I’m 27 weeks, 1 day pregnant with this new baby, the one all the nurses and doctors call the happiest pre-termer they’ve ever “met.” He’s constantly on the move, and his heart is already as steady and strong as a full termer. Strange that his should be, when my own feels so torn. Am I bleeding from a broken heart?
We lost a baby in January: our August Child. I was 13 weeks pregnant when they couldn’t find his beating heart. I wished maybe mine would stop then, too. They called it a “missed miscarriage.” Strange that my body clung to a baby whose life was lost inside of me, when it had previously cast Alder’s thriving one aside. I am facing another premature dispensation of this Happy Boy, not because of infection, rupture, or labour, but because of the malformation of the home I’ve created for him.
Hemorrhaging heart, hemorrhaging home.
There’s a hemorrhaging woman in Luke’s Gospel, too. She’s had 12 years of bleeding: 12 years of wondering when her body will finally cooperate; 12 years under the curse of living in her own skin; 12 years of failed cures, dashed dreams, exhausted bank accounts. Despite her misdiagnosis and failure physicians she still has one hope: Jesus can heal her. She’s so confident in His power she thinks she could receive her cure and slip away unnoticed. Just a little brush against his cloak. No one need know…
But Jesus doesn’t let her slip away as she hopes. There is no escaping the spotlight for this fragile soul. I’ve always wondered why. Why doesn’t He let her go in obscurity—thankfully, but privately—rejoicing in the healing she’s received? Why doesn’t he let her take what she wants and leave?
Maybe her heart was bleeding, too. And Jesus doesn’t deal in half measures; He wants all of her well. He wants to give her more than she knows she needs. “Little Daughter,” he tells her, “your faith has made you well. Go in peace.”
In those simple sentences, he shatters the shame in her heart and the inditement of the public. He heals her hemorrhaged heart. “Little Daughter, My Girl.” I imagine the meaning: “I know your body has rebelled against you. I know you want to crawl back to your home and heal quietly, recover slow from the trauma and years of judgement and disappointment and sickness. You’re hoping maybe everyone will forget who you are, what you’ve dealt with, and maybe even one day you’ll rejoin society and reclaim your hopes and dreams of a normal life. But it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks. Your dreams restored can’t fix your heart. I want that fixed, too. So I claim you. It’s not your sin that made you sick. It’s your faith that made you well.”
On the way to heal someone else’s little daughter, Jesus heals His own.
I know more than ever that it’s this type of healing that I need. Not just the kind where my vasa previa resolves, my placenta shifts, my body starts behaving and my baby comes safe weeks from now. I want that desperately, but I need heart healing, too. A heart that no longer bleeds from the pain and shame of wondering why my body is in shambles, why it costs so much to me and my family, why I can’t do what “women are created to do.”
I need healing from the three years I’ve lived in the shadow of my quiet, self inflicted shame of wondering if this is really all my fault.
The subtle judgment over whether having another child was selfish or unwise.
The shame of thinking I have nothing to offer because all I seem to do is fail and require more care.
I thought I could reclaim my life with a successful pregnancy; a quiet, normal delivery that ended with a beautiful baby and a happy family. We never announced the pregnancy. I wanted to slip away unnoticed, and return with normal baby and a normal life. See? I can do this, too. . .
But Jesus won’t let me go with half measures. So here I am with bleeding heart and bleeding body. And I’ve learned something from considering this Little Daughter in Luke: I’m not gonna brush and run. I’m going to cling to that cloak and I’m not letting go until all of me is well: whole home, whole heart.