Watch: Winnie and Jeff’s testimony

Winnie and Jeff describe the emotional roller coaster they experienced after losing their first baby in a miscarriage and how their faith was stretched and tested. Thankfully, they recognised the trap of a “reciprocal faith” and decided to continue to place their faith in God in spite of the many temptations along the way. Praise God! Watch their testimony.

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Video transcript

We noticed that as a result of this miscarriage, our relationship with one another grew stronger, we’re able to be more emotionally transparent with one another. However, our spiritual growth went back.

Jeff: We stopped trusting God quite a lot.

Hi, my name’s Jeff. I work at a church and I love running.

Winnie: My name is Winnie. I work in a non-profit. I don’t love running.

Jeff: Six months ago, we lost our baby to a miscarriage.

Winnie: Today is actually a very significant date for us because tomorrow is supposed to be a date that we would meet our newborn in person.

Jeff: After going through this miscarriage, we realized that there were a lot of areas that we’d never dealt with before.

Actually, miscarriage is a big deal. It isn’t something that we can push aside easily.

It is not a bigger deal than any other trauma or loss that you may have experienced or we’ve experienced.

There are many unexplained feelings that we never felt before. And these feelings were bizarre, that appeared at random times, that would be very new to us; a lot of shame, a lot of anger with God, injustice with the world, a lot of guilt. Were we doing the wrong things?

We discovered also that actually the way I grieved and the way Winnie grieved was also very different. Surprisingly, I actually grieved longer than Winnie, but I grieved a lot more silently.

Grieving is a very unique experience and there is no one size fits all.

Winnie: For the past six, seven months, we were pretty stuck. Sometimes, we are still stuck. We spent many days and many nights asking, “Why, why does it happen to us?” You know, “What did we do?”

We also got stuck in the reciprocal faith. The “I do, You give” concept. We do so much, why don’t we get it? We were judging God even more than we are normally. We also felt like, you know, we cannot move on anymore and that was the only chance. That’s it! You know, we lost it.

Physically, I also feel there’s a piece of me that is gone. It affected me physically, emotionally, and mostly, spiritually.

We also became, you know, someone that is very foreign to us. We felt very empty inside. The emptiness is very real. We live our life with a big disappointment in God. Jealousy started to develop against other couples. Yeah, all of these caused us to walk away from God even further. And the longer we hold on to these feelings, the harder it is for us to get back with the Holy Spirit.

Jeff: At the very early onset of the miscarriage and even at times now, it was hard, really hard to pray, really hard to praise, worship, really hard to trust God. That faith that we had developed actually didn’t stand the test of time. I actually heard in a sermon, it says a faith that can’t be tested, can’t be trusted.

And so our faith hadn’t actually been tested like this before.

And so we lived a discouraged Jesus-followers life. We weren’t victorious. We lost hope. What really helped us in that time was we had great community. We had a group of five or six couples, even those that were pregnant with children, that were actually very supportive in our journey of grieving. They cried with us and they walked with us for many months in our pain.

I noticed that Winnie was actually trying her very best to get back to God.

She thought that God had abandoned her in the ER (emergency room) during that night of the miscarriage but recently, she discovered that actually, God had never left her. And what was actually blocking her from realising God was her negative emotions and the actual physical pain and trauma of that experience.

So what we have decided and need to do now is to actually stop asking “why?”, why did this happen, but asking “how?”

How can we see you in that when we trust You, God? We had to put aside our pride and humble ourselves and ask, “Alright, God, You’re in charge. What do You want from us now? We aren’t, we aren’t the ones to demand You to answer us or demand You to give us a baby.”

We actually forgot who God was in the light of things; the Creator of the universe, the One who weaves things, intricate webs, together. We forgot He was that. We forgot that He was able to do all that. We thought, “You can’t even give us a baby then really, who are You?”

We had to put aside this worldly vision of success; to get married, to have a stable job, to have an easy life, to have a house, to have a child – all these things that society tells us to do. We had to put that aside and really ask God, “What is Your plan for our lives?” not what the world plans.

And in that process, we discovered that we actually held onto the promises of the Bible in an incorrect way.

The scripture never, never specifically says, “Winnie and Jeff, you will have babies.” It doesn’t say that. It doesn’t say when you will have babies, or even if you have babies at all. So we had to reconcile with the fact that we may never actually have a family of our own.

Winnie: Going back to the night of the ER, I thought God abandoned me, but God actually never abandoned me. Only when I looked back that I can see that God was everywhere, even before we went into the ER, He was already there and prepared everything for us.

What we learned is, you know, where is our contentment? We placed our contentment incorrectly in places where it’s not God.

We place our contentment on each other, on the baby, and on the worldly living. We also gave room to the enemy to take control of us, our thoughts and our behavior, and even, our attitude toward each other and toward God. We’ve learned to be submissive again.

Even if God tells us the reason why we lost a baby, would it make us to be more submissive? Like, is that what we call our faith? Like, where are we placing our trust? And are we trusting God or are we trusting humans or the human interpretation of God?

There are quite a lot of, I would say, distractions or recommendations after the miscarriage, especially from doctors and your loved ones around you.

I’ve been told to go to acupuncture, go to herbal doctors and go use ovulations stick, baby test kit, tracking apps, and like do some sort of classes to exercise to increase my circulation.

There are so many things I was recommended to do to try again. We were tempted but we talked about that, we prayed about that.

We don’t want to do that because, you know, God is the One who can give. God has His own timing. We are trusting the tools more than God, and that’s not where we place our contentment. Our contentment is in God.

Jeff: Romans 8:28 talks about all things working together for good for those who are called according to His purpose. And even though in our minds, this wasn’t a good thing, but God can use something like this for the good, the greater good.

Now we don’t know if we will have a child. We place our hope and trust that we will have a child, but we aren’t holding onto it. We are going to hold on to the goodness of God. What we will do is we will lift each other up and we’ll continue to love and honor one another as a couple.

We will continue also to affirm that God is good, no matter what.

We’ll have good days, we will have bad days, days when we just really struggle with our faith, days that when we will grieve when we’re reminded of little things that happened but it is actually part of our story of Jesus’ followers.

Now we live in this new normal actually, Winnie and I, where we are parents of a child that we will never, ever get to hold. And so our hope is that even though with such pain that we’ve gone through, and the pain that you have gone through, that you will continue to hold on to the goodness of God and that He’s working all things for the good, and even terrible things that can be good, that come out in your life if we just put our trust in God. And so that’s our prayer for you.

 

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