How Do I Trust God After Pregnancy Loss? Navigating Spiritual Disorientation and the Quiet Path Back with Stephanie Duncan Smith

What does it mean to risk love again—after loss, heartbreak, and the disorientating grief that follows?

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In this incredibly tender and powerful conversation, I’m joined by Stephanie Duncan Smith, author of Even After Everything, to talk about the kind of spiritual confusion that often follows personal loss—particularly pregnancy loss.

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Stephanie shares how, after experiencing a miscarriage, her faith didn’t disappear—but it did lose its shape. Together, we explore how to stay grounded in God’s love even when your emotions feel muted, your prayers feel flat, or your sense of spiritual connection feels off.

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Whether you’ve experienced loss or walked alongside someone who has, this episode is an invitation into honest faith and the sacred practice of hope.

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This episode explores:

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• Why spiritual numbness is a natural response to pain
• What it looks like to grieve without having to fake it
• How to handle deep pain during seasons that are supposed to be joyful
• Why naming your loss honestly can help you heal
• How Stephanie processed the grief of pregnancy loss

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📘 Get Stephanie’s book: ⁠Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anway⁠

📥 Grab your 3 free Boundaries For Your Soul resources ⁠here⁠: 

📥 Download Alison’s ⁠free printable⁠ with the five boundary tools when you sign up for her weekly email.

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LIsten to more episodes on grief and healing:

⁠Episode 133⁠: Navigating the 6 Stages of Grief with Renowned Grief Expert David Kessler

⁠Episode 102: ⁠How to Name, Frame, and Brave Complicated Emotions About Faith & God

⁠Episode 159:⁠ Spiritual Drowning, Honest Questions, and a God Who Doesn’t Let Go with Heather Thompson Day

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📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode⁠ here⁠

💬 Got a question? Call 307-429-2525 and leave a message for a future episode.

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Editing by Giulia Hjort

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Music by Andy Luiten

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© 2025 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage or transcript without permission from the author.

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Transcript

Anyway. Stephanie is [00:01:00] someone I deeply respect for her honesty, her depth, and her spiritual insight. As a senior editor at Harper One, she has shaped the words of many bestselling and award-winning authors that you and I know and love, but today she's sharing her own story. In our conversation, Stephanie opens up about her own experience of pregnancy loss.

The spiritual and emotional disorientation that followed. We talk about what it means to hold both deep grief and fierce love, and to take the risk of opening your heart again even after it's been broken. In today's episode, we get really personal. We talk honestly about pain, about healing, and the slow sacred work of learning to trust.

Again, we talk about how it's not through grit or forced resilience that we find our way forward, but through receiving the. Full spectrum of our lives of what's achingly hard and what's achingly beautiful, and knowing that at the heart of both lives, the promise of God with [00:02:00] us. I want to gently acknowledge that today's episode includes themes of pregnancy loss and miscarriage, which may be difficult for some listeners.

Please take care of yourself and as always, feel free to skip this episode if it's not the right time for you. Stephanie Duncan Smith is a writer and senior editor at Harper One who has spent her career developing, award-winning and bestselling authors. She's the creator of Slant Letter, a bestselling Substack email newsletter for writers looking to deepen their craft.

Stephanie lives with her husband Zach, a professor in their two children in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Please enjoy my conversation with Stephanie Duncan Smith.

INTERVIEW

[00:02:44] Alison Cook: I kind of wanna start this conversation where your memoir starts, which is with this incredible tension where you experienced the loss of your first pregnancy, right? As Christmas was. [00:03:00] Approaching, and that begins to serve as an anchor for the structure of the rest of your book. But tell us a little bit about the background and about that moment.

[00:03:10] Stephanie Duncan Smith: So I should start by saying my husband and I were childless by choice for almost 10 years before we decided that we were going to try for. A pregnancy, and this was a, you know, a storied decision and we didn't come into it with a lot. It was more of a cognitive choice, if I'm being very honest than an emotional one.

