Letter to My Daughters
What follows is a letter written to the author’s two daughters who passed away due to miscarriage. This letter is shared with the prayer that it might encourage someone else.
Jamie Zane & Asher Providence Murray,
My daughters, your sister will be born any day now. Your mother and I cannot describe the joy in our hearts at the thought of holding her in our arms. She has been a funny baby so far, kicking and jumping in the womb for Mom all day. That is, until she calls me over to watch and feel. Somehow, every time, she stops. I wonder if there’s anything to that…
My precious daughters, according to God’s perfect wisdom and good pleasure, you will not spend a moment outside of your mother’s womb. Instead, you will be spared a life lived in a world that, though it has its joys, is a vale of tears. God decided to take you out of the world and to bring you home. This moment, I believe you are set before the face of that glorious, living God, who has loved you so infinitely more and infinitely better than your Mom and I ever could. We planned to give you everything that we could in life, but God planned to give you something better.
My little girls, we know that God works all things for good, for those who love him. This is the truth we cling to when we look at the empty spaces in our hearts — the onesies we purchased for you, the cribs we planned to buy for you, and the lives we so desperately wanted to share with you. As if this great comfort weren’t enough, we know that those who love God do so because He loved them first. I believe you both, who so truly have my heart, are resting in that love and experiencing the intense joy of heaven.
And so, your sister’s name is Felicity, which means “intense joy.” Her name is what all three of you have brought to Hannah and I. It is also the continuous, uninterrupted, and eternal experience of those who the Lord has made a child.
Sweet babes, who we so wish we could’ve held in these arms, we will embrace you with those arms the Lord will recreate in us when we he comes.
“For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.”
1 Thessalonians 4:16-17
To the praise of his glorious grace,
Dad
