I love efficiency. I always have. If I can accomplish two (or three!) things simultaneously I feel hypothetical star points pinging above my head as if my life were some cosmic video game of accomplishment.

I can remember an argument I had with my friend at summer camp in junior high when she wanted to deliver a few letters to the post box in the dining hall during free time – a 10 minute walk from our cabin. The idea struck me as foolish – why drop them now when we could bring them at dinner when we would already be going there? I distinctly remember telling her it was a “waste of foot movements.”

And I wish this aim of mine was something God reciprocated in my spiritual life – why take the long way when we could just get there as soon as possible? He’s God after all – if anyone could spot and accomplish the quickest route, it would be Him! And yet I would never use the word efficient to describe God’s role in my life and my story. Oftentimes His unwillingness to solve my problems (or eliminate them altogether!) has caused great frustration and I’ve no doubt let Him hear my end of it (and my ideas for how he could do better next time).

The day after Christmas 2021 Travis and I found out we were expecting our third child. We were excited and already looking ahead to the end of the summer when we would become a family of 5. Our first two pregnancies had gone smoothly so within two weeks most people in our circle knew we were expecting. A week later something changed in my body and I started to miscarry the baby. By the end of the day he/she was gone.

It took two painful weeks for my body to complete the process of miscarriage and after missing a few work shifts, I decided it was time to keep moving forward and go back to work. That January night, not one, but two co-workers announced their pregnancies – both due the same weekend as the child we had just let go. In my heart I felt genuine excitement for them, but it co-existed with the literal confrontation of our loss. And it was not a confrontation that would disappear that night – for the next 9 months I would walk alongside my two young co-workers as they carried their babies, attempting to be an older mama lending insight and encouragement.

In the first few months I didn’t know how to grapple with our loss – there are so many emotions that come with miscarrying. Guilt – did I do something medically or in my diet that caused this? Fear – will I never have another child? Anxiety – was the miscarriage the result of a deeper hidden medical issue? Sadness – this side of heaven I will never meet this child that was part Travis, part me, and fully created in the image of God to be a unique footprint on the Earth.

But as time passed I had to process these things with God – it was unavoidable. Even if I wanted to forget, every Monday and Thursday at work I’d be reminded that my womb should be growing, but it was empty. At first it seemed cruel, but over time I began to see it as a kindness. A reminder from a good Father that forgetting did not equal healing. Facing it, talking about it, and receiving it were practices that took time but that ultimately brought peace into that part of our story.

Labor Day weekend both of my co-workers had their babies, and I celebrated healthy babies with them – and also celebrated how God had tenderly walked with me the past 8 months. I journaled of how the long process had softened my heart, and a new tenderness was growing that had not been there before. As I’ve watched friends go through gut-wrenching loss in the last year I’m slower to speak, quicker to listen, to shed tears, and pray long-term.

Two weeks later, I found out I was pregnant again. My husband and I were cautious and excited, longing to grow our family but knowing it’s not always a direct route. We had been trying for months and weathering each month’s “not this time” together.

But as I look back on those months I see how much healing happened – and none of it was circumstantial. Perhaps if I had become pregnant within a few months of miscarrying I would’ve treated the new baby as the resolution, and not God.

Rebecca McLaughlin brilliantly illustrates this point in Confronting Christianity through the story of Mary, Martha, and the death of their brother Lazarus. Mary and Martha call to Jesus while Lazarus is still sick – knowing Jesus’ power and His love for their brother, they assume He will come quickly and heal him (efficient!). Jesus receives the message, but He doesn’t come. At least not quickly – in fact, the text says He remained in place for two extra days. By the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. And even when He does come, He does not rush to the tomb. First He has a conversation with Martha.

I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

John 11:25-26

McLaughlin translates: “As you stand here in your desperate grief, your greatest need is not to have your brother back again. It’s to have me.”

He later goes to the tomb to raise Lazarus from the dead, but first He gives us a portal into His own soul – in two words the Scriptures say “Jesus wept.” Jesus allowed them to see that He was grieving with them. He loved them so much more than giving them simply what they wanted – He was stepping into their grief and saying “I know.”

I feel as if I’ve lived this story so many times – when I desperately wanted God to give me the exact thing I was asking for and didn’t get it right away (or sometimes at all). Yet I’ve come to learn that God is so much more than an efficient problem-fixer. He is a thorough lover and healer. And that is infinitely better than making all of my problems disappear through happy endings.

Efficiency may give us the quickest result, but thoroughness gives us the best result. The miracle of this story is not that I am once again with child, but that where a wound pierced my heart God tended to it, slowly, mercifully, and thoroughly. Is this how God makes His people more like Him?