Jenna and her husband, Crispin, are among the most gentle and trusting people you could meet. When they were looking for a house to buy, they found the perfect place. They were thrilled.
They told the realtor that they would think about it overnight and call in the morning to buy: They wanted one night to sleep on the decision, rejoice before being swept up in the business of buying and moving. But when they phoned the next morning the house had been sold!
They were aghast! Jenna wept and grieved. How could the Spirit do this? How could God show them everything they wanted and take it away? It is the age-old cry.
A few weeks later Jenna and Crispin found an even better house, and then she remembered that the Spirit sometimes removes things in order to bring us the true desires of our hearts, the unvoiced longings we don’t even know we hold.
I have another friend, who, at 50 years of age, wants desperately to get pregnant with her second husband. The couple spent thousands of dollars on fertility tests, and when she was impregnated, my friend was sure the new little soul was coming to her. She miscarried. The pain was intolerable! Now she is undergoing the procedures again, but in the meantime she tells me that she is glad for the miscarriage—not losing the baby, of course not that—but because she discovered depths to the new marriage and her relationship with her partner that she could not have imagined.
Now she knows the love she and her husband share, independent of children. She knows the marriage will survive anything. She knows that when the baby comes (as it will), it will arrive to a marriage bonded and strengthened by the pain that both father and mother have undergone.