We knew that we wanted a family, but we felt pretty ambivalent for a while about the when and wheres of that. And so it was really meaningful to me that December, to grow. Into the idea, even just the very fresh concept that I was pregnant and for that experience to parallel the advent [00:04:00] season because this is what's important, I didn't go into this pregnancy with high hopes, frankly.

I went into it thinking, I think this is what we want, I guess. So it was really meaningful to me to. Walk through this advent season and really for the first time experience firsthand, the wonder and the mystery of new life. That wasn't something that I carried with me into the process until it became part of my embodied experience.

And then I thought, wow, this is amazing. And then that parallel, very suddenly starkly broke. And it was the week before Christmas and in the advent season, each week is sort of themed, and that week was advent week of joy, and it felt like a slap in the face. It felt like divine abandonment, and it felt [00:05:00] like the whole world in across cultures and generations and traditions.

So many people were readying to celebrate this most historic birth. And then it was like a, just kidding, not for you. And it broke me. It just broke me. It would've been painful anytime of year, but the juxtaposition really felt searing in a way that sent me reeling.

[00:05:31] Alison Cook: It makes so much sense, and one of the really. Incredible and meaningful parts of the book is you talk about how you began to lean into this liturgical calendar, this idea of the seasons, and we're gonna get into what we mean by that. For my listeners who aren't as familiar with that type of background, but as sort of a structure or a scaffolding.

For that [00:06:00] process of grief and pain. Right. So the very thing that in a way was such a added, this coming of Christmas, kind of compounded in many ways, the sense of loss also became something that you began to lean into. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and how that kind of played itself out inside of you?

[00:06:21] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Absolutely. So I gave you my raw reactions in the real time of this event, and what I had to work through and work out for myself was how does a story, the liturgical story, the narrative, and the shape of the Christian year, which follows the life and death and resurrection of Christ Square with an experience like that.

How does the story of what I understand primarily to be the incarnation God with us, the coming of [00:07:00] God to be in our humanity, how do we square that with personal moments that truly feel like and are marked by death? What are you supposed to do with that juxtaposition? I mean, the book shows my.

Wrangling and reckoning through this. So I don't come by any of what I'm about to say lightly, but I think for me, a lot of it was realizing that there's a promise in the paradox, and it is God is with us and that presence follows us through any personal moment of our life, death, and life that defies death.

That is the constant. The actual, the whole beauty and consolation of Advent is that a world is hurting so deeply that God says, I can't take it anymore. I'm going to come be with you. And not just be with you, but in the depths of the worst of your [00:08:00] human experiences, I am there. So what I experienced at first, and this is valid. was, this is an unsolvable paradox and I actually came to see it's not,

[00:08:15] Alison Cook: so I wanna slow down there on the unsolvable paradox. Tell me more what you mean by that.

[00:08:21] Stephanie Duncan Smith: I think we approach Christmas as a universal story. A universal hope. A universal promise, and that is a part of the Christian year.

Right? So in broad terms, the Christian year. Begins in Advent, which is a preparatory season toward the celebration and the feast day of Christmas,you know, these are the major seasons. And then time goes on and it moves from Lent, which is a preparatory season for the Feast Day of Easter.

And there's other seasons in there, but all of these are sort of high holidays, right? And. [00:09:00] In the calendar of a year, each of us will have particular personal experiences and life events that might align with those larger narratives, or they might clash in unbearable ways. And when that happens, as it did for me.

It's so painful and that dissonance can feel unbearable and unsolvable. And that was really the driver in my writing this book and working it out for myself, thinking, okay, but where is God in this dissonance as I'm feeling it? Because this doesn't feel like something where you can solve for X.

[00:09:43] Alison Cook: So in the process of wrestling with that very tension of when. This tragedy in your life occurred, which was right at Christmas. It kind of forced you into dealing [00:10:00] with tremendous dissonance. This doesn't compute. How can this incredibly painful loss be occurring? At the very moment that much of the world is celebrating this incredible. Hope.

[00:10:17] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Yes. And I think that is the core of the question. It's how can anything be so beautiful and representative of hope for so many other people? But to me it's salt in the wound.

