The Bible certainly calls us to come to the conclusion that God is good, to come to the conclusion that he is trustworthy, and that everything is going to work out in accordance with his plan.

At the same time, the Bible also helps us to see that there's a means by which we get there or a language that moves us

along between sort of the pull of my life is really hard and I trust in God's sovereignty.

Welcome to the Crossway podcast, a show where we sit down with authors each week for thoughtful

interviews about the Bible, theology, church history, and the Christian

life. I'm Matt Tully, and today I'm talking with Mark Vrogop. Mark serves as lead pastor at

College Park Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. He's a council member for the Gospel Coalition,

and he's the author of a new book with Crossway, Dark Cloud's Deep Mercy, Discovering the Grace of Lament.

Today, Mark and I discuss his own journey through sorrow when he and his wife lost their

daughter, Sylvia, just days before her due date. He then goes on to share how God used that

tragedy to awaken him, and ultimately his whole church, to the grace of lament, a faith-filled yet

honest way of relating to our pain that we find illustrated right within our Bibles.

Let's get started. Mark, thank you so much for being with us on the Crossway podcast today.

It's great to be with you today.

So in 2004, you and your wife experienced something incredibly painful, probably one of the most painful experiences a person can imagine. Can you share a little bit about what happened?

Yeah, my wife woke me up early one morning. She was nine months pregnant and she said, Mark, I think something's wrong with our pregnancy. We had had multiple children three that had been born prior to that time and nothing had ever gone wrong. And so this was a shock. And to make a long story short, after a visit with a doctor, determined that our nine-month-in-utero baby had died. And my wife gave birth to our stillborn daughter, Sylvia, February 17th, 2004.

And that began a lengthy process of grieving.

Years after that, we had multiple miscarriages,

something called a blighted ovum,

which is a false positive pregnancy.

And the Lord put us into a season

where we learned how to trust the Lord and also what it means to really grieve deeply.

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