Held
Held: 31 Biblical Reflections on God’s Comfort and Care in the Sorrow of Miscarriage
By: Abbey Wedgeworth
[Fulfilled ‘A nonfiction book about grief’ for Shelf Reflection’s 2023 Reading Challenge]
“Suffering tempts us to believe that God is absent, cruel, manipulative, or unconcerned, but the Bible offers us the truth.”
I very much wish I had had this book when I experienced my miscarriage. This will be my top book recommendation for anyone grieving miscarriage or infant loss.
Abbey talks about every struggle I remember wrestling with— the complex and conflicting thoughts about myself and God, doubting God, feeling prayer is pointless, frustration with others’ responses to my pain, feeling responsible for my suffering, having a hard time being happy for other mothers, feeling like my body is broken and unable to do the very thing God commanded us to do, and just feeling like my faith had faltered.
It is written with such validation and compassion and gently helps us see God for who he is and helps us lift our eyes to He who can comfort us and give us peace in an impossible time.
I know most women going through miscarriage or infant loss probably aren’t looking for a book to read. It may feel too daunting. But this book is meant to be read just a couple pages at a time. It’s very manageable, comforting, and will speak to the very grief we struggle with.
Each chapter is just a few pages and concludes with some verses to read, reflection questions, a response, and a place to journal.
Right out of the gate Abbey hits on the most important thing we need to think about when we go through trials and suffering: who is God?
“You can choose to allow your circumstances to shape your understanding of who God is, or you can allow what the Bible says about who God is to inform how you respond to your grief. What you believe about God…will have everything to do with the way that you heal and move forward.”
I eventually got to this point in my grief journey, but this book would have made that process a lot faster.
If there is a single most important thing that helped me heal, it was this realization. I had to stop asking why and start looking at who— who God says he is. What is his character? Because we most likely won’t get the answers we seek (and there is a chapter devoted to this thought as well) but if we know Who is sovereign and Who loves us, we can trust him in the ‘withholding’ of the answers we think we need.
This book is written around Psalm 139. I memorized this Psalm when I was in high school, before I had ever really experienced grief or pain. And this book opened up this Psalm even more for me and showed me how each verse is a comfort in our trials. It provides a framework for sadness but also for hope and for trusting in the One who knows all and sees all.
I love how this is the focus because even if we forget some of what we read in the book, any time I read Psalm 139, now, I think it will be a re-centering and a reminder for handling hardship.
I specifically remember that in my pain, I did not want to pray. I didn’t even know how to pray. Sometimes I think I still wrestle with that. But I love what Abbey encourages us with in the chapter on prayer:
“Prayer will make a difference in your suffering, even if it doesn’t make a difference in your circumstances, because it will undoubtedly make a difference in you.”
“Disappointment is inevitable in a fallen world, but the way to stop it from growing into bitterness is through thanksgiving: trusting God’s commitment to our good, reminding ourselves of all he has done for us in Christ, and then specifically noticing and praising him for every little thing he gives us as grace upon grace.”
There are many reasons to pray, but one is because it is our communication line to the our heavenly Father who wants to hear from us. Prayer isn’t always for the results, but it changes us as we depend on the Lord.
It made me think of Benjamin Hastings song ‘That’s the Thing About Praise’. The lyrics say:
‘There's what I want, and then there's where I'm at
Every one step forward, it got me five steps back
And I cried, I called, God knows I prayed
But most days, faith is climbing up a mountain that stayed
It don't always fix your problems, but it'll tell ya how small they are
That's the thing about praise
It won't always move the mountain, but it's good for the heart
That's the thing about praise
You'll never know what it's gonna change, but it'll always leave a mark
That's the thing about praise
Yeah, I might see walls start falling, or it might just change my heart
That's the thing about praise’
And as we think about singing that praise, it struck me in her chapter on going back to church how being around other believers helps us.
“When we join in singing with other saints, or let tears flow as we simply listen to their voices, we are prompted to praise God and to remember the truth of the gospel. Sometimes those voices carry our weary, doubting hearts, declaring over us the words we desperately need to hear and are struggling to sing—or believe—ourselves.”
This is exactly as it was for me. When I miscarried, the song ‘Good, Good Father’ had just become popular and was sung all the time. I couldn’t bring myself to sing the words. They didn’t feel true to me. Yet I knew they were. I think God was healing my heart even if I didn’t know it by listening to others sing those words around me until I could believe them again. ‘Your Word says you are good, God,’ I would say, ‘Help me believe it because I can’t sing this right now.’
Every chapter was a balm. Even for me, being almost a decade past my miscarriage, it was still healing to read this, to reflect on how I felt years ago and see where I am at now. To see God’s faithfulness. And to heal some parts that I didn’t know still needed healing.
Recommendation
I highly recommend this book and am so thankful for Abbey’s compassion and transparency in writing it. She includes short stories written by other women (and one man) who also experienced grief.
