The God who works through our trials
It would not be an overstatement to say that 2022 was one of the hardest, if not the hardest years of our marriage. Not in the sense that we were having issues with each other, but rather the trials from the outside pressed in hard on us. There is far more than we can talk about here, but the one we will share with you now and, the most relevant to this story, was our miscarriage. But, first, back to the beginning.
When we were dating we started talking about how many children we wanted. At this point, we were probably influenced mostly by the families we grew up in, because I was pretty firmly in the camp of two children, while Jessie was at a solid five. Eventually we decided we didn’t know anything about having kids, so we said that if the Lord gave us one, we would go from there.
Along came Hank. Hank was not an easy baby. Don’t let anyone tell you the newborn stage is a breeze, or that you’ll miss it when it's gone. It’s not, and you won’t. Probably at least. Some do, most don’t. We certainly don’t. Some have it good with their newborns, we did not. So here we were with our first child, sleepless and just trying to survive, and let me tell ya- I was hooked.
Not hooked on the newborn stage, obviously—that was awful. But even in the midst of the sleepless nights and a screaming baby, something clicked inside of me, and I knew I would love to have more—several more. I think my exact words to Jessie were (with a sheepish grin), “Okay, I could see five or six of these things running around here." So, at the beginning of 2022, we began to try for a second and it didn’t take long for us to find out we were pregnant. And it was a joyous time.
But as quickly as our joy came, it was lost to grief and mourning. Twelve weeks into our pregnancy, Jessie went to an appointment and our little baby didn’t have a heartbeat. Even as I write this, the emotions of that day come flooding back. All joy and hope was lost, as a deep darkness enveloped us. I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever cried like I cried that day. Devastating is too light of a word.
We eventually named the baby “Little O,” our baby that we never got to meet.
The God who sees me
She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi [‘well of the Living One who sees me’]; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered.
(Genesis 16:13-14)
I’ve heard stories about people having tangible experiences with God from various friends and people I know, but have never had such an experience myself. Most of my walk with the Lord has been intellectual and academic, and if I’m honest, I’ve always been quite skeptical with anything experiential or emotional when it comes to religion. Much of this spirit comes from the tradition I was raised in, but it’s also just my personality. I live much more in my head than in my heart. It’s a good thing I have a wife that is the opposite.
It’s not that I haven’t wanted to have an experience with God. I certainly have. I’ve prayed for it. I’ve prayed for other people to have it. And I have certainly been able to reflect back on my past and see God’s hand at work in my life. But I’ve never had an experience like I’ve heard of other’s having.
So, what happened in the midst of our darkest moment was a complete surprise. There we were, the night we found out about the baby we lost, Jessie still bearing that child within her, holding one another in our bed, sobbing like we had never before, when I looked up and gave Jessie a confused look.
“Umm, so this is going to sound weird… because it’s not something I would normally say… but I’m pretty sure I just got a message from God that we are going to have twins.”
And it did sound weird coming from me. I thought it might be something that she would be more likely to say than me. But I had an undeniable conviction that that was what the Lord was saying to us in that moment. I didn’t hear an audible voice or anything, I just knew that’s what I was being told. It was a message of redemption.
But that didn’t make it easy to believe. Again, I am pretty far from the charismatic tradition. I grew up in a tradition that was actually quite opposed to God working in any way that someone might call a miracle today. I no longer held that conviction (who am I to tell God what he can and can’t do?), but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t often skeptical (probably too skeptical) when I heard anything that was too good to be true. Honestly, we were both dumbfounded about what to do with that moment.
In a way, I think I was trying to protect God, as if I could do such an outrageous thing. Sure, people abuse the concept of miracles often, but that doesn’t make them impossible, or even implausible. Most every concept or teaching is abused by someone, but we can’t just throw everything out because some version of it is incorrect.
Jessie looked at me, not really knowing how to process what I was saying. “What? Okay…” In the moment I didn’t really know how to process it either. “I don’t know, that’s just the message that I am hearing right now.” I thought it could be my blind optimism, my brain searching for any amount of hope to grasp onto in this pit of darkness. But somehow I knew it was more than that, even if I didn’t fully believe it. The word I keep coming back to is conviction. I was convicted that that was the message that had been laid on my heart, to use a phrase that I am unfamiliar and somewhat uncomfortable with.
Of course we wanted to believe it. What a story of redemption! What a testimony! But could we really believe it? Could that really have been what God told us in our darkest moment? What if I was just making it up? What if it was just my heart longing for joy, coping through loss? What if we believed it, and then it didn’t happen? Would our hopes be crushed? Would our faith be lost? Is even asking these questions a sign of doubt that would lead to not receiving this good news?
