Silent Cries: What does it mean to carry burdens?

January 22, 2021 Tom Creedy

God gives us more than we can carry. Joanna Ivey shares her experience in this extract from Silent Cries.

I’ve often heard people say that God never gives us what we can’t carry. But Jesus says something different. ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me’ (Luke 9:23).

When Jesus took up his cross, it was too heavy for him to carry. The Son of God, who holds the world in his hands, had to call on the help of another man to help shoulder his burden as he walked down the Calvary Road. And he says that if we want to follow him, we too will have to take up our cross – something which will inevitably crush us under its weight, until we too learn to call for help.

The cross I was carrying was too heavy for me. The fear of losing another baby felt too difficult. Not only was this cross too heavy but the road was too long. If I couldn’t manage to stand under the weight, how could I begin to walk with it on my shoulders, let alone make it down the long road to term? It sounds about right that God only gives us what we can carry, but God’s very purpose is to give us what we can’t carry, so that we learn how to depend on the strength that he alone gives for the journey home. Many carry the cross of childlessness or of multiple miscarriages, sometimes for the rest of their lives. For me, even carrying the lighter cross of a rainbow pregnancy* for a limited time meant having no other option than to cry out in desperate prayer to my heavenly Father.

We’d never prayed like we prayed for this baby, because never before had we felt our sheer powerlessness. When there’s nothing you can do to keep your baby alive, you have to go to the only place – the only One – who holds that life, and yours, in his hands. God’s tender reminder was that this was too big for us to carry on our own. And yet his call to take up our cross wasn’t a cruel game, but his way of helping us to take steps forward in the power of his Holy Spirit and in the refuge of his fatherly care. Just as there was no way of having another child without walking this painful path ahead, Jesus’ reminder was that there’s no way home to heaven without taking up our cross daily, with his promise and power to get us there.

Despite every desire of my heart to curl up in a ball and go to bed until the baby was born, this wouldn’t be a faith-filled following of Jesus. God calls us to an active kind of waiting, which looks like following him in faith despite it sometimes feeling impossible to do so. Faith follows. How can we say we trust Jesus if we refuse to follow him when the load feels too much, or when we feel we can do it on our own? Doesn’t God know the load we’re carrying, both because he’s given it to us and because he’s carried it himself, in Jesus? Perhaps this baby would die, a cross so unbearable that it would surely crush me under its weight. But if I’d known that Edith would die, this too would have seemed like an unbearable burden, and yet God had carried us to this point. Wouldn’t he do it again?

Despite constant prayer, there was no time when our cross felt any lighter. In the first trimester, morning sickness provided a spurious barometer of the health of the baby. If I was feeling sick, my body was sustaining life, but when I felt better, was it giving up? I was scared of going to the loo in case I’d find blood – a curious first-trimester detail from Edith’s pregnancy that I’ve always looked back on with questions. Much of the second trimester, I longed to feel sick again. Without sickness or movement, how did I know that the baby hadn’t just died? How long would it take for my body to tell me? Was this normal ligament pain or should I call a midwife? The questions kept coming, and yet it wasn’t until twenty-nine weeks that our worst fears seemed to be coming true.

As I waited for Jonny to pick up the phone, it felt like I couldn’t breathe. Was it all happening again? I paced up and down the living room as the ringing tone went on for what felt like an eternity. ‘Joanna?’ he picked up, about to hear the worst, as he had done every time I’d called him since I was pregnant. But this time he got the response he’d always feared – the unintelligible overflow of crying and fear and breathlessness that made conversation impossible. ‘My love, you have to calm down so you can tell me what’s going on. Have we lost the baby? Please, Lord, please tell me we’ve not lost the baby. Joanna?’ But he was talking to himself. ‘Joanna, take deep breaths . . . deep breaths,’ he repeated. I sat myself down on the sofa and breathed in and out, before finally the black mist of panic began to lift. ‘We’ve not lost the baby.’ Jonny said nothing, but I heard his relief breathing itself out down the phone. ‘Bubs is still moving, but I’ve had some blood. I’ve called the Women’s Hospital and they’ve told me to come in.’ ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ he replied quickly, putting down the phone.

We were used to waiting hours in triage but it was clear that, with my history, no-one was taking any chances: we were called through right away. Although I’d felt the baby move, this was the first time I’d been in this scenario since I’d been strapped up with Edith and the Doppler stick had been pressed into my side, amplifying nothing more than the faint sounds of my own digestive system. As the midwife picked up the Doppler Jonny turned away, head in hands, unable to cope with what we might find out.

‘There’s the heartbeat!’ the midwife smiled, as she moved the stick towards the bottom of my bump. Jonny looked like he was about to faint, but seemingly there was nothing at all wrong with the baby.

This triggered the first of many bi-weekly scans, Day Assessment Unit visits and pregnancy groups, and as we drew closer to thirty-seven weeks the emotions ramped up. We now knew this little one would survive on the outside, so shouldn’t we just get Bubs out? It would have been risky, and perhaps a decision that would undermine God’s work to bring us to a greater trust in him. Besides, our consultant didn’t like the idea.

By this stage, I was no longer working out how to take the next step, but I was walking – stumbling, at least – down the path God had put me on under the weight of this cross. At each of our multiple scans, rather than being shocked that my baby had once died I was shocked that God had kept this child alive. Here was another life that God had ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’. My inability to do anything to sustain my baby’s life had previously led to anxious prayer but now, seeing little legs kick the uterus wall and hearing the bloodstream through the placenta, I was drawn to worship . . . and peace. Not peace that rid me of all my fears, but a settled confidence in God and a relief that I was a mere bystander in the whole thing. From my inability to keep this baby alive to my incapability of walking under the burden of this cross, I’d seen God be true to his word – we are dependent on him for life and breath. On the way home to heaven, yes, we’re called to walk, but we’re also called to watch. To watch God as he proves faithful to his promise to uphold his children as we wait patiently for our hope.

God gives us more than we can carry so that his grace can be seen for what it is: not only as that which saves us, but also as that which upholds us under the many crosses he calls his people to carry – childlessness, baby loss, baby losses being some of the burdens he places on our shoulders. And I’m happy he does it this way; after all, the pressure to be able to carry this weight alone would surely be too much. Instead, like Jesus who endured the cross ‘for the joy that was set before him’ (Hebrews 12:2), by placing these crosses on our shoulders and teaching us to depend on him, he increases our joy as we see his kingdom on the horizon. So long as the joy set before me was the safe delivery of this baby, I was paralysed. But this eternal joy is what has kept me walking under the burden of not knowing whether this pregnancy will end in delight or disaster.

The Lord gives, and he takes away. While I’m desperate that this time he’ll give and not take away, the day is coming when God will no longer take away. And that’s enough to keep one step in front of the other.

Silent Cries is out now, and was one of our January 2021 Releases.

*a 'rainbow baby' is a term for a baby born after a mother experienced a baby loss, from miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death. A rainbow pregnancy is a pregnancy under the same circumstances.