The truth about Christian life and blessing came home to my wife Rachel and I over a decade ago. Our first child was due in January 1994 and for the previous nine months we had looked forward to this more and more. On January 29, our little girl, Laura, was stillborn. Suddenly, the Christian walk wasn’t quite the progression from one blessing to the next we all sometimes unconsciously think it should be. How could God slap us so bitterly in the face?

Right from the first hours of our bereavement, the church family cared for us, prayed for us and for weeks and months afterwards just spent time with us. But despite the support of God and his people, there was no getting away from our raw disappointment with the Lord, our anger that he would cause this to happen. What was he playing at? Being a part of the kingdom of heaven has clear benefits, not least God’s protection and provision. Hasn’t it?

Life only got worse. Rachel had one response to the experience and I another. Rachel wanted to cry every tear, put words to every feeling. I wanted to run a mile. I didn’t want to confront my emotions; I wanted to put the pedal to the metal and leave heartbreak trembling in the wake of my burning rubber. It was a triple whammy. The hoped for child had been snatched away. The unfailing love of the Lord had begun to seem, well, failing. And the processes of grief were driving us further and further apart. One couple in four that loses a child, we learned, breaks up within a year.

The eighteen months after we lost Laura were the most difficult of my life. I wanted to pursue my relationship with God as I had before, but found it very hard – even though he continued to sustain me with words from scripture. Just as bad, Rachel’s grief was wearing me out. It was as if she were a dead weight keeping me anchored to the pain I was so anxious to flee. I thought she was never going to stop crying.

Things changed. I decided to write about the experience. In the novel I began late in 1996, Joe Porter, a father in his mid-thirties, goes to the park with his two little girls and loses one of them. Creating a fictional protagonist who loses a child, albeit in a very different way, was a way of confronting the submerged emotions connected to my own loss. In Holy Joe, the conflicting responses Joe and his wife Sarah have to their tragedy were similar to those Rachel and I experienced. Thus the novel is less about what happened to the abducted child, Martha, and much more about what the loss does to the faith and marriage of Joe and his wife Sarah. The characters and circumstances are not autobiographical, although the emotions and the South Manchester settings are.

Over most of the next decade, I continued to draft and redraft Holy Joe. Beyond examining my difficulties with grief, I also wanted to show the world outside the church that Christians aren’t really so strange. Not religious, not saints, not extra-terrestrials, but ordinary people from the same culture as everyone else, who just happen to have the best relationship of their lives with God.

Yes, Rachel and I got over shouting at God. We came to realise that he doesn’t cause stillbirth, cancer, war or poverty. It’s in the nature of having free will that misfortune and catastrophe are possible; indeed, in a fallen, flawed creation, they are inevitable. We came to see that when life turns traumatic, God is there with us in it and is able to raise phoenixes from the ashes.

In persevering with our grief, we have seen, as he said in James that miserable morning, "what the Lord finally brought about". Like Joe in Holy Joe, the ordeal we went through has in the end strengthened our faith and our marriage. We have since been blessed with two wonderful children, Poppy and Noah. For years, Rachel has been involved with a support group for people who lose children at or near birth and I’ve been working with a Manchester youth group called Caterpillar, which, through the arts, aims to show Jesus to young people. And in 2006, two more silver linings are emerging from the black cloud: Holy Joe is being published and, more importantly, Rachel, the children and I have been to China and adopted a fifteen-month-old daughter, Maisy Nan.

The truth is that, as C.S. Lewis said, pain is God’s megaphone. Which of us through perpetual blessings, without pain, would amount to anything? What Rachel and I learned from our experience was that God isn’t the instigator of our trials, but, if we look for him, he stands with us in them, "full of compassion and mercy," and is able to bring good out of what at the time appears only to be meant for bad.