Austin's Blog

Child loss is painful and it isn’t a “one and done” type of loss. You plan for your children to be with you until your earthly end and you usually don’t prepare or plan for the pain of losing them. The pain of child loss is profound and guttural. We feel it in our hearts, in our bones, and in our throats. Can we simply soldier on and ignore it? That’s doubtful. C.S. Lewis famously noted about it, “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” To ignore the pain would be like a runner with a sprained ankle entering a marathon. He will simply lose the race and harm himself further without tending to the ankle.

We have talked about what we must do with our pain. To what end have we been given this opportunity, this terribly heavy cross, this stewardship? We have been granted this hellish experience for a greater good. We are stewards of it, even though we would’ve never asked for it. We live a life we never wanted and yet, as stewards, we have a task before us. Frederick Buechner wisely advises, “Being a good steward of your pain. . . . It involves being alive to your life. It involves taking the risk of being open, of reaching out, of keeping in touch with the pain as well as the joy of what happens because at no time more than at a painful time do we live out of the depths of who we are instead of out of the shallows.” To what is the Lord calling us to do with this awful reality? How will we use it well? What will we do as the dust settles, the grass grows upon sweet Gabe’s grave, and the aging of child loss sits so profoundly on our faces? How will we steward this well?

One thing I don’t want to do is waste it. The loss of Gabriel is just as important as the life of Gabriel. The pain is a testimony to his profound worth, value, and dignity. We don’t want to miss the opportunity to testify to the immeasurable wealth that we’ve gained from both knowing and losing him. Kim Nolywaika, a fellow bereaved parent, writes, “I do not want to waste this pain by letting it destroy me or my relationships. I want to use it to help and encourage others if that is possible because there is a teeming world of hurting people out there. When you are alone and you are weeping, and the longing for your child is a thick and expanding heaviness in your chest, threatening to erupt from your throat in silent, choking grief; when the missing him becomes a mountain of sorrow that looms over you as you whisper your child’s name in astonishment, and it just hurts, hurts like nothing you have ever known before and you cannot escape it; when you feel trapped in the sadness and there seems to be no way out… Do not despair. Sit and let it come. Be still and let it crash through your soul, toppling every idol as it surges through your heart. Let God do the work only He can do, purifying you, conforming you to the image of His Son. He is drilling, hammering, grinding, cutting away all that comes between you and Himself. Of course, it hurts; do not run from it.”

At the end of our lives, we want to hear the Lord Jesus say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.” I want to be a faithful steward of this pain and enter into the joy of my master, a joy that will assuredly include seeing our precious Gabriel again. May the Lord do it!