I sit at the kitchen table, staring. The sunlight pours in the window beside me but does so gently, filtered through clouds and branches, and the Christmas cards propped up on the sill. I don’t see the sunlight or the cards; I don’t feel any of it. Because I’m back in the hospital, holding my baby girl, watching her heart beat.

We had absolutely no control. Why worry? The plane was going down, but we were with the person we loved.

My mom told me that one of the times she sat with a parishioner who had a stillbirth, a nurse told them that this baby spent their life in utero knowing nothing but love. Leif and Autumn knew nothing but love. We might not have memories of their personalities or what they looked like or how they smelled, but we watch our living child play beneath the trees with a leaf in his hands jumping into piles he’s made and we remember loving them like we love our living child. And so even though we have crashed yet again, that love remains and maybe will guide us as we sort through the wreckage.

In that moment I took it as reassurance, as the younger sister winking at the elder. My last miscarriage, an anembryonic pregnancy back in 2018, was of a little girl who I named Persephone. This moment felt like my two babies connecting, healing this gap in our family.

Now I read it as them reaching toward one another, soon to be reunited.

In our tradition, each baptism serves as a remembrance of restoration for the gathered community. Each baptism is an opportunity to commit and recommit to the baptismal vows others made for us. Each baptism is a time to hear the story of God’s saving acts through water and remember anew that God is still saving us. My child’s baptism was mine and my spouse’s and my sisters’ and even in a way the cat’s: every baptism proclaims, reminds, insists that we are all soaked by the love of God.

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day is a day to wander in and out of wondering.

After my third loss at the end of April in 2018, I sometimes found myself believing that love was wasted after all. And still, even with a living child, I struggle with due date anniversaries, especially as we have had more failed fertility treatments trying for more children. I listen to the advice of friends with three year olds and remember that I could have known this stuff already. I see a four-year-old playing at the playground and feel robbed of all the years I could not watch my four-year-old play. The feeling of love wasted is a lie because love continues connecting us to one another, even beyond the grave, but the feeling of love wasted also points to the persistence of loss. My friend Rev. Tiffany Patterson lost her daughter Josie, and she said once that she didn’t just loose an infant, but a one year old, and a two year old, and an eight year old. We have lost so many possibilities.

I recognize that loss, but I have decided, as my living child runs around with fistfuls of pancake he wouldn’t eat in his high chair, that today I will continue to love fiercely, buoyantly.

…the love I have felt today has been threaded through with loss, the loss caused by grief and the loss caused by injustice..

But even in that loss I have felt God's arms wrapped around me as family and mentors, friends from high school and seminary, colleagues, parishioners and co-ministers drove all the way here to celebrate with me, whoop-whooped in support as Bishops prayed over me, commissioned me to take on the mantle of trouble-maker and justice-seeker, and covered social media with well-wishes and encouragement. I have felt hope again, for myself, for the church, for our world.

Something broke inside me after my third miscarriage. This time, I had gotten pregnant after a frozen embryo transfer with a genetically viable embryo. At the time, I knew less than a handful of people who had failed frozen embryo transfers and no one who had ever miscarried after IVF. I felt that my body had played the cruelest trick on me. I felt that God had too as I spent my whole life wanting not only to be a mother but to birth children and I could not even manage to with loads of medical intervention. I could not face going back to work in a church and preach resurrection when celebration of new life would fall falsely from my mouth and my entire being felt empty.

So I ran away.

It took me a few years to be open about my struggle with infertility. I was one of those annoying people who got good grades without even trying, jumped from college to grad school straight into a job. I married my high school sweet heart. Yes, I had setbacks and disappointments, but I overcame them, figured out a new path forward. I got stuck with infertility. I am still stuck because of infertility. Many losses in life might feel that way; I don’t think this stuckness is unique to infertility. I got stuck because infertility is a betrayal, a huge betrayal by my body. And a betrayal by God.