[00:10:30] Alison Cook: Yes. Oh, that I'm imagining so many listeners resonating with that on a lot of different. Levels. You know, when something so incredibly painful happens on a day, on an anniversary in a moment, and suddenly that very beautiful thing becomes something incredibly painful.

And that was sort of the impetus for you to have to almost begin, not only to process. And so I wanna kind of break this apart, not only to process the [00:11:00] loss, but also to process it against your larger spiritual framework. It's almost like you didn't have a choice in that because of that juxtaposition, right?

[00:11:10] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Yes. So authenticity is a guiding compass for me. I do not have a poker face. I can't fake it. And this was the first year I think, in my life that I did it not go to the Christmas Eve service because I knew that that would not be good for me and I couldn't. Put on a face and pretend that the ultimate had not just happened when it had.

And I think, you know, for anyone in any kind of grief, I often say the loss or the hardship is the first grief and the pretense is the second. And there's not much you can do to control. The loss or the hardship itself, you know, that's what has happened, has happened. We can't undo it, [00:12:00] but we don't have to put on a pretense and we don't have to put on ourselves the burden of pretending that things are fine to make other people feel more comfortable.

And that's one simple, but I think really profound way. To really own your own grieving and healing process. And for me, in the spirit of authenticity, that really began with, I have to call this what it is, and I have a chapter in the book called Naming the Night, because I think that's the call when the unthinkable happens, when we brush up onto, you know.

Pain and death. You just have to call it what it is, and you're allowed to do that. And I think that there's a lot of shoulds that get charged into the grief experience, [00:13:00] like, especially when it comes to pregnancy loss. I've heard so many women say like, I don't know. Should I really be feeling this sad?

It was so early, or kind of dismissing and discounting. What's an authentic emotion, and I just don't believe that's helpful. And I'm sure you could talk a lot about this from your work. I think there is freedom and a sort of cathartic release in naming the night when it's night.

[00:13:30] Alison Cook: Yes, yes. And again, the courage. For all of us to do that, and I am imagining putting myself in your shoes. I'm thinking about those weeks leading up to Christmas and after Christmas, the courage to do that during a season when you're especially not supposed to be doing that.

[00:13:48] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Yeah, the hardest thing for me that year was coming back to work. On the other side of the holidays and everybody's like, how was your Christmas? [00:14:00] And I just didn't have the energy. And actually, you know, everybody gets to make their own decisions for themselves. What's good for you in a place of grief? What will be supportive for you? You get to decide that. And that's not anything that I can tell you or anybody else, but actually for me, again, in the spirit of authenticity, I told a lot more people than I socially needed to because it felt easier for me. Not, and that's a choice that I made for me, but I think we all have to decide what's gonna help us.

[00:14:32] Alison Cook: But again, I love that you gave yourself permission because you knew yourself and you knew it is going to hurt more to pretend. Therefore, I'm going to tell people and that is what I'm doing for me. Which is really what's key.

There wasn't, I'm not doing this to make other people feel a certain way. I'm doing this because this is what I need to be able to navigate this. I need to be able to say whatever the truth was. It's so powerful and so [00:15:00] important. Anything else from, those couple of weeks after? When you said that, when you said I had to go back to work, that was helpful to you in terms of honoring the grief and in terms of what you're saying, not having to pretend and giving yourself permission to be in the emotional space that you were in while also simultaneously still.

Trying to find ways to function in the world. it's something I hear about a lot from clients, you know? It's like, I am feeling this heavy thing and I'm expected to show up at, you know, my job or show up at this event, and how do I do that authentically to your point where I'm still doing the thing I need to do, but I'm not betraying this tremendous burden that I'm carrying.

Any other thoughts from? Your own experience, and I know some of that's trial and error, it's figuring ourselves out through the fact of being thrown into something. But any ideas on what was helpful to you or maybe what wasn't helpful?

