On Providence
I keenly remember, during my first year of seminary, writing a card for a woman whose husband had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor. At that time, I don’t think we knew that it was a glioblastoma (an always deadly cancer), but he was due for surgery and we wanted to write some words of encouragement. Some friends gathered a card and we wrote about providence from the Heidelberg Catechism:
Q27. What do you understand by the Providence of God?
A. Providence is the almighty and ever present power of God by which God upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty—all things, in fact, come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand.
Q28. How does the knowledge of God’s creation and providence help us?
A. We can be patient in adversity, thankful in prosperity, and for the future we can have good confidence in our faithful God and Father that no creature will separate us from his love. For all creatures are so completely in his hand that without his will they can neither move nor be moved.
As a word, “providence” can sound like the sort of platitude that people don’t want to hear in times of suffering. I have lost track of how many times I’ve heard people object to statements like “God has a purpose in it” or “everything happens for a reason.” But the doctrine of Providence is much more than a mere platitude. It isn’t a slogan to be repeated casually.
Indeed, Providence is a doctrine that is as precious as it is tricky. It raises hard questions about suffering—evils both natural and moral—or even the smaller difficulties in life. The exact nature of its relationship to these questions (and their answers) is beyond my present scope. Instead, I would like to explain why this doctrine is so precious and how I came to learn it intellectually and personally.
When I began my journey into Reformed theology, I was almost entirely self-taught. I would procrastinate on my school reading assignments by reading theological articles online. There were so many unfamiliar ideas and terms. I just read and read. As often happens when one begins to study Reformed theology, I started with the doctrine of Election but Providence goes hand in hand with it. As a result, it was one of the earliest doctrines that I learned.
My study of Reformed theology began in a time of great personal upheaval. I had just transferred to university from my community college. In addition, my family decided that we needed to leave our church due to changes concerning the conduct of worship and church life in general. (We went from a fairly normal evangelical setting to one where the singing had more in common with a performance, plus it was very, very loud.)
We ended up at a tiny Calvinistic Baptist church as it received an influx of new members from another local church—one experiencing conflict over subjects like predestination. The pastor of the conflicted church was a graduate of a Calvinistic seminary and when tension arose he was kicked out and a few families left with him. The church we all joined, incidentally, was experiencing its own trials of trusting God’s providence. The church's pastor (and only elder) was newly diagnosed with cancer. When we joined the church, he often wasn’t able to attend. After a few months, though, he went into remission and was able to return to the pulpit. When he was able to resume teaching and preaching, we started a Bible study covering all the basics of Calvinism—especially the sovereignty of God and how Scripture was structured by God’s covenants with his people.
This was the first time I had been in a church situation where theology was actually taught to people as something important to know. It was just assumed that everyone needed to know these things. Additionally, everyone wanted to know these things. It was a genuinely exciting time, and I thrived in it.
Thinking back, it’s not surprising to me that I ended up falling in love with the doctrine of Providence. I leaned hard on it for years. It was comforting to know that all was as it should be with every step taken being the ones I ought to have taken and nothing done thwarting God’s will. This would really hit home, though, some years later when my husband and I started trying to have children.
Providence Personalized
I lost my first pregnancy in February of 2014. It was a traumatic experience that included being diagnosed with a rare form of ectopic pregnancy. It was quite an emotional roller coaster that had begun with the doctor suspecting the more traditional tubal ectopic earlier in the pregnancy. Going from the diagnosis of a suspected ectopic pregnancy to a threatened miscarriage to a different form of ectopic pregnancy in the space of two months took an incredible toll on my mental health. (Few will—or want to—warn you just how terrifying pregnancy can be.)
In the aftermath, I developed panic attacks. My anxiety and sensory issues reached new heights. In October, I sought out a clinical psychologist who diagnosed me with ASD (autism spectrum disorder).
Two years later, I became pregnant again. This pregnancy was uniquely challenging as I developed and struggled with a debilitating loss of executive function. Executive function is the term used to describe the cognitive processes involved in things like time management, completing tasks (even basic ones), etc. Executive function issues are common in autistic individuals, as well as in those with ADHD. It was easy for people to laugh off my issues as “pregnancy brain,” but for me, it was extreme enough that I wasn’t able to complete tasks I had done a hundred or thousand times before.
Sadly, that pregnancy also ended in a miscarriage. (It’s weird, very weird, to describe the simultaneous relief and grief that you experience when you have a normal miscarriage after a traumatic loss. It’s a dizzying blend of emotions.)
After that pregnancy, my executive function issues persisted. They were not as severe as they were when I was pregnant, but definitely still present. Eventually, I was diagnosed with ADHD just months later. It was really helpful to understand why I struggled with so many things that others did not. Once again, the diagnosis explained little things about my life that had always mystified me. (Things like why my brain feels itchy when I’m bored by something, why I can’t remember enough to retrace my steps when something is lost, etc.)
To this point, very little of my adult life had gone according to plan. But there’s a real possibility that any postpartum depression or anxiety without a diagnosis of my multiple conditions would have been crippling, or worse.
