Silent Cries: Grief and Hope

The bereavement midwives had told us that we’d probably fall into one of two groups of grieving parents: those who wanted to try for another baby right away and those who simply couldn’t face the possibility of carrying another loss. Some doctors advised us to wait until the results of the postmortem. Others dismissed that, advising that we should try when the time was right for us. In the thick fog of contradictory medical advice, all we could do was head for the light. For Joanna and me, the only light we could make out in grief’s shadow was that of holding another baby in our arms. Short of bringing Edith back, there was nothing we wanted more.

Before that time, I’d always thought grief and hope were on opposite sides of the emotion spectrum. It took Edith’s death for me to realize how wrong I was. Grief and hope are like new lovers, having recently met by some chance and now impossible to separate. Whenever grief turned up, hope was there with it – hope of better times ahead, and of regaining what had been lost.

In our grief, we’d never hoped so much for another baby. We longed to hear those newborn cries and feel the clasp of tiny fingers around ours. In some ways, this hope kept us going and gave us the motivation to get out of bed in the morning. Friends spoke about this as a positive sign of being on the road to recovery. However, despite giving us the motivation to put one foot in front of the other, longing for another baby did nothing to heal us. The more we hoped for another baby, the more we looked for some assurance that it would happen. And because no one could promise this, when our hope weighed heavy we were only pushed deeper into the throes of grief – an inescapable cycle towards hopelessness.

Everything felt so fragile. What if God said ‘No’ to another? What if we did get pregnant . . . how would we make it through nine months of going to bed not knowing if Joanna would miscarry or have another stillbirth? What if God gave us another baby but then something happened to Jos? The Lord gives, and he takes away. Finding solid ground, when the rug of our lives had just been pulled from under our feet, felt near impossible.

Of course, hope can be a healthy sign in grief’s gloom, but it has to be the right kind of hope – one that doesn’t stand on sinking sand, but on solid rock. Our lives amount to little more than holding on to some kind of hope, but the Bible has a very strange category of the sinking-sand kind of hope that grievers are prone to, and that I was beginning to put my trust in. It’s the kind of hope that we can hold on to tightly, but that will ultimately leave us without hope.

God’s Word says that, without Jesus, we humans are ‘without hope and without God in the world’ (Ephesians 2:12, my emphasis). After suffering the loss of one of God’s good gifts, who wouldn’t be prone to finding hope in regaining that gift? Whether we look to what we’ve lost or something else, grieving will always mean finding hope in something. And because it’s all that we know, we tend to look for this hope ‘in the world’. But with its many gifts of God’s grace, this world is the very place where God says that lasting hope can’t be found. If our deepest hope is here, we’re ultimately without God, and without hope in a world that can’t give it to us. With Jesus, however, we find what we’re looking for: our hope is transferred from this world to the future world that Jesus promises his followers. Unlike our hopes, pinned to our present home, this is a world that ‘does not disappoint’ (Romans 5:5, NKJV).

It’s no coincidence that when the apostle Peter writes his famous description of the hope Jesus offers, he writes it to grieving Christians like you and me, prone to shift our hope on to sand. We grieve for our children, and so hope for another baby. But, to our despair, that hope can die overnight. It has once, or perhaps twice, and it might do again. So Peter points towards our future hope in Jesus as a ‘living hope . . . that can never perish, spoil or fade’ (1 Peter 1:3–4) – this hope can’t die. He writes:

In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed. (1 Peter 1:6–7) 

Unlike many well-meaning friends who encouraged us with the likelihood that we’d have more children, Peter points to a hope that isn’t based on statistics; it isn’t here in this world, but it’s ‘kept in heaven’ for us (1 Peter 1:4). Our perseverance through grief grows in us our heavenly hope, so that when we die Jesus will be praised, and we will finally take hold of what we always hoped to find in this world.

There’s no short cut to this solid-rock kind of hope. For me, it was only when I found myself desperately holding on to the hope of another baby, and finding it to be hopelessly insufficient, that God began to work. Over the following months, he continued that work, not to take my hope away but to slowly replace it with a better one.

Silent Cries is one of the IVP January 2021 Releases. We've also published a number of related titles on grief and hope that you might find helpful, and we share them below.