story that illustrates the same dynamic, but this one is nearly 400 years old. John Owen (1616-83) and Richard Baxter (1615-91) were two of the most significant figures within seventeenth-century English Puritanism. Both were dedicated, effective pastors; both were prolific authors and theologians; both were influential leaders of their respective streams within the Puritan tradition. So they shared an enormous amount of common ground. But they did not like each other, and the conflict between them, once it began, was lifelong. A while back I set out to understand why they came to such a deep and bitter animosity. I excavated the different layers of their relationship to identify the varied reasons why it went so badly wrong. I learned that the three most consequential reasons for their mutual dislike were all in place before they even met.
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