“We can be patient in adversity”
Finally, in 2018, I had my first successful pregnancy. I still struggled with my executive functioning, but this time I knew why and I knew how to work with it. The relief in knowing why things were the way they were was huge. My husband and I had a plan in place which made it easier to cope. Still, it was a challenging pregnancy.
I felt poor the entire time. My nausea got progressively worse. I ended up failing my glucose tolerance test at the beginning of week twenty-seven. The necessity for an endocrinologist referral to manage gestational diabetes was very disheartening—I had dreaded this possibility my entire pregnancy and had done what I could to mitigate the risks.
As week twenty-seven progressed, I waited (read: dreaded) for the endocrinologist’s office to call about an appointment while feeling increasingly poor. Then I got the phone call. I couldn’t come in on the initially offered day, so the nurse poked around. She asked if I could come in that afternoon, and I said yes.
I was in no state to drive at that time—too tired, too much pain in my hands. I called my husband at work and asked him to come home and drive me. At the doctor’s office, they took my blood pressure: 168/98. Though a high reading, I’m prone to white coat syndrome and I was pretty stressed about the whole gestational diabetes business. Wishing to not overreact, they took my blood pressure four times, hoping for better numbers, before sending me to my OB’s office.
“Don’t stop anywhere,” they said.
Despite this caution, I still wasn’t concerned. I sent texts to my mom, apprising her of the situation. I told her not to worry. I was sure they would just send me home with some blood pressure meds. But once I got in to see the on-call OB, he took my blood pressure (still high) and said pretty much the last thing I had expected, “You have preeclampsia with severe features.”
For those unaware, preeclampsia is one of the leading causes of maternal deaths—the high blood pressure causes strokes, and your liver and kidneys can be damaged. It can also turn into full-blown eclampsia (the mother experiencing seizures). So I was sent directly to labor and delivery, hooked up to magnesium (in order to prevent the aforementioned seizures), and an ambulance was summoned. With no NICU available at my local hospital and no knowledge of when the baby would come, I needed to be sent to another hospital.
(There’s an escalating protocol when you have preeclampsia. They give you blood pressure medication intravenously and then measure your blood pressure. If it’s still high, they give you more. Eventually, if you don’t respond, they deliver the baby. When you’re as early in pregnancy as I was, the goal is to keep you pregnant for as long as possible without endangering the life of the mother.)
The ambulance came. At the new hospital, they repeated their attempts to bring down my blood pressure while the hospital’s OB gave me a pep talk. She didn’t want to deliver a twenty-seven-week-old baby so could I please respond to the drugs? Finally, my blood pressure did come down. There was rejoicing. Two days later I stopped responding to the medicines and my baby was delivered via c-section at twenty-eight weeks, two days.
“We can be … thankful in prosperity”
It was incredibly difficult to go through at the time. Gestational diabetes stressed me out horribly—my ADHD was in full force and needing to think about the details of food just sounded exhausting and impossible. In the end, though, there’s a strong possibility that the diagnosis saved me from a stroke—or worse.
In the days between my admission to the hospital and finally delivering my baby (who is currently a very healthy almost-toddler), I was struck by how very providential everything was. So many things worked out perfectly such that the disease was caught before either I or my baby suffered serious consequences. My experience brought me to reflect on Romans 8:28:
"And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”
God used a diagnosis I had done my best to avoid and a doctor working on an unusual afternoon for earthly blessings: my baby and I lived! And so He taught me to be “thankful in prosperity.” However, it is also true that the context for Romans 8:28 makes clear that it isn’t simply a platitude to comfort people about earthly prosperity. The Lord has taught me to “be patient in adversity.” In the Lord’s providence, “good” refers to God’s plan of sanctifying a person. “Good” is not a guarantee of easy.
The last couple of years have been hard in so many different ways, and yet looking back I can see how it has been used for my sanctification. My faith has been strengthened by trials. My prayer life has improved through the saints praying for me and for my baby as well as the opportunity to return the act for the saints. All this calls to mind the command in James 1 to be thankful for trials because they strengthen your faith (James 1:2-4). How could that be so if God were not completely sovereign over our trials?
So here I sit, over a year later, incredibly thankful for the very trial that I had done my best to avoid. Life didn’t work out the way I planned, but since it didn’t, I’m far better equipped now to survive motherhood by relying on God’s providence. Sometimes I am tempted to mourn how thoroughly things didn’t go the way I wanted. But then I look at my baby and recall the deep, abiding truth that nothing has happened by chance. Everything has been and will continue to be in accordance with God’s fatherly hand.
“We can have good confidence in our faithful God and Father that no creature will separate us from his love”
These are just the events that I can trace out without supernatural revelation. I’m sure there are many more ways in which this is true—honestly, even in her short life, my baby has been through her own set of health misadventures, a few of which have made the truth of Providence known in their own right.
The way these trials have worked out not only to my earthly benefit but also for my sanctification has only driven home the comfort that comes from resting for the future in this precious doctrine. The knowledge that God’s providence is the determining factor of reality—even when the circumstances are terrifying or full of grief—is a light in the darkness (Psalm 23:4).
“For all creatures are so completely in his hand that without his will they can neither move nor be moved”
