Grieving in the Margins 

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” — Jeremiah 1:5a (NIV)

March arrived again.

Maybe you noticed it the way you notice everything now — with that particular ache that lives just beneath ordinary moments. The light is changing. Things are blooming that you did not plant. And somewhere, probably on your social media feed before you were fully awake this morning, someone announced a pregnancy.

You said something gracious. You may have even meant it.

And then you close the app and sit with the part of you that no one sees.

The Grief Without a Funeral

No one sends flowers for a negative pregnancy test. There is no bereavement leave for the morning after a failed embryo transfer, no meal train for the silent loss that happened before anyone even knew to hope with you. The world does not pause. Your coworker does not know why you are quiet. Your mother means well but does not know what to say. And so you learn, without meaning to, how to carry something heavy in a way that does not inconvenience anyone.

You learn to grieve in the margins.

Not Invisible

But here is what I want you to know, and I want you to let it land slowly:

God has never once looked past you to someone more deserving of His attention.

He has not missed a single negative test, a single waiting room, a single drive home in silence. He has not confused your grief with ingratitude or your ache for lack of faith. He has not grown tired of the same prayer offered in the same dark, month after month after month.

He has been in every single one of those rooms with you.

March is a complicated month when your arms are still empty, and the world insists on blooming anyway.

Everything around you speaks of new life. And there is a particular cruelty in beautiful weather when your heart is heavy. It’s as if the world did not receive the message, as if it is celebrating without you. You are allowed to feel that. You are allowed to love the sunshine and grieve at the same time. These are not contradictions. They are just the truth of where you are.

I won’t make you a promise about the future today.

So let me just say this:

You are not forgotten, not punished, not loved any less than the woman whose prayer was answered differently than yours. 

You are known. Fully. By name. By longing. By loss.

What Someone Should Have Said

Someone should have brought you a casserole. I know, because no one brought me one either and I have needed one more times than I can count for over a decade. Someone should have sat with you the way people sit with the bereaved and said “I know this is a real loss” aloud and let you fall apart without rushing you back to fine.

If no one did — I am sorry. That absence is its own wound.

But God is not limited by what the people around you understood to acknowledge. He was there. El Roi — the one Hagar named in the wilderness when she had been unseen by everyone who should have known her. He has never looked past you once.

He found her in the wilderness. He can find you in March.

Bring Him the Month

So as March opens, I am not asking you to manufacture hope or perform peace you do not feel.

I am asking you to let yourself be seen, by the God who already sees you, exactly as you are. Tired. Hoping. Grieving. Brave in ways that will never make anyone’s highlight reel.

Bring Him the month. Bring Him the ache. Bring Him the complicated feeling you had when you closed that app this morning.

He can hold every version of it. 

He knew you before your womb knew waiting. He knows you still.

For Reflection

Where have you been grieving in the margins? What would it mean today to bring that exact grief, unnamed and unresolved, to a God who does not need you to tidy it first?

A Prayer

Lord, You are El Roi — the God who sees. See me today in the places I have learned to hide my grief. I am tired of carrying this quietly. I am tired of pretending I am further along than I am. I don’t need You to fix it today. I just need to know I am not invisible to You. Be near to me in the waiting. Tether me to hope that does not demand resolution. And let me feel, even for a moment, that I am fully known and not alone. Amen.