Even though miscarriage is common, no two experiences are ever the same. And common or not, the pain is real and often debilitating.
I believe this book will offer so much to those going through this heartache. Not just to survive, but to draw us back to our life source and the only true place of comfort.
“As we walk forward into a future that is unknown to us, we can embrace with certainty the comfort that comes from the knowledge of who God is, the fact that he is with us, and the assurance that he is leading us by his grace toward a new heaven and a new earth, where there will be no more sorrow, no more pain, and no more babies that die too young.”"
“Hope in the current and coming glory of God without fear or shame, because in the death and resurrection of Jesus, you and I find the absolute certainty that God’s plan of redemption can never be miscarried.”
[Note on the book: The cover shown in these pictures is the hardcover version I purchased. It has an elastic yellow band that closes the book. It gives it a journal-like look and feel. It would make a great gift if you know someone going through loss to add to a care package.]
Quotes
To give you a better idea of the encouragement you’ll find in this book, here are some more quotes:
“You may long to feel strong, capable, and unencumbered by sadness after your miscarriage—you may want to be out of this season and on to another—but the value of suffering is discovered in the midst of it as well as after it, for it is while we are walking through it that our frailty and weakness can convince us of our need for God’s power and sufficiency.”
“Scripture tethers our hearts to what is true when we feel ungrounded and uncertain. In it we hear him speak and are assured that he hears us when we cry out to him. As his truth informs our feelings and our hearts draw near to him in prayer, he comforts us with a peace that surpasses all understanding—an unshakeable confidence that he is with us and for us, and that our souls are secure.”
“Your trials are not opportunities to discover how strong you are but rather for you to learn to depend on the strength of the Lord. (Eph 3:20)”
“In that spiritual darkness in a time when nothing makes sense and when our doubts seem to be speaking louder than our faith, we must remember that believing is not a matter of strength. Faith is not something we conjure up; it is a gift we receive.”
“You may doubt or falter but that doesn’t mean your faith has failed or your soul is lost… even as we lie awake with all of that heartache, weakness, bitter disappointment, and fear—even as we sit in the darkness, riddled with confusion and doubt, wondering if we will make it out of this with our faith intact—we can say with the writer of Psalm 16:7-8 ‘I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.’”
“However perplexing the question may be of how a good and loving God could allow suffering, his control is a comfort to us in hardship because we know his character and his promises to us. (Rom 8:28-30) Miscarriage is not good, no, not good at all, but according to the Bible, God’s purposes for you within it most certainly are… when God’s word tells us that he works all things together for our good, that good isn’t necessarily our material or physical good—the growth of our families, for example. He is committed to our spiritual good.”
“I don’t pretend to understand exactly how this works, but somehow, God’s redemptive purposes for your life are being accomplished through the suffering you’re currently enduring. He’s getting glory from it, and you’re being prepared for glory by it.”
“When you feel bitterness and confusion over the mystery of suffering, you can give God glory by trusting that his plans are perfect and his ways are higher than yours, even if they are incomprehensible to you. And when you feel despondent and sorrowful, you can give God glory by hoping in Christ.”
“When your body can’t hold on to a baby, what other hope do you have than to cling to the God who will hold on to you?”
“When we see that God did not withhold his own Son, we can believe that anything he does withhold, he withholds in love.”
“If our sense of purpose lies solely in motherhood, the loss of an unborn baby can lead to a feeling of worthlessness. But if we believe that our chief end or highest calling is ‘to glorify God and enjoy him forever,’ then we can be filled with purpose and satisfaction in any season and any role.”
Further Reading
She recommended these in the back of her book:
Inheritance of Tears by Jessalyn Hutto (I read this before I wrote reviews and it was good)
Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering by Tim Keller (I also read this before I reviewed books)
The Promise is His Presence by Glenna Marshall (on my TBR)
Hope When It Hurts by Kristen Wetherell and Sarah Walton (Wetherell also wrote Humble Moms that I thought was really good)
The Envy of Eve by Melissa Kruger (on my TBR)
Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy by Mark Vroegop (so good!)
Women of the Word by Jen Wilkin (on my TBR)
The Moon is Always Round by Jonathan Gibson (HERE is an Amazon link to this one. I plan to get a copy eventually- it’s to help children understand God’s goodness in suffering)
Here are some other books on suffering and grief:
Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers by Dane Ortlund
How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil by D.A. Carson (this one is probably better read BEFORE you’re in the midst of suffering)
Suffering Wisely and Well: The Grief of Job and the Grace of God by Eric Ortlund
If God is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil by Randy Alcorn
Becoming a Woman Whose God is Enough by Cynthia Heald
The Honest Griever: Truths God Teaches on the Journey from Pain to Purpose by Lynne Hoeksema
You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.
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