[00:15:59] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Yeah, [00:16:00] sure. So I haven't told this story often, but this is a good place to share. I ended up not writing this into the book For various editorial reasons, but there's sort of an extra chapter to the events of things. AndI went into the ER and was told we couldn't find the heartbeat, but they also said, you know, come back a week later just to be sure.

And I watched movies for a week. I didn't have anything else to do. It was a long week and at the end of that week, I. I had to go back in and they confirmed it, but in the middle of that week, I was actually summoned to jury duty, and that's a medical reason to not have to go. So I should have been excused.

And there's a story here that essentially my provider did not provide a letter in the time that I needed it, so I had to go federally.

[00:16:57] Alison Cook: Oh my gosh.[00:17:00] 

[00:17:00] Stephanie Duncan Smith: I was absolutely, I was furious, but it's the fury that comes with helplessness and powerlessness and just the loss of control. And I was pretty certain, I knew what was happening in my body at the time, but it was the one time I left my house that week, and when I was there, I was a mess.

And it's an even bigger story because it was actually a criminal trial for murder, and I just couldn't take all the emotional inputs. I just couldn't do it. So after I was finally excused from the selection process, I went to my car and I called. I was too angry to drive. I didn't feel sober. In my rage, I didn't trust myself to drive.

So I called my provider [00:18:00] and I said, I need to speak to the manager. Like, who do I talk to? And they, you know, put me through some voicemail and I just thought, I have to do what I can do here. And I'm able to sort of, you know, see the humor of this in retrospect, but. I'm not laughing at myself. I actually, after that, made a series of calls and it was like to the airline that had sent me on a nine hour delay and needed to gimme a voucher.

And it was stuff like that. And it's kind of funny that I did that, but I get it. And I see that woman in her car and I have so much love for her and compassion because she was flailing and. There was so much she couldn't control and she was doing what she could, and I actually am so proud of her [00:19:00] for practicing self-advocacy as a channel for her rage.

[00:19:06] Alison Cook: Yeah,

[00:19:07] Stephanie Duncan Smith:I mean, it didn't heal me, but it was a lifeline. Where otherwise I just would've felt like I'm so helpless and powerless. All of this is outside the realm of my control, and I think that matters. I really think that it matters to say in small and large ways to self-advocate, especially when so much feels overwhelming to you, and whether that's saying to your boss.

I'm overloaded right now and I can't take on that extra project. Or it's, you know, saying to your mom or your mother-in-law, like, I would love to see you, but I don't have the capacity this weekend. Do what you need to for yourself and that will feel empowering in a way that is hard to come by in those moments.

[00:20:06] AD BREAK 1

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[00:20:06] Alison Cook: It's really good. I just recently did an episode on boundaries where I'd really kind of taken a deep dive into the newest research on it, and one of the studies I found was talking about how, and it kind of gets at this idea of agency and self-advocacy that you're describing, that when we, we really speak up for ourselves, it actually lights up the prefrontal cortex, which is giving yourself that gift of agency of here's what I can, and again.

There might be days where you're like, I cannot do this, and that's okay too, but where there's that moment of I've gotta find a healthy outlet for this rage, I'm gonna do it, and what a great way to do it. Just really honoring the different parts of you that needed you to. Understand how real that, you know, I'm angry, I'm sad, all the different things. Giving yourself an [00:21:00] outlet for those different experiences.

[00:21:03] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Yes, and I wanna close that story too by saying I did get a hold of the founders of the practice and. Prompted them to institute a policy that for anybody who needs a letter 24 hours.

[00:21:17] Alison Cook: That's amazing.

[00:21:18] Stephanie Duncan Smith: And that felt great. Yes. 'cause I don't want anyone to have to be in that position ever again. I should be the last one.

[00:21:25] Alison Cook: It reminds me, you talk at the end of the book about the stress cycle. I think it's Emily Naski. You were talking about it almost with the stress of allowing yourself to feel joy again. And we're gonna get there. But it also is another version of it. I am am raging and I need to find a way to let it flow through.

[00:21:41] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Yes. Get it out of your body. Yes. Whatever you can do to get it out of your body, it's not meant to stay locked up in there. Yep.

