Worship through Suffering | Kim Palmer
Saturday, December 10, 2005 … more than sixteen years ago, but in many ways, it still feels like yesterday. On that date, at 35 1/2 weeks gestation, I delivered our second child, a son, Andrew Boyd Palmer. He weighed 6 pounds, 3 ounces and was 20.5” long with a full head of dark hair, just like his big sister, Hayley, had when she was born.
But Andrew’s birth was not your typical birth. It wasn’t filled with happy tears and anxious family members waiting for Dad to make the big announcement that his firstborn son had arrived. No. Rather it was filled with a sadness and heartbreak no parents should have to experience, yet some of us do. You see, the night before, the doctor quietly uttered these devastating words to us: “There’s no heartbeat.”
Our Andrew was gone; he would be stillborn.
Never could I have imagined losing a child
It just didn’t happen in my world; nothing like this did. I had only ever heard of tragedies like this happening to other people, usually people I didn’t even know. But I’ve learned when we experience a loss or pain or suffering, that’s when people start coming out of the woodwork to share their own stories … stories of comfort, stories of empathy, stories of understanding what you’re going through. These might be people you’ve seen in church, but have never actually spoken to. Or people you know, but never knew this pain was part of their story, too. They want to comfort you, to let you know it’s going to be okay, that you’re not alone, that it will get easier, and that you can find joy again.
2 Corinthians 1:3–4 says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (NIV).
I never asked God why this had to happen to us. And believe me, that’s just as much a surprise to me as it might be to some of you. But I never once questioned why. Maybe it was the shock of having just lost a child, a child we never even got to meet, but I only ever thought, “Why not? We’re not exempt from pain or suffering or loss. We’re just like any other couple.” I had simply been fortunate enough up until that point in my life not to have experienced the heart-wrenching pain of losing someone close to me.
I did all the right things
I wasn’t particularly close to God when my husband, Wes, and I lost Andrew. In fact, I hadn’t ever really been all that close to him. I didn’t grow up in a Christian home, my family didn’t attend church, and we didn’t read the Bible. I did, however, attend Sunday school as a child occasionally and a Christian camp with friends one summer, so I had certainly been introduced to Jesus. I even invited Jesus into my heart (on several occasions), not fully understanding exactly what that meant, but I knew it meant I would go to heaven one day and live in eternity with him.
In college I started going to church regularly on Sunday mornings with Wes and his parents. I enjoyed going, but probably because it meant I got to spend more time with him, not so much that I was there to learn more about God and his Word and how to develop and deepen my relationship with him. Rather, I found my joy in worldly things.
After college, Wes and I got married and we moved to Illinois. There we found an amazing church where we felt at home and got plugged into a Bible study group with others our age, and we served in ministry together as well. It was more than just going to church on Sunday mornings, and guess what? I started growing spiritually. We both grew spiritually. Wes was even baptized there. Three years later, in 2002, we relocated to Erie and started attending another amazing church, FAC, where we’ve been attending and serving ever since!
I was still very much a “baby Christian” at that point in my life with a lot more spiritual growing to do. God knew what I needed, and he knew exactly how to make it happen, even if it involved pain and suffering … even the pain and suffering of losing a child.
God never wastes our pain; he will use it for his glory. He creates beauty from ashes where we can find joy through suffering! I truly believe God orchestrated everything from Andrew’s conception to giving us the strength to say goodbye to him before we ever had the chance to meet him.
Just a few weeks after losing Andrew, this verse was printed on the inside of the church bulletin on a Sunday morning:
Jeremiah 29:11 “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord … to give you a future with hope” (ESV).
I knew that verse was speaking to me—that God had plans for me and for our family, that losing Andrew wasn’t the end of our story. That became the verse I clung to for a long time. It gave me hope, it promised me joy, and it still does. Less than two years later, we welcomed another baby boy, Levi, into our family.
God is bigger than our pain
Even though losing a child was incredibly difficult and painful, there is a God who loves us and is bigger than our pain. Wes and I clung to his Word and to each other. And guess what? We grew some more. We grew stronger in our faith, and we grew stronger in our marriage. We wanted to learn more about the God we serve and his promises to us. I cannot imagine having walked through our loss alone: no God to lean on, no words of truth to stand on. God saw us through.
Fast forward sixteen-plus years to the present, and God has seen us through many other trials along the way: difficulties in our marriage, the deaths of our fathers, several job losses and changes, just to name a few. And yet, here we are: married for almost twenty-three years, two beautiful children with us, one in heaven, a wonderful church home and family, and so much more. We have found JOY through suffering!
James 1:2–3 reminds us,
“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance” (NIV).
Amen.