Glees & Glums: Finding Peace in the Darkest Moments

​"Views expressed in blog posts do not necessarily reflect the views of the Early Pregnancy Loss Association"

By: Andrea Hubin

“Ups and downs.”
“Highlights and lowlights.”
“Glees and glums.”

Whatever he chose to call it that week, the drill was the same: each Monday morning, my teacher would ask everyone to share one positive and one negative thing from the previous weekend.

I’m sure it was just a strategic way for him to get all our chatting out before class so that we’d pay better attention. However, it pointed to a truth that still resonates with me today:

Good and bad are a part of every day. How you define any particular day or circumstance depends on your perspective.

The day I heard the heart-stabbing words, “There’s no heartbeat,” was such a day. Those three simple words caught me completely off guard.

Fewer than two weeks prior, I had visited the doctor to confirm my excited suspicions—I was pregnant with my second child.  I heard the baby’s heartbeat (166 bpm) and immediately began planning how and when my husband and I could begin sharing the news.

Now, only days after making our announcement to family and friends, we stared at the motionless body of our little one on the ultrasound screen.
After a rather dazed conversation with the doctor, I asked if he could print some photographs from the ultrasound for me. He agreed and told us to wait a few moments in the lobby.

As my husband and I sat holding hands in numbed silence, a woman stood up from her seat across the waiting room and made her way over to us.
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“I don’t know what you believe as far as religion and Christianity go,” she said tentatively, “but I felt God telling me to come over and pray for you.”   
She went on to explain that she was not even supposed to be there that day.  She had some prior obligation at a nearby building and somehow found herself in this office.  (Admittedly, her explanation may have been clearer than this, but my mind was not in a state to remember exact details.)

“I have no idea exactly why or what’s going on in your life, but I felt that I should obey Him.  Perhaps this is why I am here today. May I pray for you?”

In our darkest moment to date, our gracious Heavenly Father immediately sent us a precious reminder of His steadfast love.  As we sat in our grief, not yet knowing how to pray, He sent another one of His children to intercede on our behalf.

This is not to say that this trial was automatically easy, or that there was no place for further grief.  On the contrary, after grieving only briefly together in the doctor’s office, my husband and I stopped at a park on the way home to weep together and jointly cry out to God in our disappointment and heartbreak.

But that woman’s prayer was a glimmer, a ray of light pointing to God’s love on a day when it would be hard for us to see anything but darkness and disappointment on our own.

The Bible tells us that we live in a world full of sin and suffering (Genesis 6:5; Jeremiah 17:9). It is no wonder, then, we tend to find plenty of “glums” in a any day.

However, the Bible says in Psalm 145, “The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made.” Even in our darkest moments, we found abundant evidence of God’s steadfast love and kindness.

​But that woman’s prayer was a glimmer, a ray of light pointing to God’s love on a day when it would be hard to for us to see anything but darkness and disappointment on our own.

In the days and weeks (and months) that followed, God showed us so many evidences of His outpouring of love that I have not time to fully recount them all:

• a sister who didn’t know what to say but dropped everything to just come and be with me
• a woman who explained her own story of what it was like to pass a baby (when doctors would tell me nothing more than “it’s different for everyone”)
• family members who prayed and cried and shared Bible verses with me
• the sense of peace and closure I received when I passed my son quietly at home and held him in the palm of my hand
• the opportunities I had to encourage other friends who miscarried a child within that very next year
• the vibrant grin of my now two-year-old daughter who would not have existed had my late son survived

The list goes on and on.

The name we chose for our son sums it all up:  Jaron Tobias

Derived from Hebrew, “Jaron” means “to sing or shout out” while “Tobias” means “Yahweh [the Lord] is good.” We chose his name to be a constant reminder—in any and every trial—to sing out that the Lord is good.

​Though this is not the road I would have chosen, I can truly say with all my heart:  

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning, GREAT IS YOUR FAITHFULNESS.”

Andrea Hubin is a pastor's wife and homeschooling mom with four precious children.