The purpose of loss in the plan of life

There are so many synonyms for suffering. And loss is one of them. Think of that for one moment. Any time we are suffering we’re suffering loss. We have lost something tangible or intangible. And usually within one loss is a whole raft of losses. There are layers of loss within the calamity of one loss event.

When we lost that Nathanael, it wasn’t just him that we lost. We lost our hope for a child at that time. We suffered the loss of stress in that season; the toll it took on my wife’s body and the impact of how we were treated by some people. We suffered dramatic change in several relationships. We suffered betrayal. We lost our opportunity to properly grieve our son, because of senseless circumstances. And we continue to suffer loss whenever we see a five-year-old these days, even if our grief has settled for the major part in the gravitas of acceptance.

We have also learned that there’s an upside to life after loss; you receive what you otherwise would never have possessed if you’d not suffered loss.

Here’s the thing: we grew.
As individuals, as a couple,
as servants of the Lord.

Although it involved myriad tumult, although it cast us regularly into the rocks, although we were pressed in without precedent, that season of life proved to us the goodness of God, in spite what God had allowed. The Lord did not want us to be crushed, but a genuinely random genetic condition had enveloped our unborn, yet God proved good by growing our little Nathanael ever so normally in the womb, albeit with compromised lung development. Our faith shone because of the people that were praying for us. Favour came our way even if our lives were spurned with misfortune. Amid the horror of child loss, we faced the opposite reality—by faith our God was there.

Neither my wife nor I were strangers to loss. I lost my first marriage, and if losing Nathanael was trade-work, losing my first marriage was a solid apprenticeship in preparation. Never have I learned more about God—before or since—than at that time. My wife had suffered several losses before she met me, including a variation of ambiguous loss, a traumatic accident that took two years to adjust to, and a relationship that concluded unexpectedly.

You who read this have suffered your own losses. For what purpose?

The purpose of loss in the plan of life
is to teach us what nothing else can.

Loss takes us to the silent and dark ocean bed of truth. It takes us there and it keeps us there, until we learn a vital life lesson. When I lost my first marriage, not one part of my life wasn’t turned completely upside down. There was nothing I could do about it. I simply had to adjust… or perish! Why on earth would I give up on life if I had the equal but opposite choice to be resurrected?

While we live, God desperately wants to give us all the opportunity to face a place of truth we cannot escape from. Not because God’s cruel—but because our Lord is generous and wishes for us to experience this kind of victory against the odds, to learn empathy and compassion, to discover a breadth of life we never saw before, and to taste the depths that are possible in life, in order that we would also know the heights commensurate with those depths.

In sitting in my lonely bedsitter, weeping buckets some nights, missing my children, poring through my Bible, I had space to pray like I never had before. I could not escape God. His Presence was indelible because all the distractions were stripped away, and I desperately needed comfort. I sought the solace of fellowship, and God provided spiritual care for me through wiser, stronger humans. And later, when we lost Nathanael, I cannot tell you the amount of times I’ve heaved healing tears in singing to him. Such sorrow is profoundly healing. It is a beautiful and painful process every time, which just goes to show sackcloth-and-ashes is intrinsically redemptive.

The purpose of loss in the plan of life is obvious to those who’ve been trained by it. Trust it when you’re called there. It won’t make the journey one iota easier, but at least you can trust the direction you’re headed. Keep the faith. There’s no other way.

Photo by Sylas Boesten on Unsplash