Questions I Can’t Stop Asking After Child Loss: A Pastor Gets Real
When the questions won’t let you go, you don’t have to carry them alone.
The questions after child loss don’t wait until you’re ready for them.
Why did I even pray? Can I ever trust God again? Is my child in heaven? Will I know them when I see them again?
When I asked the moms in my community what they would ask a pastor about God and the death of their child, so many of you responded.
So I brought your questions to Pastor Jacob Bales.
Jacob is a Teaching and Family Pastor at Northside Christian Church in New Albany, Indiana. Tony and I have known him since he was in sixth grade.
As a very young minister, Jacob was in my living room the night Andrew died. He had an up-close view of our grief.
Right before we recorded, he shared with me how that night shaped him. He said, “It changed the way I walk into a room,” when a family is facing what we faced.
That is the heart he brought to your questions.
He didn’t hand us easy answers. He gave us something real.
If you’ve been carrying questions you can’t put down, I invite you to sit with us here.
Why Pray When Your Prayers Weren’t Answered the Way You Hoped?
When Prayer Feels Pointless After Child Loss
You prayed for protection. You prayed for healing. You prayed for a miracle.
And your child is no longer physically here.
Somewhere along the way, a question settles in: Why pray at all?
I understand that question.
In our home, we had family devotions before everybody went out the door. I gave my children to God. They were His, and I trusted Him with them.
I believed protection was guaranteed if I prayed for it.
And then Andrew went to heaven.
I grew up in a little bit of a legalistic background. I didn’t realize until later that I believed something I had never put into words: as long as my life was good, God was good.
For some moms, the pain cuts even deeper when another mother’s child is spared. It can feel like betrayal.
Why didn’t You love my child as much as You loved hers?
If that question lives in you, you are not the only one carrying it.
What Prayer Really Is
Jacob’s answer opened up a whole different way of seeing prayer.
He said prayer is not always what we think it is.
We can start to treat prayer like a list. We ask, and God gives or God doesn’t.
But Jacob put it this way: “Sometimes the real work of prayer isn’t to change anything around you, but everything within you.”
He pointed to Scripture’s promise that the prayer of a righteous person is powerful, and to Jesus’ words that faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains.
Then he said something every grieving mom needs to hear. Sometimes the mountains that move aren’t the ones we asked God to move.
But they are still moving.
God already knows what we will ask before we pray. Yet He still invites us to come.
That tells us prayer was never only about the list.
“Prayer is about bringing our heart to God,” Jacob said.
You can still bring Him your requests. But at the center of prayer, you are bringing Him you.
And His promise about prayer still stands:
“In those days when you pray, I will listen.”
Jeremiah 29:12 (NLT)
He listens. Even when the answer was not the one you hoped for.
How Do I Trust God Again After the Death of My Child?
The Question Underneath the Question
When prayers aren’t answered the way we expect, the next question comes quickly.
If I can’t rely on Him, how can I trust Him to be there for me the next time?
One of the questions you sent read simply: How can I trust God after the death of a child?
Jacob answered the way Jesus often did. He asked a question back.
“How can you trust God when your child’s still alive?”
Then he explained what he meant. If our trust changes after the death of a child, “then what you were really trusting in was the circumstances that God could provide for you, and not the one who’s actually doing the providing.”
That one stayed with me.
Jacob described biblical trust as face-down trust. It is lying flat before God with open hands and saying, “I have no hold and no control, and I am giving every single thing to You.”
That includes your child. That includes your own life.
He admitted this kind of trust is hard to find anywhere in the human world. Even the best relationships hold something back.
But God isn’t asking us to hold on to anything. He’s asking for everything.
Jacob also encouraged us to decide now how we will respond, before the hardest moments come. The open-handed surrender we offer while our children are alive is the same surrender we offer after.
Surrender Doesn’t Mean It’s Okay
Here’s what I teach the moms I walk alongside.
When you walk through the death of your child, you are in the biggest spiritual battle of your life.
You don’t realize it at first. In survival mode, you’re numb. But as you begin to move out of that numb phase, the reality sets in. Your child is not coming back this side of heaven.
Our culture will fail you every time it tries to tell you how to grieve.
