On the 27th of June 2018 my husband, Reon and I were blessed with a beautiful baby boy, Hugo. I had a perfectly healthy pregnancy and our son is a perfectly healthy, growing 16month old boy.
Earlier this year we started praying about baby number 2. We decided to leave it all in the Lord’s hands. Our main prayer was that He grants us another pregnancy when the time was right, in accordance with His will.
When I found out I was pregnant during October of this year, we were overjoyed! We were convinced that the Lord’s timing was perfect and that it was His will for our family to expand.
On Sunday, 27 October 2019, we shared the great news with our families at our home. We celebrated the new addition to our family who was on the way!
The very next morning, on the 28th of October 2019, we suffered a miscarriage. This was a very confusing and painful day for us.
After getting over the initial shock, we were left with various questions. One night, I decided to look for the answers to these questions in God’s word. God so clearly gave me all the answers to our questions, which I needed.
- Firstly, in order to understand the extent of our grief, we needed to get clarity on whether there was a new “life” formed inside my body. Was I carrying a baby or a foetus?
God gave me Psalm 139:16
“You saw me before I was born. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.”
This was absolute confirmation to us that, indeed this was a little life. A baby. Not just cells, not just nothing.
This of course brought great sadness along with it, in that we now, for the first time in our lives, needed to deal with the loss of a child.
- Our second question related to the fact that we prayed for this child. We left it all up to God. If it was not meant to be, why grant us a pregnancy?
God gave me 1 Samuel 1:27 -28
27: I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of Him.
The significance of verse 27 is that, on 27 October, this is exactly what we celebrated with our families. The fact that the Lord has granted us what we prayed for.
- So the question that remained was why did we lose our baby on the 28th? And the Lord answered me so clearly with verse 28:
28: So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.
Verse 28 gave us such incredible peace. Learning that this baby will spend its life with the Lord. He/she was simply too good for this earth. And one day we will have the privilege to join this child of ours in heaven.
It also took us some time to come to the realization that this miscarriage was not from God, but from the devil, “who comes to steal and kill and destroy”, according to John.10:10. And that Jesus, who “came to provide life and life to the full” will carry us and help us to deal with this test of our faith. The devil will test the Lord’s servants, but God does not leave us to fend for ourselves in these times. God opened His arms to our child and welcomed him/her into heaven where he/she will spend eternity with God.
- Further we needed to know what the life lesson was that we needed to learn from this experience. We were not going to let it simply pass, without taking some good from it too.
In order for us to take something from this experience, we decided to remember this experience through our baby. As we did not have a gender, a name or a birthday for this baby, we chose to remember the date of my miscarriage as the identifier.
I decided to read up what the Bible says about the number 28.
In the Bible, the number 2 symbolizes the trust you should have in God and also in your Guardian Angles. This is so beautiful to me, as it confirms that our baby in heaven is our guardian angel, and it motivates us every day to do what we need to do in order to one day be with our children in heaven.
The number 8 symbolizes a new beginning; a new order or creation, and man’s true “born again” event when he is resurrected from the dead into eternal life.
This whole experience has truly grown our faith. It has been a new beginning for us as a couple, whereby we learnt how to grieve together, but also to together, rise again.
The number 8 further can be best described as still a part of the whole, just greater than the whole. The basket is full, but with a surplus. In the Bible, the number 7 symbolises completion and fullness, then above that, comes the number 8.
We as a family on earth will have completion and fullness, but above that, we have a surplus in heaven.
Aimee Nel