[00:21:49] Alison Cook: I wanna just touch on this idea of grief that you described. You write of a pregnancy loss. It's not just the loss in the moment, it's the loss of the future, the loss of all the [00:22:00] future possibilities that in your case, you'd barely just started to dream about in a way.

It resonated with me. And I wanna name this also for listeners because there's so many ways we experienced this. I didn't have biological children. And when it became clear to me that I wouldn't or couldn't, It was like I had a parade of images of sixth grade graduations, high school graduations, you know, the future losses.

And it surprised me. It just the way my psyche just. Had to process those losses. So tell me a little bit about how that was for you and what that was like for you.

[00:22:42] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Yeah, I think this hearkens back to what you were saying about finding our permission to grieve, and I'll speak particular to pregnancy loss and then more broadly, 'cause I think this is a really interesting dynamic.

But in the case of [00:23:00] pregnancy loss. It would be fairly easy on a face value way for someone to say, oh, but you didn't even know them. You know, how can you grieve someone that you don't even know? And it's like, oh no, that's not what's happening here. You are grieving an entire imagined future. The future of a life together.

And I would say that that is sacred imagination at work. That is the mind imagining something good and true and beautiful, that God honors and celebrates whether it comes to being or not. So who are we to dismiss that sacred imagination? And I think that carries to any kind of loss of the future. And if, you know, an, an example we could all pull up from this is from the COVID years.

How many [00:24:00] weddings or family reunions or graduations did families and individuals imagined that never got to be, that is worthy of your grief. Again, these are good and beautiful things, and we're right to put our hope in them and be shaped by that hope. My, the subtitle of my book is The Spiritual Practice of Knowing The Risks and Loving Anyway, and I have been very formed through, you know, living this story and then writing about it.

My very strong belief that the risk is always with us, and there could be an argument that it's better not to take that risk, but I am convinced that we really like who we become and we're proud of who we become when we [00:25:00] use that sacred imagination for hoping for something good, no matter what.

[00:25:05] Alison Cook: I love that phrase, that sacred imagination, because there is something holy about it. It tells us something about ourselves, about what we need as humans. These milestones matter and there's something about them that we need to honor. I really love that you write Stephanie kind of as we lean into, because it, it is true that part of the book isn't just about the grief, it's about how you began.

To hope again and in a very specific way, which is relevant in this case. And there's this quote you have in the book that I think is so powerful. You say the line between love and loss is thin as the rim of a coin and as if tossed into the air ever shimmering. And you know, that's just, that's the reality, right?

And how am I gonna hope again and how am I [00:26:00] gonna. Dare to imagine loving again in this specific way, and again, like you said, in broader ways that relate to everybody. This can happen in any kind of situation. And as you were wrestling daily with loving any way, how did you work through that, especially when you had experienced such a profound loss and the real risk. Of love is that it can get taken away.

[00:26:27] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Yeah. I'll put it this way. I have two children today. I have a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old, and they were both born after losses and I have never known pregnancy to be anything but truly a daily terror. It's just a true confrontation of mortality from waking to sleeping.

And I don't wish that on anyone. I certainly never saw it for myself at the beginning of [00:27:00] this journey, but I found it truly terrifying and I had to find solid anchors for myself or I wouldn't have been able to function. I think a few of the anchors I found are, you know, simple yet profound. And again, this is for any kind of unknowing because we all live in unknowing.

This is not an isolated experience, but I, the first thing that really helped me was just staying grounded in the present. One of my pregnancy books had a line kind of a mantra for today, and it just said simply today I am pregnant and. I don't know what tomorrow is. I don't know about next week.

I don't know. But right now I have whole body, whole person access to the only time I have whole person access to right now. This is where I am [00:28:00] and letting that be enough for today. And I, you know, there's a way to expand that into whatever your own. Love against risk scenario is it's just like today I have what I need today, I'm safe.

Today I am cared for and it's daily, but it's, I think it shapes us, and I wouldn't say this is a practice, but maybe something to stay close to is I was really interested to learn. There have been some studies, and you may be in the deep on these, but there have been some interesting studies that show.

