Dear Mila, God Doesn’t Do Bad Things to Us
Dear Mila,
I’ve been struggling for the past year with the day that you came. The time that you spent with me for 9+ months, just us, was so safe. I couldn’t understand why everything went so wrong. What did we do to deserve that? I was so angry at God, despite the fact that you were a gift from him to me – unknowingly, I had conditions on receiving it.
The day you came to earth is the day I almost had to leave. As time passed, the realization set in even harder that we almost didn’t make it out alive. Little things would send me into fight or flight. A whiff of anything that smelled like a hospital. An LED light with lots of bulbs. Food poisoning cramps. I wondered if it would ever end. Every time I closed my eyes, I was back there.
I felt guilty because I was having a hard time enjoying getting to know you at first. All my friends were having babies and they would use phrases like “blessed” and “best day of my life” when describing the days they gave birth. But at the time, all I wanted to do was block our day out. “How could you say that?,” someone asked me. It made me feel worse – even though I’m still not sure how that was even possible.
The truth is, I have done so many things wrong in my life, but in return, life has been exceptionally kind to me – so maybe I did need to be knocked down a peg or two. I honestly don’t feel worthy to be your mother some days. But the God of the universe has looked at me and dignified me. He knew we were meant to be. He picked me. And that tells me everything I need to know.
I’m writing this almost a year after the day you came. It’s the farthest we’ve been from that day, but it also weirdly feels like the closest. I’m seeing the world in color again, Mila, and it’s all because of you. I can’t pinpoint when it started to happen, but it did, and I am eternally thankful.
You and God teamed up to heal my heart. I’m not angry anymore. I’m not sad anymore. I no longer feel cheated. In fact, I’d do it all over again to get to this point. Because now I can teach you the greatest lesson I’ve ever learned, and it’s this: God doesn’t do bad things to us.
What happened to us wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t your fault. The Bible tells us that God is good (Psalm 107:1, Psalm 145:9, Nahum 1:7, Mark 10:18 – just to name a few). God loved us enough to give us free-will. That means that we are free to make our own choices and do our own thing. But logically, that means the world has to operate a certain way. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”
God is also all-powerful (Romans 1:20, for example). So I understand if your next question might be, “why didn’t God intervene?”. And while God certainly could have stopped what happened, I’m thankful now that He didn’t. James 1:2-4 says, “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.”
God can take terrible things and turn them around (Romans 8:28). There was work left to be done in your mom. And God doesn’t care if these things happen at the last minute, because he’s seen the whole schedule. God used that time to strengthen my faith – my guess is because he knows you’ll learn the best from watching your parents. And I need to be able to raise a tiny disciple to the best of my ability because every day matters for eternity. I’m not going to pretend to have the mind of God, though, so I could be wrong. So, you can bet that I’m gonna ask him why it was all necessary when I get to heaven, regardless. But for now, I’ve released it to him and thanked him for the pain because it was holy.
I want you to know that the day you came really was the best day of my life. It was the day I changed for the better. It was you and God, working together. My dream is to see that partnership continue.
I love you.