We were confused and anxious. But the Lord is better than our anxiety.
The God who meets us in our doubt
Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
(John 20:26-29)
We didn’t have to wait long for God to reassure us. Soon after that dark night in our room, we started seeing signs of the Lord’s promise. We began to hear the word ‘twins’ everywhere. Our friends would bring it up in conversations, we’d see videos and stories about twins on social media, it would even come up surprisingly often during interactions with complete strangers.
Now, you might be thinking (as we thought too), well when something is on your mind, you do tend to see it everywhere. Like when you start looking to purchase a yellow car, and then all of the sudden you see yellow cars everywhere.
And that’s a real phenomenon (it’s sometimes referred to as frequency illusion/bias). But this was more. One of the early signs that we saw more often than we should have seen them were double rainbows. Maybe you already know this, a baby that comes after a loss is often called a ‘rainbow baby’, and here we were seeing double rainbows everywhere. At the end of a particularly touching episode of Bluey that all three of us happened to be watching together. Over the palace after Queen Elizabeth II’s death when we were going to London the next week. My mom posting a picture of a double rainbow outside their house. Double rainbow when I was driving home from work. Double rainbow when we stepped out of our car one Wednesday night going to church.
Perhaps my favorite rainbow sign came from Jessie’s nephew. At the beginning of August, Jessie’s sister and her kids came to visit us and they had drawn us several pictures. As we were going through the drawings, we found that her nephew had drawn us two different rainbows on two different drawings. Jessie looked at me with one of those knowing looks and said “Look, he drew us two rainbows.” When we asked him why he chose a rainbow, he just said “I don’t know, it was random.” It wasn’t random for us.
When we were visiting my sister and brother-in-law in Bloomington we went to a used bookstore where Jessie happened across not one, but two books about twins. I’m happy to say that one of them is now in our collection.
It really was uncanny the number of times that we heard ‘twins’ in our conversations. We heard it from friends, family, and even complete strangers.
Jessie tells a couple of stories of strangers reminding her of the promise: “I remember one Wednesday evening as we were walking into the church building a woman who was visiting. I went over to meet her and asked if she wanted to join the class we were going to. We got to talking afterward and she sees Hank running around my feet and says ‘Oh, so sweet. Is this your baby?’ ‘Yes’, I smiled. And I kid you not the next words out her mouth were ‘I used to nanny twins.’ I about died. I have no idea what my face did but I flagged Walter down as soon as I could see him, laughing, I repeat to him ‘Walt, she kept TWINS.’ Another time I was getting new glasses at the eye center like a real adult when one of the kind workers sitting across from me starts randomly talking about her twins. I am serious, just completely out of the blue. That’s always how it felt for me when I would see or hear something, like God just dropped a big ole fat reminder out of nowhere.”
The moments that the Lord got my attention the most were the moments when I was feeling the lowest. The double rainbow that I saw on my way home from work one day spoke loudly to me because I was losing hope because I hadn’t seen a sign as a reminder in a while, and was beginning to wonder if I just made it all up. But I think one of the clearest moments for me was a conversation I had with a friend at work. I would retell the story here, but I think I’ll let my past self tell the story through a message I sent Jessie after it happened:
Eventually, we had seen and heard things about twins so much that we had to believe that this was more than just frequency bias. So, we decided to act on faith and started praying for it, much like Mary’s prayer “may it be done according to your word.” Actually, the gospel accounts of Mary “treasuring these things in her heart” had never meant so much to us as they do now.
So we prayed. And we began to tell some people.
The God who is always faithful
For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.
(II Corinthians 1:20)
I love the story of Abraham and the promised birth of Isaac, not because any of the human characters do any of the right things, but precisely because they don’t and yet God is faithful to his promises. God tells Abram that he is going to have a son through whom God will bless all the nations of the earth (a promise that is fundamental to the gospel). Abram believes God at first, but his faith in that promise waivers. He tries to fulfill the promise himself by having a son through his wife’s servant. He and his wife both laugh when they are told they will conceive and bear a son when they are well-passed child-bearing age. And they don’t even act righteously towards Sarah’s servant after they use her when they take things into their own hands. Yet God is faithful, and His promises are true. And Abraham and Sarah bear a son in their old age, though whom, indeed, the Messiah comes.
“The saying is trustworthy, for:
If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he also will deny us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful—
for he cannot deny himself.”