What a grieving mom wants most is to feel settled, safe and secure again. And that security is not based in human reasoning or anything this world has to offer.
It is based in surrender.
I know surrender can feel threatening. It can sound like you’re saying the death of your child is okay.
It isn’t. I’m never going to be okay with the death of my child.
What I am okay with is that God’s in charge and I’m not.
I teach out of Psalm 139 often:
“You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.”
Psalm 139:16 (NLT)
Not one of your child’s days was unseen by Him.
What Romans 8:28 Really Promises After Child Loss
The Verse So Many Grieving Moms Hear
If you’ve walked through the death of a child, someone has probably quoted this verse to you:
“And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.”
Romans 8:28 (NLT)
But there’s nothing good about the death of a child. So what does this verse actually promise?
Jacob read it inside the whole chapter. Romans 8 also speaks of present sufferings and of being more than conquerors.
He said sometimes our biggest physical losses turn into our biggest spiritual wins.
Then he took us to the cross. It was supposed to be the greatest defeat in history.
He thought of Mary watching her son die, and said so many of you listening know exactly what that’s like.
Yet now we look back on that moment as the greatest spiritual victory there has ever been.
Redemption doesn’t always come quickly. Jacob said you may sit in the hardest place for ten years before God shows you the redemption. You may not see it until heaven.
Someone might hear your story twenty or forty years from now, and God will redeem it there.
He shared how moms who have experienced miscarriage sometimes go on to walk with other moms facing the same heartbreak. It doesn’t mean what happened was good. It means God made something good out of something terrible.
This verse doesn’t promise terrible things won’t happen.
It promises God can redeem them.
God Walks With You Through His People
Before we recorded, I was in Deuteronomy 31.
As God’s people prepared to enter the Promised Land, He told them to be strong and courageous. Not in their own strength, but in Him. And He promised He would go ahead of them and be with them.
So how does God walk with us when we can’t see Him?
Often, He sends someone who has walked this road before you to walk it beside you.
Jacob pointed to this verse:
“Share each other’s burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ.”
Galatians 6:2 (NLT)
We expect God’s presence to come in billboard moments. But so often He moves through His people, someone arriving at the right time with the right words, or simply staying.
When Elijah listened for God, He wasn’t in the wind or the earthquake. He came in a gentle whisper.
Jacob put it this way: “When we experience the presence of suffering, we equate it to the absence of God.”
But as a friend of his says, God is never up to nothing.
His timing is not our timing. His silence is not silence the way we interpret it.
That’s why community matters so much. Lean in to voices that align with the Word of God, and guard your heart from anyone speaking into your grief who doesn’t share your spiritual values.
Is My Child in Heaven? Will I Know Them When I See Them Again?
When You Didn’t See the Evidence You Hoped For
This question comes up again and again with the moms I mentor, and it can keep a mom from ever reaching surrender.
“Teresa, I did not see any evidence that my child was serving the Lord, had accepted Christ or even knew who Jesus was.”
Here’s what I hold on to:
“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…”
Ephesians 3:20 (NIV)
I firmly believe every person will have the opportunity to accept or deny Jesus. Just because we didn’t see the evidence doesn’t mean God wasn’t working.
Jacob agreed. We don’t always see the unseen work God is doing in a person’s life. He has heard many stories of people coming to faith in final moments no one else ever witnessed.
Then he said something that brought me peace:
“We never get to decide who goes to heaven. God gets to decide who goes to heaven.”
We don’t get to decide that for anyone. Not for our children. Not for anyone else.
But we do know what Scripture says about the place He is preparing:
“He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain.”
Revelation 21:4 (NLT)
Jacob’s encouragement was to replace that worry with hope and faith that God is who He said He is.
Will I Recognize My Child in Heaven?
One of the questions you sent was one Jacob said no one had ever asked him before.
Will we know our loved ones in heaven?
He was clear about where the Bible is clear, and honest about where it leaves room to wonder.
He pointed to the disciples, who eventually recognized Jesus after His resurrection.
He pointed to Samuel, whom Saul recognized from a description in 1 Samuel 28.
And he pointed to the Transfiguration, where the disciples knew Moses and Elijah without being told.
