“I came to God through a time when the tiny
 life of an unborn child was dying inside me”

Having decided to move on from atheism, Commitment-Phobe is trying God

I was in the park with a friend who was praying for someone, praying for healing. She said that life was hard, prayer wasn’t always answered and she had to accept that, but she also believed it could be answered. This got me thinking: Do I believe prayer can heal? I want to believe that God intercedes in response to prayer, but, for every miraculous recovery there are the billions of deaths. Another friend recently turned his back on church after the death of a loved one. I totally get it. I want to pray with him, I want to bring him back to the comfort of church community, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the response was: “Get lost” – or words to that effect. There is no promise that when you take up the cross your pain will end – in fact, quite the opposite. (Mathew 8:34-35)

In a way, I came to God through ill health and death – a time when the tiny life of an unborn child was dying inside me. One of these small deaths for which our society doesn’t have the mechanisms to help people with. It happened at the same time that the royal family were waiting for the birth of its newest member. As I entered the hospital to find A&E, I had to walk past banks of photojournalists waiting to catch a glimpse of the mother and child; they were all looking away from me.

I thought I might be having a miscarriage. I was told I could be – or it could be an ectopic pregnancy. We would have to wait and see. I don’t remember much about the next two days. Was the royal child born then or earlier? I think I may have been busy having a scan or blood test, or waiting, and missed the big photo opportunity. I know that by the time my condition was confirmed, the banks of photographers had gone. I was told this embryo was trying to exist in the wrong place. It was stuck in my fallopian tube, and was going to die away slowly or kill me. Fortunately, with early detection and modern medicine nothing so dramatic had to happen…

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This is an extract from the June 2015 edition of Reform.

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