Thunderheads of Condemnation

My world turned dark as I contemplated the most unpalatable scenario of them all: that God had set His face against me. Since I had originally been convinced that the pregnancy was His way of reaching out to me in love, of knitting us back together as the team we had been since I was four, the miscarriage became a sign that He hated me. I just couldn't understand how He could have let me go through the brief phase of ecstasy and planning, all the while knowing that I would be deeply devastated by the loss. I was not then and am not now trying to blaspheme God or question His perfection. I just did not understand. The logical conclusion, at least to my grief-muddled head, was that the bill had come due. I was paying for the many sins I had come to walk in as the gulf between me and the Lord had widened. Some of these sins were so familiar, I swerved into them without thinking and with only occasional compunction. The only sign that I labored under them was a dark cloud of condemnation that hovered over my head pretty much everywhere I went. On the heels of this crushing wave of perceived rejection by God came a second wave ever more deadly to my tortured psyche: fear. If my dreams of a baby had been summarily washed out with the tide, what might happen next? These juvenile ways of looking at my situation and my heavenly Father would be resolved in the coming months as I felt His presence in my life and my home, but directly after my miscarriage they tortured me and dominated my thought life. The emotional pain I felt was almost physical. It was as if I had a gaping wound in my gut that poured forth blood day and night without ever, mercifully, letting me bleed out and die. It was bad, reader.