After a miscarriage, the grieving person is often the first one left without words. Friends hesitate, church goes quiet, and prayer can feel like a performance. The guide that follows offers no explanation for the loss. It offers something smaller and more useful. Scripture gives grieving people permission to speak to God before they feel better, and it shows companions that silence often helps more than answers. You can work through it alone over a few quiet evenings, or with a small group across one or two gatherings.
The guide follows the story Lance Asper told in a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields about losing his and his wife Meredith’s first pregnancy. He did not tidy that story up. Alongside it are three biblical passages and one practice built from the questions Lisa asked him. If you are grieving, take only what you can carry today and skip the rest.
Before anyone speaks
If you are leading a group, assume someone in the room has lost a pregnancy and has never said so. Some losses happen so early that almost no one knew. Others were announced, celebrated and then never mentioned again. Say at the start that every personal question can be passed, and that passing needs no explanation. Do not go around the circle or ask anyone to tell their story. If someone does, receive it without answering it with a verse. A parent who listens the whole time is taking full part.
What Lance did not clean up
Lance and Meredith had been through job losses and new starts before they decided to try for a family. They got pregnant in 2022 and told her family over Thanksgiving. Then came weeks of bleeding, worry and an early appointment. The night before it, Lance felt that God was telling him it was okay to be happy about becoming a father. He let himself feel it. The next morning the doctor confirmed a miscarriage.
He names many feelings, and few of them are tidy. Part of what he felt was relief, because he had been afraid of how the school families they served would react to the timing. Then the grief hit. “I had so many emotions,” he said. Driving to a work appointment, he broke down in front of a friend of ten years. “I’ve never really cried like that before,” he said.
He also felt betrayed by that night of peace. “And then I feel like I let my guard down for you or like trusted you,” he said, speaking to God. He wondered whether he had done something wrong, whether God was rewarding and withholding like a man training a dog.
Grief after a miscarriage can hold relief, guilt, anger at God, embarrassment about announcing too early, and sorrow for a child no one else met. None of those feelings is a verdict on your faith.
For quiet observation: Without judging any of them, list the feelings you have had since the loss, or have noticed in the person you are caring for. Which one feels least allowed? You do not have to do anything with it yet.
A prayer that complains first
Psalm 13 is six verses long. Read all of it slowly. In the first two verses the psalmist asks the same question four times. Psalm 13:1 begins: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?”
This is poetry, and it is prayer. It records how abandonment feels from the inside, and it says so to God’s face. Scripture keeps this prayer and hands it to worshipers to use. The complaint is not a failure that the psalm later corrects. It is part of the prayer.
Then the psalm turns. Psalm 13:5 reads: “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.” The turn does not answer the question how long, and nothing in the psalm says the trouble has ended. The psalmist leans on God’s mercy while the question stays open. That is close to where Lance still stands. Years later, holding his son, he still asks God “why did you make us go through that,” and he still trusts.
If you use this psalm with a grieving friend, do not hurry them to verse 5. In a life, the space between verse 2 and verse 5 can take a very long time. Someone who prays the first four verses for months is still praying Psalm 13.
Hannah, and a priest who misread her
The opening chapter of 1 Samuel describes a different loss. Hannah is grieving years of empty arms, and she is provoked for it. Read 1 Samuel 1:1-18. Verse 10 says that “she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the LORD, and wept sore.”
Eli the priest watches her lips move without sound and decides she is drunk. In 1 Samuel 1:14 he asks her, “How long wilt thou be drunken? put away thy wine from thee.” Her reply in 1 Samuel 1:15 is worth reading twice: “No, my lord, I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the LORD.”
The narrative describes rather than commands, but it shows something companions need to see. People close to God can misread grief, and the grieving person is allowed to correct them. Eli is a warning against deciding what someone’s pain means before you understand it. If someone at church has said something careless to you, Hannah’s answer is a model: plain, unashamed and accurate. To his credit, Eli listens and blesses her.
Hannah later bears Samuel. That is part of her story, not a promise to every grieving woman, and the text never offers it as one.
The week Job’s friends got right
Before Job’s friends gave their famous bad answers, they did one thing well. Job 2:13 says: “So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great.”
The trouble in the book begins later, when they start explaining. Paul gives the same instruction in Romans 12:15: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” He says nothing about interpreting the weeping.
