Plans & Change & Heartache...


We had planned to be at the beach this past week with our friends, I would have been 16 going on 17 weeks along and anxiously & excitedly waiting to find out if we were having a boy or girl in only a few short weeks after we’d returned from our vacation. Our last big trip as a family of five! 
Monday was scheduled to be a routine check up, but instead no heart tones were found on the doppler. I was sent to ultrasound minutes later, where it was confirmed that we had lost our baby a week and a half prior. 
I never wanted us to experience this. No one should have to. But here we are. Our hearts left with a gaping hole that can be filled with nothing else this side of heaven. I have never felt heartache like this. Our fourth baby, what would have been our family’s little caboose. 
So many things we had envisioned as a family of six, the sweetest little plans the kids had made in their own hearts, dreams of October through December with a new baby, talking nearly every night at dinner about who would fill the sixth chair at our table... 
Truthfully, I still feel so devastated that I don’t have a lot of encouraging words about it. I wish that I did, and I hope that I do at some point. It feels cruel & it feels unfair, and yet somehow, somewhere inside me I still know that God loves us. I see His love in the faces of my children & in Chris every single day. I feel it when I worship & today in the warm sun on my shoulders as I walked across the parking lot. I see it in the sunset over our lake & in my home that is filled to the brim with flowers sent from so many people who love us & are lifting us up during what feels like our darkest hour.
I miss our baby, I miss being pregnant, but am thankful to have carried her for a season. I am hopeful that God will bless us with another baby to keep & I feel certain that even in the company of deep sorrow, He will continue to weave beauty into our story.
 "Can't go back to the beginning, 
Can't control what tomorrow will bring, 
But I know here in the middle, 
Is the place where You promise to be."