Some grieving people have been told by well-meaning pastors that they won’t recognize their loved ones in heaven. Jacob believes Scripture gives real reason to hope for deep relationships and recognition there.
I believe we were created with a purpose, and that purpose is eternal. I don’t believe it ends here.
Only a few people in Scripture glimpsed heaven, Isaiah, Paul and John among them, and none of them had words to fully describe it.
I once heard a theologian say God gave us what we need in His Word to live this life. The rest He keeps as a mystery for now.
When your child lives in heaven, you want to know more. That longing is not wrong.
It’s love.
Living With the Questions You Can’t Answer Yet
Be Honest With God, Then Let Him Be Honest With You
How do we live with the questions we may never have answered this side of heaven?
Jacob’s answer was simple, but not easy: “Always be honest with God, but then let him be honest with you.”
You will not get an answer to every question. Some answers you get, you won’t like.
Think of Job. He experienced unimaginable loss, then his health was attacked too. At one point he sat on a pile of rubble, scraping his sores with broken pottery.
Then come chapters of Job and God being brutally honest with each other, until Job reaches the place of saying, I’m not in charge, and I will be faithful to You.
People ask Jacob whether it’s okay to be angry at God. He says that may be the wrong question.
Yes, it’s okay to be mad at God. But the point isn’t whether you’re allowed to feel it. Your job is to be open with God about everything.
Read the psalms of lament. They begin with grievances and honesty, and they end with faith.
So bring your questions to God. Then search for the answers you can find in the Scriptures.
Sometimes the answer will be wait.
Sometimes it will be, you don’t get to know.
And sometimes it will be peace that passes all understanding, because God is near to the brokenhearted and brings comfort at the exact right time.
Lament Is Not the Absence of Faith
I teach about lament often, because it’s the passionate expression of our grief.
David poured out his anguish, and then said this:
“Yet I am confident I will see the LORD’s goodness while I am here in the land of the living.”
Psalm 27:13 (NLT)
Somehow we think we can hide our true feelings from God. We fear He’ll punish us if we’re honest.
That’s not the God we serve. He invites our honesty, and intimacy grows in it.
In Jewish mourning traditions, people would cut their clothes and wear sackcloth and ashes. Later, they would sew the garment back together, mended, as a symbol of how God had been with them in their grief.
That is so different from what our culture teaches: stuff it down and push through.
We do not grieve without hope. We can bring it all to Him, and we do not have to live in despair.
It is a choice. Not one we make once and wake up whole. We don’t live in an Instant Pot society. God partners with us over time.
Look for the Good, and Look for Him
Jacob closed with a passage many of us know, and the context changes everything:
“For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. In those days when you pray, I will listen. If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me.”
Jeremiah 29:11–13 (NLT)
God spoke these words to people who had just learned they would spend seventy years in captivity.
He didn’t remove them from it right away. He told them to build homes, plant gardens and raise families. To find the good in the middle of the hard.
And to look for Him with their whole heart.
As Jacob said, the promise “is not that He’ll deliver you out of it, it’s that He’ll be with you in it.”
“The LORD is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.”
Psalm 34:18 (NLT)
You may not get every answer.
But you do get to know Him.
And that’s the answer we really need.
🎧 Listen to the Full Episode
If these words have met you where you are today — there is more waiting for you in this week’s episode.
🎙 Episode 327: Questions I Can’t Stop Asking After Child Loss: A Pastor Gets Real
Pastor Jacob Bales of Northside Christian Church sits down with me to answer the questions grieving moms sent in: why pray after the death of a child, how to trust God again, what Romans 8:28 really promises, whether your child is in heaven and whether you’ll know them when you see them again.
Next Steps/Mentoring
✨ Why Am I Still Stuck?
In this episode, I share what a grieving mom wants most is to feel settled, safe and secure again.
Have you carried some of these questions in your heart?
In this free 30-minute teaching, I would love to share with you how to get those questions answered and then discover what may be keeping you from reaching the place you desire to be: to feel good again, to enjoy life again.
I’ll show you that this is possible without leaving your child behind.
👉 Watch the free teaching: Why Am I Still Stuck?
With care and prayer,
Teresa Davis
