{"id":5497,"date":"2026-06-10T17:12:42","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T21:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5497"},"modified":"2026-06-10T17:12:42","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T21:12:42","slug":"when-there-is-no-dash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/10\/when-there-is-no-dash\/","title":{"rendered":"When There is No Dash"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast<\/em>,\u00a0click here<\/a>

“Would you like to hold her?”

On a cold winter\u00a0morning more than 30 years ago, a\u00a0young mother gently placed the body of her stillborn daughter, carefully wrapped in blankets, into my arms.\u00a0\u00a0

She had come into the world that morning.\u00a0And she had\u00a0left our world that same morning.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky once said that the death of a\u00a0single infant calls into question everything we believe about God.\u00a0In ways that are difficult to describe, I’ve never really been the same person since that morning in the hospital when I held that little girl.\u00a0\u00a0

Numerous preachers have called attention to\u00a0the information that is typically chiseled on a gravestone.

Prominence is given to the date of birth, as well as the date of death.\u00a0\u00a0

In between those two dates is a punctuation mark \u2013 a dash that represents the entirety of that person’s life.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0

The dash contains all the stories we tell about somebody’s existence on earth.\u00a0All their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments.\u00a0Their travels.\u00a0Their education. Their most memorable Christmas.\u00a0Their worst decision.\u00a0Their goofiest pet.\u00a0Their favorite childhood toy.\u00a0Their hardest final exam.\u00a0Their wedding day.\u00a0Their most challenging illness.\u00a0Their best friends.\u00a0Their spiritual crossroads. Their most awesome memory.

Those are the categories, the common indicators of personality and character, by which we tend to talk about our own lives and remember the lives of others.\u00a0

They are the benchmarks by which we say that someone has been alive \u2013 or, as the case may be, that somebody “really lived.”

But a child who never takes a breath in this world has a different kind of tombstone.

There is no dash.

If there are no stories to tell, how can we affirm the wholeness and the\u00a0real life<\/em> of such little ones?\u00a0

Every child has one-of-a-kind\u00a0fingerprints and DNA that will never be repeated.\u00a0That’s enough to establish uniqueness.\u00a0But what we long to know is something far more important: significance<\/em>.\u00a0How can we affirm the meaning<\/em> of a stillborn life?

There is a deep assurance in Scripture that meaning is connected to our\u00a0relationship with God.\u00a0And God intimately knows every one of us.

The psalmist writes, concerning God, “You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made… My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place… How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!\u00a0How vast is the sum of them!” (Psalm 139)\u00a0\u00a0

Followers of Jesus have long declared that there is a special grace that surrounds\u00a0the lives of little ones who go to be with God \u2013 even if there is no “dash” in their lives.\u00a0

When King David loses his newborn son in 2 Samuel 12:23 he sighs, “I know he can’t come and be with me.\u00a0But I will go and be with him.”\u00a0\u00a0

That reflects the hope that our stories in this world are not, in the end, the whole story.\u00a0There is a reunion awaiting us\u00a0that will one day make all our stories complete.\u00a0\u00a0

Several years ago, a young father whose son was lost in utero a few weeks before birth\u00a0tried to put into words his thoughts and feelings:

“When we lost you, my child, we felt an anguish unfelt before.\u00a0Our minds told us that this happens, that Nature has its way, that God has his own plans for us, for you.\u00a0But our hearts…our hearts told us that we would miss you, that we would miss those physical moments so precious to our tenuous, fragile lives.\u00a0We would grieve your passing as passionately and as thoroughly as one another’s, for you were part of us, part of our love.

“Oh, my child, we miss you already, we miss you completely, for we loved you as much as two humans can love another, as completely as our Lord loved us to give up his own Child…

“As we gazed upon you through the miracle of ultrasound, lying in your mother’s womb, we could see your little arms enfolded in a cross.\u00a0We know beyond doubt that you are God’s child now.

“And while we cannot know, in our simple human minds, what heaven is truly like, we dream one day, when our time has come, to meet you at the gates of heaven and to know you, finally, as the child we longed to know here on earth.\u201d

Only a God big enough and gracious enough could ever\u00a0make such a thing possible.

The wonderful news is that that is the God who is really there.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here “Would you like to hold her?” On a cold winter\u00a0morning more than 30 years ago, a\u00a0young mother gently placed the body of her stillborn daughter, carefully wrapped in blankets, into my arms.\u00a0\u00a0 She had come into the world that morning.\u00a0And she had\u00a0left our world that same morning.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Russian novelist Fyodor… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5498,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[432,450,385],"class_list":["post-5497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-children","tag-death","tag-grief"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5497"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5499,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5497\/revisions\/5499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}