Grace Denied, Grace Given

I read a devotion recently from John Piper and it made me want to pass it along with my own story applied to it. In the devotion, he takes an example from Paul when he cried out to God three times for relief from his thorn in the flesh. But God’s grace did not come in the form he asked. It came in another form. Christ answered, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Piper talks about how God often blesses us with a “grace given” in the circle of “grace denied”. My wife and I have experienced that first-hand recently. About 2 years ago, we started trying to have a child. It took a few months, but we finally got our first positive pregnancy test. We were so excited, and probably at the time took for granted how much of an amazing miracle it is to have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby, not really thinking about how commonly things go wrong especially early on. At our first ultrasound, we found out that either a baby had never developed or it had died and there was no sign of it anymore except its gestational sac.

The grace of a healthy baby at that time was denied. But within that circle, there was so much grace given in the form of the support with which God surrounded us. Our family and friends gave us much needed reminding of truth. It’s also a grace that God designed us so that if there are certain lethal problems in the early development process, there is a built-in mechanism to stop the process early on. That’s why most miscarriages occur in the first trimester and many times before the first dating ultrasound. This way, at least there are less of the much more horrible experiences of losing a baby later in pregnancy after the couple has more of a chance to form a bond with it. Now it might seem like a stretch to find God’s grace in any miscarriage, and you might say the ultimate grace would be for there to be no miscarriages. Sadly, that’s not the reality we live in at this time, but I believe that that ultimate grace is coming at Christ’s return.

God supplied us with the grace to try again several months later. But again, in a very similar chain of events, we found out that our baby never developed a heartbeat. We had another miscarriage, and another grace denied. But just like the first time, God gave us grace in the support to help us through the grief and confusion. It was certainly hard to see his grace in the midst of our suffering from our perspective at the time through all of the other negative junk that came around that time and thereafter with my wife eventually spiraling into a severe bout of depression and faith crisis, which is an entire different saga in itself. But in retrospect, the fog begins to clear a bit and God’s grace becomes more obvious, and it’s easier now to spot his grace in the moment.

As in Paul’s example in 2 Corinthians, we experienced a grace given in the form of Christ’s sustaining power in unrelieved affliction. And like Paul, now we are much more able to respond in future suffering with faith in the sufficiency of his future grace.

With so much thankfulness in my heart, I can say that our story doesn’t end there. About a year and a half after our second miscarriage, I am sitting here writing this while gazing at our healthy, beautiful two day old son sleeping quietly in his little hospital carrier. His name is Samuel, meaning “God has heard”, which in Hannah’s case in 1 Samuel was her prayer for a child, not unlike ours. God has finally given us the grace of a healthy baby!

I realize that God would still have been just as gracious and loving to us if he chose to answer our prayer for a child in a different way, whether through adoption or withholding a child altogether, because he knows us better than we ever could, and his plans for us are so much wiser and better for us than we could ever plan for ourselves. We have learned through this process, among many other things, to trust in God’s goodness and His plans for us even if at the time they look nothing like the best thing for us.

As Piper writes, “We should not be surprised that God gives us wonderful graces in the midst of suffering that we had asked him to spare us. He knows best how to apportion his grace for our good and for his glory.” Praise God from whom all blessings flow!