Our Bodies Weren’t Made to Carry Death

I needed a headshot for something the other day and after dozens of attempts, I realized my eyes really were just that sad and tired-looking, it wasn’t the camera angle or the lighting. 

I shared earlier this year about miscarrying last November. Despite the many losses before that one, the loss of that pregnancy felt harsher and more wild. Like death’s free-for-all inside me tore more than just the baby from my womb—it wrapped up my hope in a dark cloud and stamped sadness into my being. 

I wrote a lot of bad poetry in the months that followed that miscarriage, trying to find words to describe how betrayed I felt by this loss.

But I kept coming back to one poem, a prayer, over and over again:

It wasn’t just about the pregnancy loss. I don’t have a listed number of kids I want—in fact, I long ago surrendered to God having even one and He gave us three. He has more than delivered. Rather, it was about my mental and emotional state, it was about how much faith I was pouring into His hands, and how far I was willing to trust Him with my dreams of a healthy and whole family. 

And during a time when I was at my most vulnerable when it came to my family and the struggles we’ve carried, I found out I was pregnant. 

The moment I realized I had conceived again, I prayed one prayer: God, I can’t miscarry right now. Please, please, please. I can’t, Lord. I just can’t.

Then I opened my shaking hands and tried to trust. 

And I walked right into the thing I never wanted to face. 

The one thing I had begged God to save me from.

Not only did I feel the sting of death, but I was infested with it. Like a million daggers were stabbing into my skin, day in and day out for months.

Even after I finally felt like I started hearing and seeing the evidence of God’s presence in my life again, I still felt the sting. Like death was attached to me, poking and prodding every chance it had.

When the fourth month post-miscarriage came around and I realized I was, once again, expecting, I was still in so much pain from the last miscarriage, that I just pretended. I lied to myself and others to cover my sickness. I didn’t bother making any appointments. I didn’t try to keep track or help my hormone levels. I just pretended it wasn’t happening in a wild attempt to act like I had control of something, anything, in my life.

We were traveling, staying in a tiny hotel room in Maryland when I miscarried once more.

It turned out that pretending didn’t stop the pain. Not the physical or the mental and emotional.

Here’s the truth: Not everyone in the world experiences a miscarriage, and many less will experience repeated miscarriages, but we all know the taste of loss in one form or another. Death is a part of life, the death of people our hearts still long for and the death of dreams and hopes that were woven into our being.

One of the biggest tenets of faith in Jesus is about death. If you’ve ever heard the gospel, you’ve heard the story. When sin entered the world, death gripped us. People, who were created to be eternally in relationship with God and each other, suddenly had to contend with the darkest enemy: death. The loss of forever with the ones we love. The loss of an easy, steady relationship with the God who made us. Physical and spiritual death would mark the world. But Jesus came—He was the promise from the beginning, and he came and conquered death. We still face the physical, until he returns, but the spiritual death no longer has power over us through Jesus. This is the hope of the gospel.

The writer of I Corinthians 15 spends quite a long time on this subject and ends with an anthem (the very one I had woven into my prayer poem), “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, death, is your victory? Where, death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”[1]

Yet, this promise isn’t complete. While the day will come when death has no power, for now, it still stings. The sharp edges of death will slice us all at some point in our lives and our bodies and minds, that were not created for it, will recoil in horror. This means that all of us will have a day when we look around and are forced to confront that our lives are not what we want them to be. They’re not what we were created to have. This life, so tangled up in death, isn’t enough for hearts that were made for eternity.

And this truth is what keeps beating peace into my sad and tired heart—of course, my body is responding to death so poorly, it wasn’t meant to carry the weight of death. And while I don’t get why the answer wasn’t what I longed so deeply for—good and lovely things like not losing my babies to the brokenness of this world—I do know that the very purpose of the gospel is to step in and shoulder this weight that death pours out, and instead of being crushed by the overpowering heaviness of death we can say:

“We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.”[2]

So here is my quiet and gentle reminder to each one of us who are carrying the weight of death in some form or another right now—this is why Jesus came. This right here. This is why God, Himself, came to earth and walked among us. He knows the pain of death and even though we still carry death in these broken, hopeless bodies of ours—He made it possible for us to also carry life at the same time.

I don’t know about you, but I’m gripping tight to that life with everything in me.

Amen, come Lord Jesus.

[1] I Corinthians 15:54-58, CSB

[2] 2 Corinthians 4:8-10 NLT