We continue our year-long journey through the Dewey Decimal System. Today we enter the realm of the 200′s, where a multitude of books about religion abide.

What Was Lost: A Christian Journey Through Miscarriage by Elise Erikson Barrett

Since I’m a male, and this 2010 title was written for women who have experienced miscarriage, you might think I’ve made an odd choice. But author Barrett, a United Methodist pastor, is a good storyteller, and she relates her own miscarriage experience so movingly that a  reader is drawn in and ready to hear the accounts that other women have shared with her.

Okay, I’ve been ill, and my emotions aren’t to be trusted. I grew weepy a couple weeks ago while watching “True Grit”–mostly, I think, because I was at a movie theatre with my wife and not in a hospital or nursing home. So you’re allowed to be skeptical when I say that Barrett’s use of the Psalms–to help women work their way through their (sometimes quite angry) feelings about God after their miscarriages–is quite moving.

Any reader, though, might benefit from the chapter, “When Other People Say Hurtful Things.” I don’t think I’ve said any of these things to a woman following a miscarriage, but now I’m on alert. The words You can have another baby will never escape my lips.

The assumption is that what you’ve actually lost is only one of many chances to be pregnant. LeAnn said, “One of the most hurtful things that people said to me over and over again was that there would be other babies. Well, I wanted that baby. The baby I had prayed for, longed to hold, dreamed about.

Prior to her ordination, Barrett was required to serve a 12-week term as hospital chaplain. In the chapter “Long-Term Effects,” she tells about the way her miscarriage came back to grab her in the midst of her chaplaincy; and that story, too, is illuminating. I’m grateful to have stumbled across this book in my quest for a 200.

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