Jonathan David Faulkner

On top of a small book shelf in my living room are a few trinkets and one picture, a very small knit hat, an angel holding a small baby and a picture of an ultrasound. Above all of this is the word Shalom written in Hebrew, the name we chose for the baby we lost on an unseasonably warm January night in 2018. It’s a daily reminder that we actually have 2 children, not just Erin, our little bundle of Joy, but Shalom, a child who we only saw on an ultrasound once before they told us she had passed away. The little baby that made me a father, but who I never met but who my wife and I both loved intensely.

Brother, I want you to hear this, even if you have lost a child, you are a father, you were part of creating that child, that life. I know this world has told you that you are nothing more than a “donor” and that you really have no say when it comes to pregnancy, but you helped create a life and now you are hurting because that life you helped create is gone. Or, you even held that baby in your arms and loved him or her with all your being, they were still born or they passed in the night, that child made you a father and this father’s day is as much for you as it is for the dad whose kids have grown up happy and healthy.

I know the wound is likely fresh for some of you, that your heart is hurting and you feel like you can’t talk about it because we are men and we just suck it up and take it. But brother you are allowed to be sad, to hurt from this, though you may have to delay your grief to lift up and love your wife through her pain, you are allowed to grieve the loss of your child. You are allowed to be angry and hurt, you are allowed to feel and when the time comes you are allowed to do what you need to do to heal.

Scripture promises us in so many places it would be hard to pick just one that God walks with us through suffering and cares for us in the midst of our deepest pain and worst trials. Oh dear brother you are not alone on this journey, I have felt what you are feeling in the last year, experienced that pain mix with the joy of a baby that would not exist had the first one lived. I have walked through our first child’s due date and cried. I am countless other brothers have experienced this and walked through this and so hear me when I say you are not alone. Remember too that the God you serve, the God you love sent his own son into the world to die on the cross, his only child, to die and show us what will happen for all who believe when our time of resurrection comes.

Brother, God is with you and your brothers are with you, stand firm in that fact even as you are too weak to stand, even as the pain feels like it is too much, even when the enemy and the world try to tell you that you are alone.

Dear brother, you are loved and you are a father.