(II Tim. 2:11-13)
I’d love to say our faith was firm and strong the entire time we felt like we got the message from God. But it wasn’t. There were days when it was, and days when we questioned whether we had heard anything at all. One of Jessie’s friends that we told this message to long before getting pregnant again recently reflected back and said “My honest reaction when you told me that was ‘oh I hope she’s not coping with her grief by escaping into delusion.’” We laugh so hard at that because truly there were times we wondered the same, but we pressed on with cautious hope.
In December we found out that we were pregnant, and we had our first appointment in January. We were anxious on two fronts. It’s hard not to be anxious when you get pregnant after losing a baby. You want to be joyful, and you are, but there’s always that feeling looming over you that this could still end in tragedy.
And on the other front, this was where the rubber met the road. Before you go to the appointment, you don’t know whether or not you have multiple babies. But after that first appointment, well… What was it going to be? Did God really tell us that we were going to have twins? Is this how He redeems such a bad year? Are we testing God?
Jessie went into that appointment and prayed, “Whichever way, I trust you.”
And let me tell you. God is so very, very good.
I cannot begin to describe the feeling when Jessie got into the car with me and Hank and said “WE’RE HAVING TWINS!” She recorded it, but it only gives a glimpse of what was going on in my head. We were crying and laughing and thrilled and in total awe of God. And convicted.
Jessie tells about her experience in her appointment: “I was so nervous. How could I not be? My body didn’t tell me we lost babies before, that could happen again. It felt like such a test. Like I knew some secret but I wasn’t sure if it was real. I planned to go into the office with a little note in my pocket that I would give my doctor that read ‘We’re having twins!’ But I didn’t, maybe because we were busy or because I didn’t want that heartbreak if it wasn’t going to be true that day. We wondered if he would incorporate twins in our lives in different ways, like adoption. This doctor, who I love, is looking at the ultrasound screen and says ‘Ope, very exciting. Very exciting.’ I didn’t allow myself to think anything of that because I figured she had been with us through so much, maybe she just saw a healthy baby. Then she says. ‘Okay. So, here’s one little squirt.” And I JUST KNEW. The way she said it!!! I held my hand out to stop her and look at her. She said chuckling a bit, ‘you okay?’ To which I said through much laughter ‘Are you about to tell me that we are having twins?’ She then proceeded to show me the other little squirt. Now I don’t who all was in that office that day but good grief they heard a woman whooping and hollering yelling ‘GOD TOLD US THIS WAS GONNA HAPPEN.’ My poor doctor was chuckling bearing witness to my absolutely hysterical reaction. At some point she says ‘and they both look perfect’. It hadn’t even dawned on me to wonder how they were. As soon as she told me there were two, God’s faithfulness took over and everything was right. I’m crying as I’m writing this because I have never in my life felt so closely God’s face staring back at me with such love and grace. Naturally, I walked out of the patient room telling anyone who looked at me. The secretary, the nurse. Probably not unlike the woman at the well, just overwhelmed with God’s love and the way He can know us like no one else. I will tell this story until I die. He has been beyond good to us.”
I had never had a tangible experience of God like this before. But now we have a testimony that we will share until He comes back and maybe even after. It’s not that I didn’t believe in God before, because I certainly did, for different reasons. But now I also believe because He has revealed Himself to us in a very personal way. And I will continue to learn about this God who is not only intellectual and rational, but who is deeply relational. Now the good news feels tangible to me.
As I reflect on this experience, I don’t think it was ever a testing of God. We didn’t pray for a sign, and we weren’t expecting anything like this. No. God—the God who sees—saw us in our darkest moment and He redeemed. He redeemed our situation. He redeemed our pain. He redeemed our fear, anxiety, and loss. Honestly, we were so ready to put this chapter of our lives behind us and start somewhere new. But He is redeeming this city for us as well.
If you know nothing about God, nothing about Jesus, know this: Our God is a God who is faithful to His promises. He is a God who redeems His people. He is the God who is Love. And He is so very, very good. I pray you meet Him.
Our story is only good insomuch as it points you to the One through whom it was written. All praise be to Him, for He is good, and His mercy endures forever.
What an amazing testimony. Thank you for sharing it! It was emotional to read because I related to in so many ways—I have two rainbow babies of my own. I had hesitantly ventured into Substack for the first time today when I stumbled upon your post. I too felt like the woman at the well after my daughter’s birth but had started to doubt whether my experience was worth sharing. Maybe this is my sign. Thank you and congratulations!
I cried all the way through this sad and beautiful and promising and praiseworthy story. So happy for you.