People who are insecure relationships, where they're loved unconditionally, they're supported unconditionally. It's healthy, stable support. They are more emboldened to take risks. And I found that certainly personally in my marriage and family relationships, [00:29:00] and I think leaning on the support from those secure relationships.

Can give us what we need to face the unknown, and that can be the people in our lives. And I also think that, you know, in my case of really kind of stepping away from the Christmas season in the wake of my loss, again, that was valid and not without reason, but I had to do my own work to mend what I knew was a secure relationship with.

The God of Advent. I knew that cognitively, but I did not feel that emotionally, and I had to do my own work to restore that trust and sort of come back into the remembrance that trust is earned. So that I could experience the benefits of, okay, I've got a solid anchor. I can take some risks, like [00:30:00] I have a widened capacity for the unknowns because I know that where it matters most. I am held and seen and supported.

[00:30:08] Alison Cook: This is really powerful and I want to make sure the listener is grasping what you're saying. There's a lot in this. So first and foremost, that I've gotta be anchored in the present moment. It's that today, this is what is true, which is such a powerful way to live life, but is almost essential when you're risking to your point, right when you're risking.

But I also heard you talk about loving anchors, and I wanna make sure I'm hearing you correctly, Stephanie, you had your, the support of your husband there, loving anchors in our lives. Loving family members, but then you went to God, and I think I heard you saying that was a little bit risky too. Yes. Wait a minute.

Is this a loving [00:31:00] anchor in this? Right, right, right. So when you're back in that position now of maybe taking a risk to go through another pregnancy. You had to really rework that with God. God wasn't necessarily intuitively that safe loving anchor is that, I'm kind of putting words in your mouth, but am I?

[00:31:21] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Absolutely. Absolutely. And also, I don't think for a second that God is threatened by that sense that maybe there's some trust that needs restored. That's the work of relationships. I don't think God is scared by that. I don't think God is put off by that to the contrary, you know, I wonder if maybe God sees that as an invitation to get more authentically connected and for a more authentic trust.

So there's something powerful there. And you know, without [00:32:00] giving too much away, but I do just wanna preview a big as it relates to Advent and. My sense of being very unseen by this season. I had to re-envision that story for myself. And I found a lot of when things started to turn for me, and I can tell you when that was, things started to turn for me as I revisited that narrative, and I realized that upon deeper reading, this is not a one dimensional story of.

Celebration and triumph because the context of the world into which this baby is born was war torn. And not only that, but specific somewhat to my, you know, context. There's the gospels don't cut out this [00:33:00] whole other narrative. Of what's called the massacre of innocence, and that's when Herod jealous King goes out and tries to preserve his kingship by preventing this baby from being born.

And rather than sideline that narrative, this is part of Advent as much as the birth of Christ is. And in fact, God came through the incarnation because of stories like this, because this should not be, it was so serious that God had to come down himself and enter our narrative and our pain, and that's when it really started to turn for me, that realization that this too is part of the story.

And if you are feeling like Christmas. An advent is painful to you. It's not lining up with your experience. The gospels give a fair [00:34:00] hearing also to a story of deep tragedy. And you know the gospels even echo prophetically. You know the prophets from the Old Testament. Rachel is part of Israel. They echo her cries through the centuries and it says Rachel is crying for her children.

For they are no more. And I hear that today and I had to learn to hear that is your sorrow is sacred to God. And if you are crying, you are being heard and honored by a God who remembers your grief in every season. You are not alone, you are not unseen. And that's when I, especially at the time, begrudgingly, I will admit, I was like, okay, I'm hearing this.

And that felt like a gift in a season that felt like, oh, you are not participating in this. This [00:35:00] isn't for you.

[00:35:01] Alison Cook: In fact, you are staying home on Christmas Eve as just as much you participating. Oh, yes. In that story, yes. As anybody else. It doesn't always feel that way. And I hear you, it feels like. We are the ones stepping away when in fact, oh no.

