Today marks a sad anniversary for me. This day 7 years ago we lost our little Beatrice… unformed, but created, alive. I remember the heartache, the shock of realizing we were going through this AGAIN. Really? Again?!

I thought about the first time this happened – nine months earlier – I knew what was going on in my body. I knew the cramping and bleeding indicated I was miscarrying. I had no doubts, even going to the emergency room at Detroit Receiving, I knew the answer we would receive.

The baby is gone.

After I had been examined, the sweet, curly-haired doctor came from behind the curtain to deliver the inevitable news: we lost the baby. We cried again. We held hands and wept again. With heaps of inability to understand why, we wept. My wounds were fresh and hurting.

I named him Benjamin. My sweet Benjamin who I will mourn until the day I hold him in heaven. I didn’t know until much later that his name means ‘with Jesus’. How sweet our God is to give me that gift of assurance that Benjamin is indeed with Him.

This day 7 years ago, the same sweet, curly-haired doctor walked into the room. She immediately recognized my face. Her shoulders fell, and her face mirrored my pain. “Not again,” she lamented with sadness, compassion and a personal understanding of my pain.

She showed her scars to me in that moment.

We had a bond of pain and loss and grief in that moment.

Last night as I lay in the darkness of our bedroom searching for sleep, I reached out to the Healer, the One who knows my scars, for comfort. I cried, remembering the day my heart broke, again. I remembered how God has used my pain and my scars of loss and grief to hold the hands of other women in a way only I could. I thanked Him for those opportunities where my scars could help heal someone else.

That’s how He does is sometimes, isn’t it?

He uses us broken, scarred, women to treat the wounds in others by being together in it, by showing we really understand them when we expose our own scars.

There’s no shame in those moments, but a sense of deep connection and comfort among the tears.

God is using me. He uses US when we are willing to step out into the place of pain with our sisters. When we are willing to expose our scars for the good of our sisters. When we are willing to re-live our pain still held in the hands of our Scarred Savior to show our sisters that He cares about their pain, too.