On New Year’s Day, I was sixteen weeks pregnant but found myself waiting in limbo for my six-weeks-dead baby both to arrive and to depart in a medically managed miscarriage. With three healthy and uncomplicated pregnancies under my belt, I felt almost no anxiety when my midwife could not locate a heartbeat with her doppler at my twelve-week appointment. She communicated what I was thinking already: sometimes early on, baby can evade the doppler. Would I like her to order me an ultrasound? “That’s okay, we’ll check back at my next appointment.”
I did not make it to the next appointment. It was bleeding that sent me in for the ultrasound. Even in the waiting room, I was optimistic that there would be a simple explanation; I wondered aloud to my husband if we might even be able to tell the sex on the ultrasound. I suddenly felt sure this baby was a boy. Instead, the ultrasound revealed that for over a month I had been a walking tomb.
I had had two of my babies at home; I had this one at home too. The freezing, wet weather had made the ground as hard as a rock. We gathered our baby’s remains the best we could, trying to discern the “products of conception” from the biproducts, and froze them until the ground thawed and we could bury him properly. My husband spoke a few words over the grave, and we marked his resting place with a stone engraved with his name: Ignacio, “born from fire.”
Given and Taken Away
Miscarriages are incredibly common. (Though, successful pregnancies and live births are incredibly more common—praise God.) I have known since my first pregnancy that somewhere between one in five and one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, but my personal statistics at the time were that three in three pregnancies end in healthy babies. Research and conviction not only led my husband and I to stop using artificial forms of contraception after our first child but also grew in me the awed understanding that, although God usually chooses to honor human action in this area, each life is a sovereign gift from His hand that He bestows as He chooses (sometimes despite efforts to the contrary). Ignacio’s birth/death has made that shining truth crystal clear in my mind, and it has added to it the Biblical other half: life is His to take as He chooses as well (Job 1:21).
Some may recoil from the idea that God takes babies in miscarriage. It is common today to assure mothers that the loss was inevitable; that the embryo likely had a genetic abnormality that never would have allowed it to develop, rather than to attribute the death to the hand of the Lord. The prophet Samuel’s mother, Hannah, who perhaps had some experience with miscarriage herself, said it plainly: “The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up” (1 Samuel 2:6, ESV). David, who experienced the death of an infant when God took his firstborn by Bathsheba, praised the Lord for writing every one of our days, from the first to the last (Psalm 139:16).
The author of Hebrews implies that each one of us has an “appointment” with death (9:27). Although twenty-five percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, one hundred percent of births (with some notable exceptions) end in death until Jesus returns. Your certain death is not merely a consequence of a fallen world (although it is); it is also the active judgement of the Lord, who has appointed the hour and circumstance of your death. But, as always with our good God, His justice and mercy meet, and His judgement of death can also mean the blessing of being reborn into eternity.
Christian, Your Death Is a Birth
Just like Ignacio, we will die before we are born. I have a fascination with birth: I love to listen to birth stories and read about the physiology of birth; giving birth to my children has been a great highlight of my life. So, I was intrigued to learn that in the world of hospice, the language of birth is often used metaphorically to describe the dying process. Just as recognizable stages arise in a physiological birth marked by certain symptoms and behavior, so also the process of a natural death follows a familiar pattern that makes clear to caregivers that the transition from one world to the next is near.[1] As in physiological birth, the transition from death to Life can be marked by moments of intense suffering and doubt. One way to meet these moments successfully is to prepare for them ahead of time.
There are lots of practical ways to prepare for your death. You can decide ahead of time where you would like to be buried, make funeral arrangements, or, as one man did at our church in Missouri, build your casket yourself. Recently a neighbor of mine, after a long decline, passed away at home and was buried in a casket made by her husband, in a grave close to their home dug by their loved ones. This approach would have been completely unremarkable a century ago, but in an age of medicalized death and commercialized burial, it was a unique and special experience for me to observe, although from a distance, how this family accepted her impending death and prepared for it as those who have hope.
Online planners and organizers for end-of-life wishes proliferate, and it is worth taking the time to plan out whatever details you can ahead of time in order to bless your loved ones. But more importantly, as Christians we must prepare spiritually for crossing to the other side. If we have the privilege of experiencing a natural death with a clear decline (and it is a privilege), those final months, days, and moments will bring our true spirituality into sharp focus. What will be revealed in the stark light of impending eternity?
All That Is Hidden
One important way we can prepare for our deaths as Christians in the West in the twenty-first century is to pluck out materialism wherever it crops up in our thinking. I do not mean here consumerism (though by all means, root that out, too!); I mean a mindset that sees the world in terms of only matter. In moments when the veil is thin (such as the beginning and end of life), hidden pockets of materialism in our worldviews will be a hindrance to stepping into the life to come in full confidence of God’s promises.
Do we tend to see illness or physical decline as an unlucky run-in with germs or the unavoidable effect of genetics? Is there nothing more to the timing of illness and decline than happenstance? If we are careful with ourselves and conscientious of our lifestyle, can we expect to avoid the worst of these fates? If we answer yes—or live in effect as if we answer yes—materialism has influenced our view of human frailty. God is sovereign over germs and longevity; our spiritual selves affect the health of our physical selves; God’s world operates according to God’s laws, both physical and spiritual. We must replace materialist assumptions with these truths in order to approach death as both the last-ditch effort of a defeated Curse and the final trying ground for our dirty-gold faith.
Additionally, are we abiding in Christ? Are we aware of His personal involvement and guidance through His Spirit? When we have daily practiced leaning on the everlasting Arms, we will fall into them all the easier when we face life’s final trial. We can spend our days now committing to memory scriptures, prayers, and hymns that we would like to be able to pull to mind specifically in our final moments; reciting these passages to ourselves in our daily trials can be excellent practice to prepare us to welcome Christ into our dying suffering at the end.
Conclusion
In the sorrow of Ignacio’s death, I had joy in the knowledge that he was in the presence of Jesus. What we wrote on his stone will be true of each of us: “Born in the Lord’s House.” All we who have been born again are already born into that household, made joint heirs with Christ. We can prepare even now for the day when our corruptible temple is planted in the ground—to be reborn again into the bodily presence of our Savior.
[1] Listen to this podcast to hear an overview of the stages of natural death. While interviewer Ginny Yurich is a Christian, her guest Suzanne O’Brien is not.
September 14, 2025
A great meditation.
September 18, 2025
Thank you for reading.