I read in the paper just 3 days ago, it's a news story from China. It took place in a province called Weifang city, and there was a young couple. They went to bed one evening, they had one child, and they were expecting a second child. In the early hours of one morning, the police burst into their home. They held down the husband, and they dragged the wife out of the home, and took her to a hospital.
The panic-stricken husband tried every way to find out where his wife had gone. But the authorities refused to tell him. It took him 6 hours to find out where his wife was. They had threatened the wife, because she already 6 months pregnant - threatened to put her husband in prison. Then they injected her, and when he got to his wife, she was in the process of miscarrying.
What touched me very deeply was that both of them suffered great grief. They were grieving over the loss of their child, and there's no one to comfort them. My heart goes out to them, and I'll tell you why in a moment. I feel quite deeply touched by that story. I'll share to you a couple of personal testimonies, and then we'll open up the word of God. I want to offer hope to people today.
Some years ago, my wife went through two miscarriages. As a man, I didn't understand at that time what it meant to a woman, to miscarry. We were involved in ministry; we had many pressures on us - we already had 5 other children. When the two miscarriages came, my wife never complained. She had the miscarriages, went to hospital, and then we carried on with our life, and I didn't think about it much at all.
We had another two children - Peter and Sarah. Some years later, I was in another church ministry, and I was praying for a lady, and asked her: what is the problem? She'd had a miscarriage, and as I prayed, she began to weep; and I felt this incredible grief - I began to cry with her. I thought: that's very strange - I must be feeling the love of God.
Then on the same day, I went to another church; and the second time, the same thing happened. I prayed for a woman who'd suffered a miscarriage, and I had this incredible grief. When you feel something, you need to ask yourself: what am I feeling; and why do I feel it? So I went home and began to pray, and the Lord spoke to me. He said: you are grieving not because of her, but because of your own loss. He said: you've lost two children – a boy and a girl, and you've never stopped to grieve. You've never even admitted you've lost a child.
So I began to grieve, and the Lord showed me what to do. I went home to my wife, and I said to her: God's been speaking to me about our two miscarriages. Joy said: “Well God's been speaking to me too - I've been journaling about this. We had a boy and a girl; and I've given them names: Timothy and Catherine.”
I said: the Lord has shown me something we need to do for our family. So we had a family meal, like we always do, and Joy put two beautiful orchids on the table. Then we had our meal, and we shared with the children. I said: “You know that we have seven children in our family. Well actually, there are nine - there are another two in heaven”.
An interesting thing happened - the two children who came after the miscarriages, both began to weep, and they were really deep sobs. I realised that they had picked up a grief in their spirit; even though in their mind, they did not know we had lost two children. There was grief that my wife carried; and they knew in their spirit that they had lost a brother and a sister, and there was a grief in their heart. The spirit of grief had come around them.