Yesterday Jess started feeling cramps and had some “spotting” going on.  Taking the doctor’s lead, I chose to be  the macho optimist.  This may have made our fears easier to face, but it didn’t prevent them from hitting us so hard as they grew into a reality.  Before we fell asleep, Jess cried “I don’t want to do this…”  she seemed to know we were losing the baby.

Grieving

After a restless night holding my wife’s aching belly, she woke me in the morning to investigate our loss:  indeed, a little sac with a tiny baby floating inside.  At first I was in shock, enough to disconnect and get Jess to and through our doctor’s appointment.  As reality set in, so have the pains of loosing the nearly-approaching fatherhood I’ve been so excited for.  The beautiful plump belly that embodied this anticipation has already contracted down to it’s normal size.  It’s eerie how quickly this journey seems to have been derailed, like the descent from a good dream, down into reality.

In the midst of our day spent going through cycles of tears and intentional distractions from them, Jess had been given a “connection”… a joining of two tragic stories, revealing that reality (in Christ) is better than “the good dream” (outside of His plans):

Gleaming

When we were living in Arizona and making tons of money working as contractors on Fort Huachuca, we wanted to raise a then-popular Shiba Inu (breed of dog).  Since we had that ton of money stocked up, we paid whatever it cost to get one.  About a month or so later, that new sneaky dog got out of our fence and found her end at the territorial instinct of the neighbor’s pit bull.  That was also a sad time of our lives.

The reason we got Leah (the Shiba Inu) was so that our then only-dog Libby would have a friend.  In the month of their time together, the two female dogs (B-words) never really liked each other… at all.  I think they took turns biting  each other when we weren’t watching.  We spent a lot of time and mastery on a pretty little dog that was never a fit, and was then quickly gone.

Not long later, my grandma (“Gram”), who’s been a champion dog breeder for a generation or two, called asking if we wanted to include a Boston Terrier into our family.  There was no hesitation for us to then take on the same kind of dog that the DeCuir boys had growing up (good ‘ole Buster).  We brought home the perfect friend for Libby: Link, a Boston puppy!

He was a little too perfect for us and for Libby…  so perfect that soon there were then more perfect dogs there too.  These puppies would go on to became perfect dogs for other owners!  Cute little Spoon became part of Aaron and Linna’s family (brother and sister in-law), getting all sorts of love, training and attention from them!  Lucy went on to become the little tractor-riding, cat-friend, work puppy with Jess’ parents in Florida!  We’re so happy that they all have each other!

If Leah had not died, we would’ve made it work.  She and Libby would have eventually become accustomed to each other and people would be amazed at how purdy our Shiba was…  On the other hand, we wouldn’t have had any reason to be offered Link, or reason to adopt him.  Our Lystra and the other Bugg puppies wouldn’t have been born or exist as great pets in the homes of Daileys and DeCuirs.

Hope

Now, in a very similar way to Leah, there was apparently something wrong with the baby that was growing in Jess’ body.  God’s decision, embedded within the miracle of reproduction, has shown us that this baby was apparently “not a fit”…  likely being that it wasn’t healthy enough for Jess’ body to keep nurturing.

Fearing this yesterday, I found myself asking God, as we do, to take something “wrong” and “just make it work”.

But no… even better, God takes the broken things in the lives of the surrendered (the tragedies like miscarriages and dead dogs, divorces, diseases and bankruptcy), to pave the way for things that are glaringly better.  We give our lives to Him and find ourselves attacked by these “dream wakings”, but it isn’t meaningless;  it’s so he can bring far greater blessing to recipients far beyond just ourselves.

We’re blessed to have the story and evidence of Him doing so through the death of one dog, to bless the lives of many more people than the one dog could have.  Likewise, though we feel a great bit of pain from this loss, it gives us hope that He’s doing much more in our lives than giving us a baby.  Through the grief we have to deal with now, someday we’ll see an astonishing contrast, created in our lives by a loving and miraculous God.