Tag / Miscarriage

by Michael

Advent Post #12

 “…Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.” (Luke 1:41)

Mary must not have known of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. I could imagine Elizabeth and her husband keeping it to themselves. It was high-risk.

Why share such news if the pregnancy could fail? Why bring all those people, who’d definitely be awestruck, into the business? Perhaps Elizabeth’s body wouldn’t cooperate and be a hospitable container for the developing baby. Perhaps God wouldn’t allow Elizabeth’s pregnancy to succeed. Perhaps it wasn’t true in the first place, her expectation.

These are real wonderings. There are false hopes. Our bodies don’t always cooperate with our dreams. Miscarriages happen, especially for those who hope at higher risks. And when they happen, they bruise parts of parents which most never see. Linger over that and make your connections prayers.

You see Mary rushed to her relative after hearing Gabriel’s words. They would share. Apprehensively or not, they would develop a bond around the amazing things God was doing. I can hear Mary rehearsing her terror, her wonder, and her praise. I can imagine she’d nearly trip over her feet to run to her loved one.

Imagine the gift of Elizabeth, who at six months is already filled with a growing baby, now being filled with the Holy Spirit. This is language I’m fairly used to because I’m Pentecostal, even if it’s an experience that makes me shudder with gratitude and light and humility. She was filled.

The Spirit fills us. The Spirit (a feminine word which we never allow ourselves to utter enough), she enters us and resides with us. She is present during moments of greatness. For Elizabeth who has likely been uncertain, I imagine there being a new calmness, a resoluteness with Mary’s entrance and with the Spirit’s coming that some things are definite. Her baby’s eventual arrival, John’s eventual life, was certain. Is that the evidence of the filling? More certainty than before. Perhaps not total but more.

I believe that Advent is a season where we rehearse to ourselves the steep, enduring promises of God. We tell ourselves–and each other by entering our homes and hanging out–and we embody for ourselves the real truth that the world as we know it is undone. We embody the message and the messengers who will tell the world the truth it needs to hear. We live that truth each day, and in our living we change the world.

Might this be the spilling which we need this season? I pray that you are as Pentecostal as the next believer, as filled with the Spirit as Elizabeth and, later, those first kind followers in the upper room. May this season bring us a new quality of faith, a trusted assurance that God is working in us to bring the world grace.

by Michael

Miscarriage, Marriage to a Bear, & Expecting a Daughter

My name is Nate Noonen and I am going to be a father in about two weeks, give or take two weeks. I have always dreamed of being a dad.  That sounds odd, but children were a huge part of my life growing up.  I married my teddy bear, Tabitha, in a ceremony performed by my father, an ordained minister in the Nazarene church.  I don’t think the ceremony was legally binding since I was three years old at the time.  From that point on, every teddy bear brought into my house was a child of Tabitha and me.  Having four younger sisters meant that Tabitha and I had children fairly regularly.

Tabitha now lives with my mom and the rest of my family back in Ohio and I have since married a beautiful non-ursine woman named Kimmy.  We live in an apartment in Logan Square which used to be populated by a series of pet rodents until the last one died a year or so ago.  After that we were going to get a dog but that was stopped by landlord intervention and a realization that what we really wanted, and felt God had prepared us for, was a child.

Kimmy had a miscarriage a year and ten days ago (July 5, 2011).  We confirmed pregnancy and knew she would have a baby for less than 24 hours before the miscarriage.  People don’t tell each other about those things, but they are all a part of being a parent.  The joy of the positive pregnancy test followed by the agony and shared pain of having to wait that much longer for the first, second, or third child.  I don’t want to get into a discussion on abortion, but I know a God who weeps for every living thing, regardless of age, and sometimes I weep with Him.

Through that sadness and the discussions we have had with other parents, we were prepared to try again, with a more in depth understanding of the fragility of life.  That fragility expresses itself in every offer of genetic testing, every “this is nothing to worry about but,” every realization of just how not in control we are and how petrifying that is.  A belief in a loving God does not shield us from that fear, but it does make the fear subject to the reminders of just how much He loves us, how much He loves my daughter Charlotte and knows her in her inmost being, regardless of the age at which she leaves this realm for another.

My daughter will be born at some point.  That is the only fact that I know right now.  Michael has asked me to write a monthly article for his blog which I will do everything in my power to fulfill.

I look forward to seeing what God has in store over the next year.

Nate