When Joy Doesn't Come in the Morning

The morning after my miscarriage I woke up with a throbbing headache and puffy eyes. It’s what I like to call a sobbing hangover. I cried hard the night before. It just poured out of me and I was hardly able to contain it. Eventually I fell asleep, but my dreams were all things pregnancy and miscarriage related and so my sleep was very disturbed.

When I woke up with my sobbing hangover I wondered where my joy was. After all, the Bible says in Psalm 30:5 that “weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning”. I certainly felt no joy. I felt pain. Intense and radiating pain. The hurt was so intense that I wondered if my own heart my just give. I contemplated staying in bed for the rest of the day, but my three tiny blessings were already awake and demanding to get out of their beds. So I got my weary body and soul up out of bed and greeted those beauties with lots of love and kisses.

Throughout the day I would retreat to the bathroom or my bedroom and just cry. It was hard, so very hard to go through the normal routine of the day when I felt anything but normal. It was ridiculous to think that I could go on like this when I had already planned so much. I had hopes and excitement for what was to be. We knew that after this fourth baby our family would be complete. We were already throwing around different names. I contemplated what it would be like to have two kids each in two bedrooms, what it would be like to have four under four for a time, and how I would fit four car seats in our minivan. I was excited about the way we were going to announce this fourth and final Kemp.

All of these things stirred in my heart, rattled in my mind and just left me feeling sick to my stomach. And I wondered again about this joy thing.

I felt bitterness creeping into my heart. I felt that nagging thought far off in the back of my mind blaming God for this one, wondering where He had run off to, questioning why He wasn’t right here with me taking away this heartache and giving me the joy that He had promised. I felt myself slipping down a familiar road of shunning the Lord that has blessed my life so abundantly, pushing my Savior aside just because I was hurting so badly. I wanted someone to blame. I wanted someone to be angry at.

After the kids went to bed I knew I needed to just have some quiet time. Again with the sobbing. But this time I just cried out to the Lord. I told Him how hurt I was, I told Him that I had prayed for this baby, prayed that she would be okay, prayed for a miracle. I told him how angry I was, how I felt betrayed, how it seemed like He didn’t care. I told Him the longings of my heart, how I just knew we were to have 4 kids and how it doesn’t make sense that this baby was taken away from us. I told him all of the dreams that I had for our family, and I told him all of the fears that I now have for the future. I poured out my heart to Him.

Somehow, through all of that verbal vomit I unleashed on God, I came to the realization that joy has nothing to do with my own circumstances. That’s happiness. Being joyful and being happy are not the same thing. Suddenly verses about being joyful in suffering were coming back to me. At first it made me angry and I felt like yelling at God that this was ridiculous and it wasn’t fair, and who considers it joyful to suffer.

But I realized that every disciple in the Bible considered it joyful to suffer. Even Jesus himself found joy in suffering.

“For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning it's shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God". -Hebrews 12:2 

^“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. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything". James 1:2-4

“Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us”. -Romans 5:3-5 

And it struck me, it’s not suffering for sufferings sake that produces joy. Christians aren’t so weird that they get a kick out of tragedy and heartache and sorrow. We don’t just wait for the days that something horrible will happen so we can rejoice that suffering has occurred.

It’s what suffering produces that ultimately brings joy. Romans 5:3-5 says that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character and character produces hope. And the hope that we have in Christ does not disappoint us.

And you know what, it’s true. It took me a few weeks to mull over all of this, but it makes sense. From my own personal experience, I can see that suffering does this. It doesn’t take away from the pain. The pain is still there. The pain is very real. But eventually, over time, it produces something amazing. If we let it.
Christians are obviously not except from pain and suffering simply because we are followers of Christ. In fact, the Bible is clear that the opposite is true. Pain and suffering will be our shadows, following us around wherever we are spreading the Gospel. This health and wealth gospel that people are preaching is a clear contradiction to Scripture. Just read it, you will see how the Old and New Testament is full of individuals, families and nations suffering for the sake of the Gospel.

I know that I have so much more to learn about this. I don’t have all the answers. I have barely scratched the surface. But what I have learned is this:

• Joy doesn’t always come in the morning- at least not in our normal sense of what the morning is. The ‘morning’ could be days, weeks or even months down the road. But ultimately, joy will come again.
• Joy comes in the mourning. It doesn’t make sense, but there it is. Joy does come through mourning. It comes out of mourning. For me personally, when I am mourning the loss of a baby I find great joy in the babies that I did get to have. When I am mourning it makes my blessings in life all the more visible, all the richer.
• My own suffering allows me to share in the suffering of others. It hurt so bad to lose those 3 babies. The ache never goes away. And when someone else experiences this pain, I know full well what they are going through. There is comfort in knowing that someone else has gone through your pain and didn’t collapse under it. I hate that I went through this, but now I have a shared story with others going through it. I can relate. I can empathize. I can be there to comfort and cry with and mourn with.
• God is not the enemy. All too often, my first instinct is to raise my fists and demand answers from God. I’m quick to blame Him for the wrongs that have happened to me because I know that He is all-mighty and all-powerful and is still a God of miracles, AND things still went tragically wrong in my life. So I immediately begin with “but you COULD have done this”. As I was praying through this the other night, the song “I am” by Ginny Owens popped into my head (Holy Spirit, anyone?).

Here are a few of the lyrics:

There's a bigger picture, you can't see
You don't have to change the world, just trust in me
Cause I am your creator, I am working out my plan
And through you, I will show them, I am.

I hadn’t heard that song in years! But in that moment I knew that God had/has something much bigger in store for all of this tragedy. I still can’t see it, but it’s there and it will be revealed at some point. I just need to trust in Him. I still don’t understand how all of it works, but I know that God is working this out.