But it took a while. I hear what you're saying to recalibrate in your own body that not just slapping on some sort of cognitive, but really allowing your embodied wisdom to understand. No, this too is part of the story. Yeah. Yes. Wow.

[00:35:39] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Yes. And it is deeply seen by God, and God is grieving. In Rachel's Tears and in yours?

[00:35:47] Alison Cook: Yes. Yes.

[00:35:54] AD BREAK 2

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[00:35:54] Alison Cook: You've said this, Stephanie, but I really wanna underscore it because it comes outta your lived experience. [00:36:00] What was surprising to you as you recalibrated not only that season of Advent, but you also kind of began to recalibrate to the different seasons of the church calendar? What surprised you about God?

[00:36:15] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Yeah, I think it's been an unfolding, but. I'll tell you this, I'm looking at it right now over my desk. I have an ancient Celtic symbol and oh gosh, I'm gonna butcher this pronunciation. I think it's a Tri Ketra, and it's basically a sort of Trinitarian image. There's three interlinking arches, and then in the middle there's a center that they create.

And my sisters gave this to me. It's like a stained glass kind of hanging, and they, my sisters gave this to me after my first loss, and I, at the time, hung it up over the kitchen sink and [00:37:00] just started looking at it. And over time, I've really started to see the center of this piece as the place where we are held by God.

I think about this beautiful verse in Colossians that says, in God, all things hold together. And I think what for me has emerged through much contemplation on where is God beating me in this healing process? And. What has really emerged for me is new and kind of renewed images of God, both as mother and midwife.

And I started to think of that verse in Colossians as it got all things hold together. And I started to think of it as, you know, in this center, this space that I'm [00:38:00] visualizing in my tri catchup, we are held together and I think about the imagery of. A woman in pregnancy, it's, we talk about she's carrying and she's carrying life and she's carrying mystery.

And that is very kindred language to the salvation metaphor actually, that Jesus speaks of when he's talking to Nicodemus. And Nicodemus asked, what do I need to do to enter the kingdom? And Jesus says, you need to be born again and. At a very face value reading, who is doing that Earthing, who is doing the divine work of that earthing, it's God.

And that might feel unfamiliar to some Christian practice and it might even feel a little, you know, can we say that? Can we do that? But I [00:39:00] think if you take a close look, you'll find so many. Images and language in scripture that is really rich with these. And you know, it's all metaphor, right? You know, even God as father, that's a metaphor just as much as any of this is.

But metaphor is helpful. That's how we can understand the abstract. And I think it metaphor becomes for us, a, a threshold to new understanding. And that's what it was for me. I thought, you know, I am held, I am carried. And the promise and the presence in that is meaningful to me.

[00:39:37] Alison Cook: That's powerful. And that is, you know, sometimes I think about even when you were saying whether you were working it out, that holding is, it is.

And I think about as you're saying, it's like when we think about the ideal, not that this is everybody's experience, but the ideal of mother love, right. Of it's a love that just holds [00:40:00] through. Yes. Everything.

[00:40:01] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Yes. So I have a master's in theology and I actually did my capstone thesis on images of God for women and what kind of a male savior means for women.

And so I've done these studies and there's one that really interests me. There's a scholar named Phyllis Tribble, and she has done a study of the Hebrew word for womb. And the Hebrew word for womb and mercy share the same root. They're very close etymologically, and there's even a dynamic to this word in the, there's so much you know, to be said about gut's, mercy, and loving kindness.

I think that's the same word here, but she calls it. Kind of one and the same. This is God's womb love. It's a mercy that is all encompassing and [00:41:00] holds it all. This is a love that holds space for us, all that holds our pain. And there's even a dynamic in the linguistic study that talks about this mercy, this womb love that's trembling for the beloved.

Like this is a very active love, a very, you know, dynamic ever present. Stance toward us. And I think that's really beautiful. And you know, for all of the wishful thinking promises that won't hold up, of which there are many, this is not one of them.