None of the gospels tell us that Jesus didn’t feel his suffering. We might think so when we read John, we might even think so reading this word from Jesus. But I think if we read Jesus entrusting his life in his last breath without understanding how he felt suffering then we miss how Jesus teaches us--- teaches me!--- in this moment. Jesus teaches us that even in the midst of pain and suffering, even when everything goes wrong and you can’t imagine how such awful ugliness can be redeemed, we can entrust our spirits not just at the end but our whole lives right now to God. Even if it looks like the plane is going to crash and there’s nothing we can do. Even if it looks like the miracles illuminated in scripture are not evident in our own lives. Even when we have loved and kept on loving and the fear of the world overwhelmed us anyway. Even then, we can entrust our lives to God, knowing that we are with the one who loves us.

One of my favorite stories in scripture is that of the woman who anoints Jesus. There is a story in all for Gospels that tells her story--- though each of those stories are very different and may not even describe the same woman. Tonight, on this last night of Women's History Month, and in my Holy Week service at church this week, I am focusing on the story from Matthew 26:6-13.

So many of our interpretations of Holy Week over the millennia has devolved to how depraved we are and how we need superhuman strength to fix our brokenness. But when I read the Holy Week story, even here on Palm Sunday, I see how Jesus’ power is not in taking sin onto himself, but on fostering a love so strong it can teach us to reach out tenderly to one another even in our own need. Jesus flipped the script of what a king could be, coming into the city on a humble donkey, and that act inspired others to flip the script of desperation and isolation. May we use this Palm Sunday story to interrupt our isolation and share a bit more tenderness in the world.

What little I know about healing is that it is not something that happens when we are alone. Grief and trauma are isolating experiences, and finding just one support group can make all the difference. As can taking action- telling your story, reaching out to leaders in your community, pestering your elected officials. I'm getting to work and invite you to join me.

In scripture, there is a story of a woman who will not stop bleeding: Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years (Mark 5:25, see also Matthew and Luke). I often feel like this woman because I am desperate for healing, and it seems from my miscarriages that I will never stop bleeding. Now, I have a living child, but I still feel this need for healing. In the age of COVID-19, struggling with the need for healing from the virus and from loneliness and from racism, this story feels more present than ever.

Five years ago, I had bought a onesie for Aaron's birthday. Aaron is my spouse, and he is a pilot, so I bought a onesie naming our baby a pilot-in-training. I miscarried that child, our first child, on Aaron's birthday. When I got home from the hospital, I wouldn't let him open it. I balled it up and threw it under the bed. Eventually, this onesie made its way to my sister's house because it was too painful to keep in my house. She held it for me, returning it to me in time for my living child to wear it on Aaron's birthday last year.

We know another world is possible.
And we know that new leaders will not save us.
As we lift our voices, we lift our hands,
so we can do the work of gratitude, repentance, and peace
together.

Scripture does not have to be another purveyor of toxic positivity in our lives, telling us to suck it up and be happy because if things aren’t good now, they will be, or if things aren’t good now you just have to try harder. Instead, scripture can help us build resilience in difficult times. I got to the point in my life that I was just focused on survival. Reading ahead to the birth of the promised child, dreaming of an idyllic future of my own was something I did for the first three years of infertility and then I could not anymore. My heart was too bruised and broken from all our losses and failures. But I sometimes found peace in pouring myself out in prayer. And when I found myself laughing bitterly, I reached out to those I love to try to find true laughter. I took strength from reading these stories and knowing that the journey of faith is less about motivational mantras we can embroider on a pillow and more about putting one step in front of the other and recognizing God with us when we can.

Our BB-8 stocking spent much of it's existence buried in a box of Christmas decorations, a gift for me but one that as soon as I saw it I knew I wanted it to be my child's stocking. Only no child of mine made it earthside for many years. When one finally did, I even called him BB-8 because he came after 7 other losses and fertility treatments.

I share this not to say, "Look how God's timing aligned with my love of Star Wars," because that's terrible theology people! He could just as easily been our BB-53, since we had 53 months of devastating negative pregnancy tests and losses before he stuck. But I choose to make meaning out of this Star Wars character as a way to share with myself and my family our story of resilience.