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High Point Chinese SDA Church

Lizette Williams-Marlow

On Loss and Pain

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much because we're not here just by chance today.

Lord, I ask that you remove from us anything that may be hindering your Holy Spirit and your presence from abiding with us here tonight.

Empty us of our unrighteousness and fill us with your righteousness.

Lord, thank you for this opportunity and may your name be magnified.

It was exactly today, February 21st, 1993, that I said, I do.

I was marrying the guy who had changed my life.

He helped me understand more about life and about God.

And that day I believed I was going to grow old together with the 1 that I loved.

I did not know that God had other plans for me.

Previous to my marriage to John, my first husband, I had experienced a few losses, losses that had impacted me greatly.

I had lost my aunt, my mom's sister, in a fatal car crash, and my grandmother, my mom's mother, to diabetes.

My grandmother had lived with us since I could remember until she died during my first year in college.

Both of these losses affected me greatly, physically and spiritually and mentally.

But through them both, I had the comfort of knowing that it wasn't the end, that it wasn't a final goodbye, and that we would see each other again.

I was daughter to a pastor, a niece to a pastor, sister to a pastor.

So I embraced my parents' faith, and at the age of 9, I had given my young heart to Jesus.

But as we all know, Baptism doesn't mean that struggles with sin go away or doubt goes away.

During my sophomore year in college, I had the privilege to go to school overseas for a year.

Being away from home makes you grow up and think about who you are.

I started feeling ashamed of my Christian walk.

I thought I had nothing special to offer or to speak of.

I didn't have a conversion story and I didn't have a miraculous story to share to give a testimony of.

All I had was a walk with god since I was a little girl and I felt that that was not special enough.

God used the Portuguese theology student to help me realize that that was special enough and that God didn't need to have a broken person to witness and to work for him.

That an innocent child of God didn't have to be trampled out in the world to be counted as special.

After John and I got married in 1993, we moved to Maryland.

They would come visit us often in between their adventures.

And it was during 1 of these travels abroad that we received the call.

And for 3 days, my family had been trying to contact us.

There had been an accident, a fatal accident, and a freak accident, and my father, my beloved father, had passed away.

I hadn't seen him in nearly a year, and I didn't get to say goodbye.

Several years later, we moved back to California to be closer to family.

My husband's aunt and uncle were very frail, and we wanted to go move near them and to be able to help them.

But by the time we made our move to California, both of them passed away.

Now that we were back in California, we decided it was time to start a family.

We had been married long enough to enjoy a professional life and some travel.

It was time to do the family thing, but it proved to be a lot more challenging than we expected.

And after failed attempts with fertility drugs, we gave up.

The excitement and the expectation was extraordinary.

It was a Friday afternoon and I was the last patient on the list and we were going to find out the gender of our baby.

I made sure that my husband had brought the video camera so that we could capture the moment.

I had been watching programs on TV with, you know, they filming the moment and I wanted to do the same thing And then it happened.

The ultrasound technician told us, we better wait.

That day, we found out that I was carrying a boy.

But that day, we also found out that our precious baby boy had a rare trisomy that would never allow him to live.

We would have to wait to see him grow up in heaven.

The inevitable loss was just too much and too great for us.

It was on another Friday, several weeks later, that we met our sweet little baby Ian.

He died in my womb while my mom and I sang songs that I had hoped to sing to him 1 day.

That day my brother and my sister-in-law came to be with us.

My brother reminded us of the day our great Heavenly Father saw his son die.

That pain that the Father's heart must have felt, in turn I knew that he knew the pain that I was in, that we were feeling.

The pain that I experienced with the loss of my son was immense.

For days I woke up crying and went to sleep crying.

1 morning I woke up thinking, if I don't get a hold of myself, I'm going to lose my mind and my husband.

A close friend of the family, a retired pastor, called to lend his condolences.

In our conversation, he mentioned that I may be questioning God and perhaps even doubting Him.

It was then that I realized that I wasn't doubting God at all, and I wasn't even questioning God.

My mind took me back to life at home as a child with my parents.

I had learned that God loved us, no matter what, that we can rely on God for everything, that God has great plans for us.

That was my not so special at all experience I had doubted as a college student.

I didn't know it then but God had plans for me and I think back now and I see how he was preparing me for bigger challenges.

I knew that it wasn't in God's plan for us to suffer or experience loss.

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On Loss and Pain

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