God Is Good...All The Time?

This is a different sort of blogpost in that I feel the need to spill my guts more than share my thoughts. I tend to think my posts through a bit more, but I need to get this one out.


I also hate that it requires some back story explanation, because I barely feel up to that. What I want to do is shout angrily from my front porch, but this will have to suffice.


3 years ago, Rachel and I decided to try for baby #2, Harry's little brother or sister. Given how easy it had been to conceive Harry, we felt confident it would go as smoothly a second time. It did not. Months passed. A year. And, finally, Rachel's doctor said she doubted that Rachel would ever get pregnant again.


Rachel and I had always said that we would pursue adoption, should something like this situation arise, and took this as a sign that adoption was in our future. We were discouraged to discover that adoption was far more expensive than we had anticipated and, given that our church-planting efforts had meant less money every month and not more, adoption seemed less and less likely a reality.


Through all of this, we prayed. Prayed to know God's will for us, prayed for God to make a way where there seemed to be no way.


And then, 3 weeks ago, we discovered that Rachel was 6 weeks pregnant. We were ecstatic, overjoyed, elated. We celebrated with our friends and talked with our church and with our son about the way in which God can still work miracles and does. The last 3 weeks, we have been walking on air. Just this past week, our church has been studying the last part of the book of James and prayers offered in faith.


Then, last night, Rachel began to have some bleeding. And I started offering prayers in faith. We made an appointment with her doctor for this morning. The sonogram revealed that our baby no longer had a heartbeat.


We are devastated. I know we're not the first people to experience a miscarriage and that many people, some of you who will read this blog, have experienced much worse. Still, we are devastated. We are angry. We are hurt. We are confused. And James 5 reads like a bad joke.


And yet, there's something else that I really need to get out. Within minutes of receiving the news, I felt this compulsion, almost as strong as a voice in my head, to acknowledge, out loud, that God is good.


I ignored it. Screw Him, I wouldn't give Him the satisfaction. But it persisted. A basic knowledge of what is true and a need to express it, despite the circumstances. Hours later, about 10 minutes ago, I broke down and did it.


At church we grew up saying to one another, "God is good...all the time. And all the time...God is good." And I believe it as strongly today as I have any day of my life. But, in some ways, that just makes it worse. That just makes this hurt more.


The subject of this post asks a question, but I know the answer; God is good.  Today, that is making me angry and confused. And, I guess, I'll just have to sit with that and think and feel and pray my way through it. But I also had to stop and acknowledge, publicly, that God is good, even if, today, that leaves me with as many questions as it does answers.


Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.