One year ago, I went to the hospital and lost a baby.

It wasn’t the first baby I had lost. It was the second one that never made it past the first trimester. And because I had already carried two healthy babies to full-term, I figured that God would give me some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card — a pass on suffering during the rest of my pregnancies.

I was so confident that I would be fine in this pregnancy, I barely blinked an eye when the nurse told me I was anemic and needed to get on iron supplements. I called in the prescription and decided to pick up the pills after my vacation to Seattle. I was only going to be gone for 9 days. I would eat iron-rich foods and get on iron pills when I got back.

I was more worried about flying and getting sick on the flight than my hemoglobin levels, but I discussed it with my doctor, and I felt great on the flight and during the trip. No morning sickness. No nausea. I felt more tired than I had ever felt in my life, but I figured that pregnant women with two small children should feel tired.

And then a week after I got home, I found myself on a hospital bed looking at a stomach that I knew it was way too flat to house any life. I knew my pregnancy was over.

What I didn’t know is that I wouldn’t bounce back. I wouldn’t get up a few days later and resume my life. I would have to climb out of a hell-hole of suffering.

I remember feeling so betrayed by God when it happened. How could He let it happen to me two times? Wasn’t one baby loss enough? And to add insult to injury, this second miscarriage confined me to a bed for weeks and weeks.

But it was out of that place of sadness and solitude in my bedroom that I began to write. And though I wanted to birth my Addison Grace at 40 weeks, God birthed in me instead a greater compassion and empathy for others and a call to minister to other women. I share this journey with you here on my blog with every post I write — and it is from that place of remembering and reflection that I write a guest post for Forget-Me-Not, Oh Lord! this week. I talk about how my view of what happened is different now than it was then. I talk about how I have been finding “beauty for ashes” in a life event I would not describe with any words less than “horrific” and “shocking.” I would love for you to click the link and join me there.

I hope you will find encouragement from the post if you are in the middle of something hard. Dorothy Valcárcel, author of the devotional “Transformation Garden: Where Every Woman Blooms,” includes some lovely lines in her most recent July 23 and July 24 devotions:

“There are some lives that seem to be utterly destroyed by some great and sore trial, but beyond the sorrow they move on again in calmer, fuller strength, not destroyed, not a particle of their real life wasted… Their character shines out in richer luster and rarer splendor than ever in the days when their hearts were fullest of joy and gladness.” — J.R. Miller

“(Jesus) has been where we are, and He walks with us and weeps with us. And with your tears He can water the seeds of character planted by pain.” — Stephen Arterburn and Jack Felton

“God has a bottle and a book for His (children’s) tears. What was sown as a tear will come up as a pearl.” — Matthew Henry