[00:41:36] Alison Cook: I wrote down this quote as toward the end of the book, you do end up giving birth to your first baby girl Quinn.

And here's this quote, I just thought it was. Stunning, and it's similar to what you're describing right now. You're describing your new baby girl and you say, “surely her life. Surely every life will hold a great shimmering spectrum of [00:42:00] everything. Resurrection mornings and dark nights of the soul sweeping pandemics and paper cut griefs. Great loves. Sucker punch losses and disorienting in tweens for all my burning goodwill. As a mother, you're saying, I can't promise my daughter safe passage, but I can promise her presence in any passage, and that's it.”

 That's incredible.

[00:42:32] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Yeah, I was really on a mission. With this book to shake the trees free of any kind of promise in the face of pain that wouldn't actually test true.

And this is what it came down to. You just found the very bottom of the funnel. This is it. It's presence.

[00:42:52] Alison Cook: What's amazing about that, and again, this is not, this is the true gospel of death, [00:43:00] resurrection, and ascension. That is the Pascal mystery, right? If you go to a liturgical church, right, every Sunday, Christ has died.

Christ has risen, Christ will come again. This is the ongoing pattern of all of our lives, and you're saying it so beautifully because this isn't a. Superficial bandaid. This is a, oh my gosh. Through my own experience of this incredible pain, I've come to a deeper understanding of what with or presence is.

And now I will have more of that to offer to this little girl, which is really what she needs. And there are just no words to describe this, but that comes pretty close. That's really beautiful, Stephanie. That's just a gorgeous naming.

[00:43:45] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Thank you. I have a brief piece too that I'd like to tag onto that. I had a couple scares during my pregnancy with my daughter, and there was a moment when my doctor, just a routine checkup [00:44:00] and you know, it was like third trimester, everything's looking good. And my doctor said, uh, you're great, but you're out of the woods now. And I sort of laughed bitterly to myself thinking, are we ever, you know, my kids are very earth side army out of the woods.

I don't know. You know, there's still so many unknowns. So I wrote this in response to that. There are so many woods. Life is an outright wilderness of them dividing up the furniture with the one you thought would be your forever gritting your teeth through the toxic work environment because you need the health insurance.

Grappling with the crushing weight of helplessness as the news cycle breaks your heart again and again. While it would be far preferable to live our lives where we can see the sun above the tree line, where we can feel its warmth on our skin and the safety of some gold clearing, we know the forest will always be part of the landscape.

We may not ever be [00:45:00] out of the woods altogether, but we can live our lives in communion. We can live sealed as God's own. Forever. The I am with us in any wilderness. What's more I believe we are meant to.

[00:45:15] Alison Cook: It's beautiful. Thank you for sharing your story, not only with us today, but through this beautiful book. It's called Even After Everything, the Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving. Anyway, and I just so appreciate you're a writer's writer, it's a beautiful book, but you're taking that hard earned wisdom and bringing it to folks so they don't feel alone in it. And I just wanna thank you not only for your time today, but for doing that hard work.

[00:45:45] Stephanie Duncan Smith: And I likewise, I want to toast the courage of all the listeners to this conversation. Whatever unknowns you're facing, whatever risks you are taking on, that makes you one of the brave ones and that matters. And you are. [00:46:00] Radically accompanied. Which is a quote from Wendy Wright in all of that.

[00:46:06] Alison Cook: That's beautiful. Thanks so much for just giving us your time and just so grateful for you.

[00:46:11] Stephanie Duncan Smith: Thank you, Allison. So good to be with you.

‍Alison Cook: ​Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of the Best of You. Today's conversation is tender. It's courageous, and I'm just so grateful for this opportunity to share it with you. I'm joined by Stephanie Duncan Smith. Stephanie is the author of a stunning new book. It's called Even After Everything, the Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving.

[00:46:17] Alison Cook: Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You, it would mean so much. If you take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts and click the Plus or. Follow button that will ensure you don't miss an episode, and it helps get the word out to others while you're there.

I'd love it if you leave your five star review. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday. And remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God. You heal others and you stay true to your God given self.