When our daughter Ruth, who had multiple special needs, died before her eighth birthday, my husband, Dana, and I were devastated. I don’t say “completely” devastated or “profoundly” devastated, because by its very definition devastation is total. There are no degrees. We experienced a black, bleak ruin where the flowering, fruitful garden of our lives once grew.

Born in a hospital in Uganda and quickly abandoned, Ruth had spent much of the first year of her life in an orphanage before being diagnosed with cerebral palsy. She then came to Maine for six months of physical therapy. We met her through friends, fell in love with her laughing eyes and contagious smile, and completed a lengthy international adoption to give her a home.

Was raising Ruth hard? Yes. It was also the most unexpected, amazing, lifeaffirming, heart-expanding experience of our lives. Because Ruth could physically do nothing for herself, our new routine—and our three older children’s— involved daily sacrifice. Yet, loving and serving Ruth filled us with joyful confidence that we were living out God’s will, expressed throughout scripture, to share his love with others. Our purpose was to love Ruth, and we did. Completely.

When Ruth died, not only did we lose a beloved child, I lost my trust in God. Here we had obediently shared his love with another, and he had broken our hearts. For months, I struggled to pray or read my Bible. In the months that followed, I gave myself permission to grieve. I needed to mourn, but I also needed to be comforted. For those who trust God, grief is not the legacy of life. Love is.

Searching for God, I opened my Bible to the most melancholy books I could think of. Ecclesiastes, which opens with the words, “Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” seemed safe. So did Lamentations, which is written in the form of a funeral dirge. I also found comfort in the Psalms, which are full of laments regarding life’s hurts.

“I am exceedingly afflicted,” Israel’s ancient king David wrote in Psalm 119:107. “Revive me, O Lord, according to your word.”

Like David, I needed to be revived. The more I read, the more tangible God’s presence became to me. The Bible is full of misused, abandoned, downtrodden, and grief stricken people, including those actively following God. To deny this is to deny the very suffering of Christ and that of millions of innocent people around the world such as those caught in the modern slave trade, struggling to find water, food, and shelter in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, those who lack medical care, and the many children like Ruth, who are still waiting for homes.

While Ruth’s loss still aches, looking in the word helped me trust the nearness of God, even in the most desperate circumstances. It also reminds me that the story is not over. Read to the end of the book and you’ll discover that someday God’s redemption will be complete and suffering will cease.

MEADOW RUE MERRILL is a Mid-coast Maine writer who shares about God in her everyday life through “Faith Notes.” For more, go to www.meadowrue.com where you can follow her on

Twitter or Facebook.