*This article addresses miscarriage, disabilities and hardships.
My first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Friends offered obligatory words of comfort, but their words had little effect. With every consolation of “It just wasn’t meant to be,” the crevasse between my shattered reality and my expectations of God deepened. Eventually, I worked through my grief, but I was hurt by my Heavenly Father’s silence regarding why the tragedy had occurred. I wanted an answer, and I believed, in order to heal, I needed one. So, when God didn’t give me a reason, I made one up.
I decided something must have been wrong with the baby, and God saved me from a life of adversity by allowing me to have a miscarriage.
It wasn’t until years later I realized my rationalization was wrong. My nearly-adult daughter who was preparing to be a medical missionary became blind. Overnight, we went from being the perfect family to the pitied one. The hardship I was so certain God had saved me from became a daily reality.
Again, I asked for an answer. And again, God didn’t give me one. Instead, He gave me the Truth.
Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them…” I’d read that verse dozens of times but had never been able to reconcile the idea of people being made in the God’s image with the presence of disability in the world. Now that my life was impacted by disability, however, I saw the verse differently. In those words, God promised that every child—including the one I lost through miscarriage, the one I assumed was “defective”—was perfectly created in God’s image. I read the verse, but couldn’t fully grasp its meaning until I thought about my disabled daughter.
Nothing was “wrong” with her, at least not to me. Her disability had more to do with the degree of difficulty in her life than the degree of defect. She was an amazing person—blind, but in spite of her condition and to a certain extent because of it—a living testimony of God’s grace. In fact, many times, my daughter’s disability wasn’t a burden at all but a blessing, an opportunity to see God work.
When I stopped categorizing disability as “something wrong,” I was able to see the truth. Disability does not diminish the image of God. In fact, every person is disabled in some way because no one is perfect. People are created in the image of God not because of what they can do but because God declares it.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized if my child, with or without a disability, was created in the image of God, there was no way God would have caused my miscarriage. Satan is the one who comes to kill, steal, and destroy (John 10:10): the source of death, disease, and destruction. Yes, the enemy dealt my family a blow through my miscarriage and my daughter’s blindness, but God never allows anything to happen He can’t eventually use for our benefit and His glory. And God continues to prove that every day.
When heartache comes, it’s only natural to ask questions, to seek answers. It’s part of the healing process. God doesn’t mind that we ask why, but we need to remember when we can’t see His hand, we can trust His heart. We don’t have to understand a situation to trust His sovereignty and find peace in His Word. When life is difficult and we’re seeking solutions, we may not always find the answer we want, but if we keep looking, we’ll discover the Truth we need.
By Glenda Durano
used by permission
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