Pascal Watson Foster is with the LORD

Friends, there’s no easy way to say this. Yesterday, we lost the baby.

We’re not sure why. Emily was 14 weeks along, and everything appeared to be going well. But the Lord saw fit to bring him home sooner than most.

He was a boy. We have named him Pascal Watson.

Physically, Emily is doing well, but we are all heartbroken.

Even so, we trust the goodness and wisdom of God. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

For us, Pascal has become another reason to long for heaven.

We are deeply thankful for the strong community of Christian friends God has surrounded us with through our church, my employer, and the broader community. We are being well cared for and have lacked for nothing.

We do, however, appreciate your prayers.

Some further thoughts….

Tragedy and the suffering that follows it are a fire. To adapt an old phrase, the same flame that melts the wax hardens the clay.

There is no escaping tragedy. It visits every life, sometimes in isolated moments and sometimes in long, relentless seasons. Over the last six years, we’ve been living through what I’ve come to call a swirl of death. Multiple family members and friends have died in unexpected and heartbreaking ways.

Each time, we have been forced to decide what that fire would do to us. Would it melt us into a sorrowful but Godward faith? Or would it harden us into self-centeredness and self-pity?

Every trial presents a person with an opportunity to confess what he truly believes. Suffering has a way of exposing the deepest convictions of the heart. In the fire, everyone makes a confession, even if he does so unknowingly.

We live in a trauma-obsessed culture that treats suffering as a kind of moral exemption. Many people assume that tragedy, even relatively small tragedies, gives them permission to live faithlessly toward God and resentfully toward others. Suffering becomes a license for self-pity and bitterness. It becomes a reason to question God’s goodness without end.

How often have grieving people been told, “It’s okay to be mad at God”? No, it isn’t. It may be understandable, but it is not okay.

A wise and compassionate person recognizes the frailty of the human heart. In times of suffering, we are tempted to doubt God’s goodness, wisdom, and love. We should not be surprised by those temptations. But neither should we indulge them. Doubt is not something to be coddled. It is something to be confronted. Faith must be reasserted. The truth must be preached to our own souls again and again.

God is good. He is good when He gives and when He takes away. He is good when we understand His purposes and when we do not. Christian maturity is not gauged by the absence of tears but by the presence of faith in the midst of them.

The immature man allows suffering to turn him inward. He becomes consumed with himself and his pain. The mature Christian grieves honestly while refusing to surrender to self-pity. He learns to say with Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” The goal is not to suffer less but to suffer faithfully.

In the last three years, I have buried my younger brother, my mother, my baby son, and three good friends. Yet I know there are many who, in that same span of time, have suffered just as much or more. Suffering is not a competition. We all must face the reality of living in a fallen world. Some endure heavier burdens than others, and those burdens often come in different seasons. But every one of us will eventually walk through the valley of sorrow.

Because of that, suffering should not become a scoreboard by which we measure whose bitterness is most justified. Nor should it become an excuse for faithlessness, self-pity, or sinful behavior. Rather, our common experience of suffering should cultivate compassion for one another. It should remind us that we are all frail and dependent upon the grace of God.

It should also give us the courage to lovingly confront those whose faith is wavering. The answer to suffering is not to lower our view of God but to raise our eyes to Christ. The reason we need the good news is precisely that we live in a bad world. The reason we need a Savior is that sin, death, and the devil are real enemies. The gospel is not a message for people who have escaped suffering. It is the announcement that Christ has conquered the very things that make suffering so painful. He has defeated sin. He has broken the power of death. He has crushed the serpent’s head. One day, He will make all things new.

Until then, we grieve. But we do not grieve as those who have no hope.