Is For the Love of Lentil just for women? In a word: no.

Since Gary and I unveiled our book, For the Love of Lentil, to the world, we’ve received questions about who it’s for and I thought it was about time I answered these questions publicly for you all. The main questions we’ve had have been:

1. Is the book just for women?
2. Is it just for people who’ve had a miscarriage?

In short, the answer to each question is a resounding “no”. This book is for men as well as women, and for people with no experience of miscarriage as well as those who have been through it.

It’s a book about one couple’s experiences and how God has carried them through. Whether you’re male or female, have children, don’t have children, would like to have children or dislike the idea of parenthood with a vengeance, there’s no denying you experience stuff, good and bad, in life, whether it’s stuff to do with children or not. So this book could be for you.

A lot of the book isn’t even about miscarriage; it’s about hoping, longing, praying, wanting. Which of us hasn’t been there, to some extent at least, at some point in our lives? Part of it is about celebrating getting what we want. Hopefully most of us have been there too. And part of it is about facing up to loss – sadly an inevitable part of life for each of us at some point and in some form.

But it’s understandable, when you’ve got no physical book yet to get the feel of, that you might think it is a book for women and a book about miscarriage. So here, to hopefully help set the scene of what it’s all about, is the introduction to For the Love of Lentil, which shows where we’re coming from in the chapters that follow:

There are times in life that leave us questioning our understanding. Whether a little or a lot, we find ourselves rethinking things we thought we understood – previously-certain concepts around which we’d shaped parts of our existence. There are times when we think we understand where things are going and how life is panning out, only to have the rug pulled out from under us and find ourselves staring up at the ceiling wondering how we came to be so far off what we thought was a certain course.

One such time for me was my husband and I losing our first baby to miscarriage. After a long and challenging path to become pregnant, we felt utterly certain God had answered our deepest prayers when we found out we were expecting a child. We were overwhelmed with love, excitement and gratitude and eagerly began to prepare for what we thought lay ahead.

Nothing could have prepared us for the devastation we would face just weeks later when we learned that our tiny but utterly-precious child had died. We faced immense grief and, alongside it, confusion over our understanding of God’s plan for our lives.

Amid all the work of facing up to our loss, our return to childlessness and the almost-overwhelming heartache that accompanied them, one thing quickly became crystal clear; if God’s plan wasn’t to bring our baby to birth and place him in our arms, He must have had a greater plan to bless people through our circumstances. Our task was simply to discover our part in that plan.

And that is how this book came about. As we began to share our news, we saw people being impacted in ways we never imagined, through our words, by the power of God’s love and grace in our lives. We have no idea who God plans to bless through this book or how; we’re simply being faithful to the call we believe He has put on us to share our story of His love, grace and faithfulness.

You might be reading this having been through experiences similar to ours or the path of your life might have been entirely different. Either way, it doesn’t matter. No two people’s experiences will ever be exactly the same (even Gary and I experienced our miscarriage differently) but one common theme runs through every journey – that God can wrap his loving arms around each one of us and lead us on through the darkest times into the light of His love.

The following pages bring together reflections on our journey, journal notes from along the way and songs placed in my heart by God at key times that had an impact as we travelled through some of our darkest days.

God has taught me so much through this journey and I hope that in some small way He will use it to teach others something too.

Sarah Moore is the author of For the Love of Lentil, A journey of longing, loss and abundant grace, which tells the story of her experience of pregnancy and miscarriage. Copies of the book are available here.