Photo by Kate Ter Haar

By Debbie Gin

Almost ten years ago, I endured one of the most painful experiences in my life.  Twice.  We lost our first child at 8 weeks in utero; we eventually named her Cadence.  Then less than a year later, we lost Nathanial at 10 weeks in utero.

Losing our kids before they were born was painful on many levels:  physical (extended cramping, as if birth pangs, with no baby at the end), emotional (emptiness, loss of what “could have been”), social (guilt around what I should have done to avoid miscarriage, as if I was in control), and filial piety (shattered dreams of providing our parents with their first grandchild).  These were some of the layers of my experience.

Perhaps most painful—and most enduring—was the sense that I had been betrayed.  Not just me, God had betrayed us, all the wonderful people who had stood with us during the week between doctor visits, praying that the non-existent heartbeat would miraculously appear on the ultrasound.  In the months and years that followed, I sank into a very deep void, a place where God existed but was not to be trusted.  If I ventured out to trust God, I thought, I would only be setting myself up to be disappointed and betrayed again.

I know these aren’t new expressions.  Those who have ever endured loss, long seasons of unanswered prayer, and human betrayal have journeyed through this dark space.  It’s a lonely place to have your back turned toward God because facing God is too risky.

The road from Distrust was long and slow.  I passed one milestone when, after nine months of intentionally not praying, I read the books of Job and Genesis and C. S. Lewis’ Til We Have Faces over and over and realized that God does not need to defend God’s self to me.  I was snapped into the reality of God’s being wholly other.  I had been trying to bring God-the-criminal to court, but God was the one who wrote the law.

Much farther down that road, I came to realize that this distrust had a lot to do with my expectations of God.  Whether right or wrong, I had expectations of God to answer my and others’ prayers; I had expectations that I’d be spared from pain; I had expectations of a good and relatively comfortable life.  Then I realized two other very important things.  First, all these were expectations of a privileged me that has lived a privileged life in a wealthy country.  Living in the U.S., I have been socialized to expect to be on top of the world, victorious in everything, in control of all things.  And, reading the Bible through this lens of U.S. American triumphalism, I have easily glossed over the passages where Hagar, Joseph, and Dinah suffered greatly, sometimes victorious in the end and other times not.  And what about those who, living in impoverished contexts, experience God deeply, unencumbered by the expectations of comfort?  I have not learned to be thankful in all things.  I have learned to be entitled.

The second realization was that, all the while that I have expected unconditional love from God, I have not loved God unconditionally.  Why have I not expected that love should flow up to God unconditionally?  I have only expected this love from God to me, as we often speak of such love flowing down to our children.  As a child of immigrant Asian parents, I have…and I have not…known unconditional love.  My parents have sacrificed, and continue to sacrifice, much for their children.  But they have also (mostly unintentionally) had expectations tied to their love.

So how can I know God’s unconditional love when I have only known imperfect models of it?  Perhaps I will experience it fully as I learn to love God unconditionally, with no expectations.

Dr. Debbie Gin is Director of Faculty Development and Research at The Association of Theological Schools/Commission on Accrediting, the support and accrediting organization of most seminaries in the US and Canada.  She was formerly Associate Professor of Ministry at Azusa Pacific Seminary and Fellow for Faculty Development and Evaluation in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment at Azusa Pacific University.  She and her husband currently live in Pennsylvania.