Lance named another kind of isolation. “We don’t really have friends who’ve gone through it that we knew,” he said. Only after he told colleagues the pregnancy had ended did some say they had been through it too. Lisa describes something similar from seminary, when the problem of evil troubled her and she went to her New Testament professor. He told her he was wrestling with it too. “He normalized the struggle for me,” she said. Shared struggle is a form of staying. When a companion admits to carrying hard questions, the grieving person is no longer the only one in the room who does.
Where Christians differ about God and the loss
Some readers will sincerely believe the miscarriage was God’s will, planned for a purpose they cannot yet see. Others believe God permits such losses in a broken world without willing them, and grieves them. Faithful Christians hold different views on how directly God ordains suffering, and this guide does not settle that question. It matters for how you read Lance. He trusts God and still asks why, and both of those fit within either view. Whatever you believe about God’s purposes, Psalm 13 and Job 2 show the same thing: grief is brought to God openly, and companions sit with it before anyone explains it.
A practice: three questions, asked slowly
In the conversation, Lisa asked Lance three questions in sequence. Those questions make a practice you can use over a week, or across two gatherings.
- Before. Write a few sentences about how you pictured God before the loss. Lance described a God of power who could do anything, and a sense that serving God faithfully should mean being protected. Be as honest about your own picture.
- Now. Lisa asked him plainly, “How do you think you see God now?” Answer only with what is true today, even if it is I don’t know or I’m angry.
- To your earlier self. Leave this blank until you are ready. Some people come back to it weeks later, and some never write it. If you do, avoid promises your earlier self could not hold you to.
Then, if you want, write a short prayer shaped like Psalm 13. Start with your own how long. Tell God what you think he did or failed to do. Stop there if that is all you have. Add a line of trust only if it is true for you that day.
For companions, the practice is different. Before you see your friend this week, decide what you will not say. Then choose one honest sentence, such as I don’t understand it either, and I’m staying. Say it, and let the quiet do its work.
When the story does not end the way Lance’s did
Lance and Meredith later had a son, Will, and Lance says seeing his son smile brings back the joy he felt the night before the appointment. Reflecting on this, Lisa said, “the suffering is there, but the joy has outweighed the suffering.” For Lance, that is true.
He refuses to turn it into a rule. He knows couples who are still waiting, or who stopped waiting. “I don’t wanna ever make it sound like this is how it happens for everybody,” he said. Lisa adds a limit of her own: “there’s several things I prayed for God to do that I haven’t seen manifested on earth.”
So a group has to hold two things without forcing them together. God can restore joy, and in some lives he clearly has. He does not promise any grieving parent a later child, and a later child does not explain an earlier loss. If you are reading with empty arms, neither Lance’s ending nor Hannah’s is the standard your grief must reach. The psalmist who wrote how long four times was praying faithfully before anything changed.
Questions for discussion
- Lance felt relief, fear and anger at once. What do you make of the fact that he named all three instead of only the sorrow?
- Psalm 13 puts its complaint to God directly. What is the difference between speaking angrily to God and speaking angrily about him, and does that difference matter to you?
- Eli misread Hannah’s grief. What are the ways people in churches misread grief after a miscarriage, and how might someone gently correct them?
- In Job 2:13 the friends stay silent for seven days. What do you think their silence communicated to Job that their later speeches did not?
- Lance felt peace the night before the loss and then felt betrayed. How can someone keep trusting God without deciding what that night meant?
- For private reflection, not for sharing: Is there one person you would want to know about your loss? What would you need from them before you could tell them?
Care beyond the group
Pregnancy loss is a physical event as well as an emotional one. A grieving mother should stay in touch with her doctor, and either parent may need more support than friends can give. Seeing a counselor or therapist is not a sign of weak faith. God works through trained clinicians, and grief that stays heavy for a long time, or brings deep depression or anxiety, deserves professional care alongside prayer. Fathers grieve too, sometimes alone in a car on the way to a meeting, as Lance did. Ask them how they are doing.
If anyone in your group says they do not want to keep living or are thinking about harming themselves, do not handle it alone. Stay with them, involve a pastor or counselor, and contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 in the United States.
Lance said that hearing teachers admit their struggles told him “I’m allowed to struggle with things too and know that I don’t have to be like perfect.” Bring God the sentence you have been afraid to say, and tell one person who will stay.