With Spring quickly approaching, I recently turned my sights toward my small garden. I get eager this time of year to have a productive and flourishing little space.

I’m fascinated by watching total transformation.

Seeds and soil. Flour and yeast. A caterpillar and a cocoon.

The way you can take seemingly random ingredients and watch them turn into something beautiful. There’s a sort of magic that follows.

A compost bin, on the other hand, does the opposite. It takes what was once living and lovely – bits from trees, vegetables, scraps – and turns it into . . . well, dirt. Soil. It’s the decomposition of beautiful things. And yet compost is this amazing nutritious mixture that brings life to your garden. It can be the difference in sad, deflated fruit and lush, gushing tomatoes.

A friend recently shared about her experience with miscarriage. She’s going through it right now, and it’s raw. She’s in pain, heavy with grief and little scraps of all the beautiful hopes and dreams she had for that unborn life.

I remember a similar experience.

My husband and I had barely seen those two pink lines before the signs showed that we were losing the baby. But it was enough to burrow into my heart that there had been life within me.

We’d conceived a life regardless of how quickly it ended. In fact, the miscarriage was so quick that I didn’t feel I had the right to grieve it. So many of my friends had carried babies a full trimester or more, some carrying almost to term before losing their precious babies. I can’t even imagine.

I knew my grief was different. I didn’t know my baby’s gender. I hadn’t picked out a name. I didn’t have an ultrasound picture to prove it.

None of that mattered. The moment those pink lines emerged, I was in love.

My husband and I cheered in excitement and prepared to tell our loved ones. But before my first appointment, I knew something was wrong. I worked in a hospital at the time, and since most of my coworkers were nurses, two of them pulled me to the side to check my blood pressure (sky high) and my heart rate. I hadn’t told anyone what was going on. I just faked a stressful workload and called my doctor.

She confirmed the miscarriage quickly but offered a grim smile and said, “at least you know you can conceive.” I know comments like that are often painful for parents in fresh grief. But I knew it was simply her attempt at encouragement, and I determined to muscle on.

Over the course of the next month, I struggled to grieve “correctly” believing that I was mostly unjustified in my feelings. My husband had a more detached reaction than I did. He was sad, but the pregnancy barely felt real to him before it was over. But at only a week after my grandfather’s passing, I felt robbed and angry. Both of our grief responses were completely normal.

Eventually, I released my anguish to God through my prayer journal with tears and not a little bit of anger. I knew if I kept it bottled up, I wasn’t doing anyone any favors. It’s important to give God our ashes when we are asking Him for beauty (Isaiah 61:3). So I did. And He gave me comfort. And though I felt no promises for more pregnancies, I believed that in His timing I’d get to hold a baby one day.  

Pregnancy didn’t come to us again for almost a year. And this time I battled the feelings of not wanting to get my hopes up and yet wanting to release all the excitement I felt in my soul. When our rainbow baby girl arrived, we were hooked. She was beautiful. She was everything. And yet she was a reminder of what I’d lost. She would grow up as our oldest child, but she was actually a second baby. She’d never know her older sibling. These feelings are what we call bittersweet.

Her first year was an extreme challenge and transition for us as it tends to be with first-born babies. Yet I can’t count the times I stopped to thank God for her little life. When I feel like complaining about the challenges of motherhood, there’s a niggling at the back of my mind that says “you could have lost her, but God saw fit to bless you.”

And through it all I’ve been struck by just how fantastically God can use the compost of death in our life to grow something beautiful in its place. There’s a level of appreciation you experience in parenthood once you’ve lost a life – even a very early miscarriage like mine.

He wastes nothing. And I don’t want to either.

He used all my pain, waiting, and feelings of unjustified grief to help me appreciate so much about my daughter.

Every time I hold her when she’s sick, I’m thankful.

When she pitches a fit – and despite my impatience – I’m so glad those little lungs have air.

When she giggles in delight and wrestles with her daddy, I’ll admit sometimes it brings tears to my eyes.

She is a walking reminder of all that I lost that day and also all that God has given me.

As much as I would have rather kept the first baby too, I’m so glad He can use the bad in our lives for our good and His glory.

Spring offers the promise of hope and newness and growth.

But maybe that doesn’t feel like the season you’re in. Maybe you’re looking at the burned ash of your life and wondering where things went wrong. Whether you’re feeling deep pain, despair, or sadness, just know that in time, those things will become the soil that brings you beauty again.

It’s hard to recognize it when you are going through the rough patch, but one day you will look up and see all the ways He used your pain to do something new in your life.

Written by: Anna Wetherington. Anna lives with her husband and daughter in Valdosta, GA.