God’s Comfort in the Loss of a Child

4 Min Read

Christians are not promised health, wealth, and happiness this side of heaven. The sad reality of life in a fallen world is that we will all go through many different forms of loss: our health, a job, a relationship, or, worst of all, the loss of a person dear to us. When we experience these things, it can be hard to see anything outside of the loss itself. It can become so all-consuming that everything else gets swallowed up by grief, even the life-giving truths of Scripture.

I experienced this when my daughter Leila was stillborn one week before her due date. I began to fixate entirely on the horror of my loss: my longed-for baby had died; I wouldn’t get to feed, clothe, or care for her; my son, Ben, remained an only child; I might be plunged into infertility again; my daughter was buried in a grave; and on, and on, and on the eyes of my soul regarded one terrible reality to the next. But in looking at my loss and its many layers, I stopped looking at the One who alone could bring comfort to my sadness and light to my darkness. Hymn writer Helen Lemmel knew the way out of my near despair:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.

When I turned my eyes to Jesus, even the loss of my child grew strangely dim as His light illuminated the darkness. Looking upon Him didn’t anesthetize me from pain, but it did bring me immense comfort amid the pain.

The Savior Who Cares

As I turned to Jesus in the loss of my daughter, I found a Savior who was full of compassion. The Gospels record how Jesus’ heart was tender toward hurting people who had experienced many kinds of loss. One of the most beautiful examples of this is when a man afflicted with leprosy implored Jesus to make him clean. Mark records in his gospel: “Moved with pity, [Jesus] stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, ‘I will; be clean’” (Mark 1:41). This man was unclean according to the Levitical laws (Lev. 13), and therefore was treated as an outcast, with physical distance always separating him from others. But Jesus, moved with compassion, stretched His hand across the void of separation and touched him. How long must it have been since this man had felt the touch of another person?

The Gospels give us many examples of Jesus touching the lives of those living under the burden and brokenness of a fallen world. With compassion, Jesus pursued the mother whose only son had died (Luke 7:11–15), the sick (Matt. 14:14), the hungry (Matt. 15:32), the blind (Matt. 20:30–34), and the harassed and the helpless (Matt. 9:35–36). When we look at these accounts, we do not see a Savior void of feeling for suffering people, but a Savior who “stretches out His hand” toward us in compassion.

The Savior Who Cries

Perhaps nowhere do we see the tender heart of Jesus more than in the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). When He arrived at the house of mourning where His friend Lazarus lay dead, Jesus didn’t shed a cinematic single tear—He wept. Even though He knew that He was about to call Lazarus back to life, He still felt the deep emotions of sadness and anger.

When I looked to Jesus, the Savior who cares, cries, and conquers in a world of sin, suffering, and sorrow, I found comfort—my only comfort in life and in death.

After Leila was stillborn, I wept more than I ever had before, but I was comforted by the fact that my Savior also wept in the face of death. In his commentary on this verse, John Calvin writes, “He is as much moved by our ills as if he had suffered with them himself.” In your loss, and in mine, our Lord Jesus does not delight in our sorrow. He is the Word become flesh who felt sorrow in His breast and tears on His cheeks.

The Savior Who Conquers

Knowing that Jesus cares and cries is a comfort in times of loss, but by itself it is not enough. For what use is it for Jesus to come alongside us in our suffering and sorrow, if, in the end, He cannot overcome these things for us? If Jesus is not a conqueror, then ultimately, He is not a comforter. When we are hurting, we do not merely need a sympathizer—we need a Savior.

Jesus didn’t come to cover our pain with a Band-Aid; He went to the root cause of all our suffering—namely, sin. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” so that He could reverse the curse of the fall (1 Peter 2:24). Before sin cast its ugly stain over everything, there was no loss. There was no crying, no disappointment, no brokenness, no death. When Jesus called Lazarus from death to life, He was showing us what He came to do: “That through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb. 2:14). Because Christ conquered death and was raised to life on the third day, He gave us new hope of a world to come where all sorrow and sighing will flee away, where death and loss will be no more.

The Savior Who Comforts

When I found out that Leila had died in my womb, I was plunged into a grief that threatened to consume me. But when I looked to Jesus, the Savior who cares, cries, and conquers in a world of sin, suffering, and sorrow, I found comfort—my only comfort in life and in death. When I turned my eyes toward Him, my loss grew “strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.”