The God That Shows Up

A journey through miscarriage, harmful theology, and the God who shows up in flesh.

The cruelest theology I ever heard came wrapped in concern.

My wife and I had just lost our second pregnancy in less than a year. We were grieving, confused, barely keeping it together. And a family member, someone who loved us, who meant well, told us that maybe we were “outside of God’s will” since the miscarriages happened shortly after we’d moved for a new ministry position. As if our geographic coordinates had somehow disrupted the divine algorithm. As if God was punishing us for taking a call we thought He’d given us in the first place.

I remember nodding, forcing a smile, trying to receive their words as the comfort they were intended to be. But inside, something cracked. Not my faith exactly, but my trust in the evangelical framework I’d spent my whole life building. Because if this was pastoral care, if “you must have done something wrong” was the best my tradition could offer in the face of unspeakable loss, then maybe I’d been taught the wrong theology all along.

The Christian Cliché Industrial Complex

Looking back, I realize those words weren’t an anomaly. They were just the logical endpoint of the platitudes I’d been raised on. “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “This is all part of His perfect plan.” They sound comforting, but they curdle in your mouth when you’re burying dreams you’ll never get to hold.

The evangelical church I grew up in was fluent in this language. We had a phrase for every crisis, a verse for every tragedy, a tidy explanation for why bad things happen to people who trust Jesus. The subtext was always the same: if you’re suffering, God either caused it or allowed it, and either way, you should thank Him for it. Your job wasn’t to grieve honestly or rage at the unfairness of it all. Your job was to smile through the pain and testify to God’s goodness anyway.

So that’s what I tried to do. I tried to be grateful. I tried to see the hidden purpose. I tried to believe that losing two babies was somehow God’s will, even though every fiber of my being knew that couldn’t be right. Because what kind of God wills that kind of pain? What kind of Father orchestrates heartbreak and calls it love?

When Better Theology Found Me

The turning point came when I stumbled across a book I wasn’t even looking for. Lord Willing? Wrestling with God’s Role in My Child’s Death by Jessica Kelley. She’d lost her four-year-old son to brain cancer, and she couldn’t stomach the Christian clichés either. God’s will? Divine design? The Lord’s perfect plan? She rejected all of it. Not because she lost her faith, but because she found a better one.

Kelley argues that God didn’t cause her son’s death. Didn’t give him cancer. Didn’t orchestrate the tragedy for some mysterious purpose we’re too small to understand. Instead, she points to a God whose love cannot fail, even when we can’t see a way forward. A God who grieves with us, not one who engineers our grief from a distance. She calls it rejecting “blueprint theology”, the idea that every tragedy is part of God’s perfect plan, in favor of a Jesus-looking God.

And that’s when it clicked for me. Because Jesus didn’t explain suffering. He entered into it.

The Incarnation: God’s Answer to “Why?”

The entire Christian story hangs on one scandalous truth: God didn’t send a memo. He came. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” isn’t just a Christmas card sentiment. It’s the theological center of everything we believe. When humanity cried out in pain, God’s response wasn’t a list of reasons why suffering exists. It was presence. Emmanuel. God with us.

Think about John 11, when Jesus arrives in Bethany after Lazarus has died. Mary and Martha are wrecked. Their brother is gone, and they can’t understand why Jesus didn’t show up in time to heal him. And here’s what gets me: Jesus could have explained the purpose. Could have given them the cosmic perspective, the divine blueprint, the reason Lazarus had to die so he could be raised again as a sign. But he doesn’t.

Instead, John 11:35 gives us the shortest verse in the Bible and maybe the most important: “Jesus wept.”

He wept. Even though he knew the ending. Even though he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He still wept with Mary and Martha because their grief was real and their pain mattered. That’s the incarnation. Not God explaining our suffering from a safe distance, but God entering into it, sitting in the dirt with us, weeping with us. That’s what showing up looks like when God does it.

What We Lost, What We’re Learning

The evangelical church I grew up in didn’t teach me how to show up. It taught me how to theologize from a distance, how to offer explanations instead of presence, how to make people feel worse while thinking I was helping. I learned to speak in clichés because clichés keep you safe. They let you acknowledge someone’s pain without actually entering into it. They let you feel like you’ve done something pastoral without the vulnerability of just being there.

But the incarnation demands something different from us. If God’s answer to human suffering was presence, then ours should be too. That doesn’t mean we never speak, never offer hope, never point to resurrection. It just means we start by weeping with those who weep. By sitting in the silence. By showing up even when we don’t have answers.

Showing Up in Flesh and Blood

So what does incarnational presence actually look like?

• It looks like sitting with someone in the hospital and saying nothing.

• It looks like bringing a meal even though you can’t fix anything.

• It looks like texting “I’m thinking of you” on the anniversary of their loss when everyone else has moved on.

• It looks like resisting the urge to offer silver linings or divine purposes or any explanation that makes you more comfortable with their suffering.

• It looks like Jesus. Weeping with Mary and Martha. Sitting with the disciples in the garden. Bearing the weight of human pain in his own body instead of explaining it away from heaven.

Here’s what I’m learning: the people who helped us most after our miscarriages weren’t the ones who had the best theology or the right Bible verses. They were the ones who showed up. Who sat with us in silence. Who let us be angry and sad and confused without trying to fix it. They incarnated the love of God by being present in the flesh, and that mattered more than any explanation ever could.

The incarnation teaches us that presence is the point. That love shows up. That the gospel isn’t a set of answers we deliver from a distance, it’s a way of being with people in their pain. And maybe, just maybe, that’s the whole point. God didn’t send an explanation for suffering. He sent Himself.

And He’s still asking us to do the same.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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