Trailblazers
Tracing God's faithfulness through my family's hard stories.
TW: infant loss and miscarriage
On St Paddy’s Day in 1979, my parent’s first baby was born. My mom was just 21. They gave him my daddy’s name and called him Robby. Only he was born blue and stayed blue. He had a congenital heart defect. He was missing his atrial septal wall. He was one of the first babies at the children’s hospital to have the surgery to repair it.
It didn’t keep.
He died on Labor Day, only five months young.
Today that surgery is not so new, nor the odds of his condition so poor. Robby helped blaze a trail for the babies with ASD who would come after him.
My mom has told me of how, after Robby’s death, she felt like a mother but had no baby to mother. How she suffered three miscarriages after Robby. How when she was pregnant with me, it didn’t feel safe to believe I was real until she heard my strong cries and saw my pink skin.
When I had my fourth miscarriage, and I was ready to tie up my tubes so I could never lose again, it was my mom that spoke the fragile words of hope: “If I had given up, you wouldn’t be here, Amanda.”
She brought me two newborn outfits after my fifth miscarriage, one boy and one girl. She said she didn’t want it to seem like she was picking a gender. She wanted to give me a piece of hope to hold on to. Nine months later, I held the boy for the one outfit–Sam. Four years later, to my great surprise, I held the girl for the other outfit–Junie.
Moms are trailblazers.
This week, my mom and I were talking about Robby’s time in the hospital. She told me how she wasn’t a good mom. How it bothered her when they put needles into Robby and he wailed in pain. How he was fragile, and she feared she would break him.
My nephew is in the diagnosis process for an incurable genetic condition. It’s the condition behind his non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I’d like to think cancer is bad enough and, for goodness sake, if one has to have it, it should stand alone. It should not be a symptom of some other awful disease. But here we are.
I thought of Robby again. How my mom has the words my sister will need for the journey ahead of her. How my mom has blazed a trail of desperate hope, of holding on and of letting go, of wincing before needle pokes that are not your own and wishing for a way to take the pain on your own self instead.
I wonder if that’s how God has felt before our suffering? If he wished to take our pain onto himself, and so he did, in the person of his own son—
on a cross—
crown of thorns—
nails and scourge—
spit and curses.
Jesus is the trailblazer through our suffering.
I’ve been amazed to find my own hard stories becoming the words that prod someone onward.
I did not experience five miscarriages or go into the mental hospital thinking I was blazing a trail. I was desperate, surviving, but way-making nevertheless. You can’t predict who you are blazing a trail for, who will come up behind you and walk a similar path. It might even be your own flesh and blood.
You might even find that you hate your suffering so much less when you discover it’s the grace of God for someone you dearly love.
Suffering is hard to make sense of. I can’t tell you what God will make of your suffering or how long it will take until you can look back and call it good. Maybe it will take the distance of heaven and the perspective of eternity.
It’s hard to sort out the will of God. Does he cause our pain? Allow it? Where is that line? Perhaps a qualified seminarian can give me a textbook answer, but I doubt I’d be interested.
Here’s what I know: in God’s economy, nothing is wasted.
While there might be times we feel like we are hacking through a dense jungle in the dark and we can’t see the way, hear me. It’s not just that God makes a way through our pain, he is The Way. He laid out our impossible Red-Sea-Road way forward when his body broke and his blood shed.
JRR Tolkien calls the moment in stories when heaven breaks through hopelessness a eucatastrophe. It means “a good turn.” It’s the Riders of Rohan returning at dawn with Gandalf when the Battle of Helm’s Deep seems lost. Jesus is our eucatastrophe. Our Red Sea Road. What is impossible to face is made possible in Christ.
He’s gone before us. He goes with us.
And he gives us His body full of trailblazers pointing us onward.
Keep holding on to hope, friend. You are blazing trails too.
I’m speechless but in tears and raising my arms to the heavens in reverent thanks for his trailblazing, the way he is our eucatastrophe, and how He is our Red Sea Road 😭🙏🏻❤️ please don’t ever stop writing
Thank you for sharing this. Trailblaze is the name of my freelance business, and I've experienced pregnancy loss. I'd never thought to think of trailblazing in this way. But just this week, a friend experienced a miscarriage and told me, "The way you shared about your loss really shaped the way I approach pregnancy." The silver lining of suffering is, as you say, our ability to help others in the same suffering.