Author: Katie Schuermann

I believe the Holy Scriptures to be the inerrant Word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit and fulfilled in Christ Jesus, our risen Lord and Savior. Therefore, I have faith that children are exactly what God tells us they are in His Word: a heritage to receive from Him. Children are not a prize for me to earn, a commodity for me to demand, nor an idol for me to worship. They are a gift which my Heavenly Father only has the privilege to bestow and to withhold. If God makes me a mother, then I can receive His good gift of a child with all joy and confidence in His love for me. If God does not make me a mother, then I can still know with all joy and confidence that God loves me completely in His perfect gift of the Child Jesus whose sacrifice on the cross atoned for my sin and reconciled me to my Heavenly Father. I am God’s own child, purchased and won by the blood of Jesus, and God promises in His Word that He will work all things - even my barrenness - for my eternal good. For this reason, I can in faith confess that my barrenness is a blessing.

She Has Her Hands Full

by Katie Schuermann

In twenty-four years of marriage, I have never been pregnant. In that same amount of time, my husband and I have received at least a dozen private adoption queries from five different states, and not a single one has worked out in such a way as to make us parents. And in spite of our multiple foster parent training sessions completed through the states of Texas and Illinois, no child ever has been placed in our home by the government.

Which means, in twenty-four years of marriage, no one has ever said of me, “She has her hands full.”

But do you know what people can say of me? that is, if they are looking closely?

“She has her stairwell and kitchen full.”

For in a plot twist no one saw coming, God called my husband seven years ago to serve as pastor of University Lutheran Church in Champaign, Illinois. “UniLu,” as everyone in the community fondly calls the congregation, is a campus ministry located just one block off the main quad of the University of Illinois, and it exists primarily to serve undergraduate and graduate students attending the University of Illinois.

This means that Michael and I are finally, joyfully foster parents, though not through state certification like we originally thought. Instead, the church equips us to take into our little family of two around sixty children every year, all of them grown-up and sojourning away from home. We get to shelter them, feed them, teach them, sing with them, play with them, love them, and try to assist their parents in raising them in the faith, all the while knowing that these foster children will not be staying with us, that in the end, it is good — best, even — when they return to the families from which they came.

One of these precious foster children said to me the other day, “I could never do what you do.”

She was referring to the fact that every year our family changes. Every semester, we welcome new students into the church and launch graduating students into the world.

As I reflected further upon her comment, I realized something remarkable about our little story of barrenness.

Michael and I are able to endure this kind of transient family life. In fact, we expect it. We thrive in it.

The primary reason for our endurance, I believe, is because God equips us to serve where He sends us and whom He sends us. He prepares specific good works for us to do, and He completes these specific good works in us. It’s that simple.

But something a little less simple and a little less obvious …

When I view our present vocation through the lens of our barren years, I see plainly that God has been training Michael and me for this kind of transient family life our entire marriage. Never have we ever been able to keep the children who come into our home. Always, we must return those we cradle to another’s arms. Every single child we meet and love and welcome into our hearts belongs to some other family. Every single child who loves us calls other people “Dad” and “Mom” and some other house “home.”

What I am trying to confess is that our barren marriage has served as the perfect training ground for being foster parents at UniLu. Welcoming student after student and then blessing each on his way is simply a continuation of the kind of love and care we have always known and shown to other people’s children in our barrenness.

To think that this strange vocation might have been God’s intention all along — “It is high; I cannot attain it” (Psalm 139)!

And here is what really blows my mind.

In making us foster parents to so many college-aged children, God is filling not only our hands but also our hearts and our prayers and our hours and our table and our stairwell and our kitchen.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine such a big, beautiful family, one so plainly created by a God.

All I know to do in response to God’s gift of family life is to thank Him for His abundant mercy and sing a psalm: “Blessed is the man and woman who fill their quiver with college students!”

Reasons We Never Used IVF – #2

by Katie Schuermann

Though it was confusing — even embarrassing — in our marriage to be one flesh year after year but never pregnant, we understood that it went against God’s will to separate what He joined together (Matthew 19:6) in our one-flesh union.

For to force humans into existence outside of God’s procreative design of coitus would require harvesting and handing over our gametes (sperm and eggs) to a clinician who would then mix them in a petri dish in a cold room away from us. This separates what God has joined together in our marriage bed, and that goes against our religion.

If your conscience is burdened because you used IVF, know that you are not alone in your regrets. The apostle Paul teaches us in his letter to the Romans that “none is righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10). He also writes that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). Please, talk to your pastor or a trusted Christian friend about your regrets, and put your faith in Jesus’ words from the cross about His work of salvation on our behalf: “It is finished” (John 19:30). Because of Christ’s mercy, we can live our lives looking backward in repentance yet forward in hope.

Reasons We Never Used IVF – #1

by Katie Schuermann

Though having no children felt like we were already dying, my husband and I could think of no situation in which it was ethically acceptable for us to create children in a petri dish and risk their lives simply to fulfill our own wishes and desires.

Put another way, it would be wrong to ask our children to suffer in our place.

We know from the Bible that it is the strong who are called to protect and defend the weak (Micah 6:8, Psalm 82:3, Isaiah 1:17, Philippians 2:4, Zechariah 7:10, Proverbs 31:8-9). It is parents who are tasked with providing for their children, not vice versa, and the inherent disordering of human vocations in IVF alarmed us.

Therefore, we understood that it would be wrong to force the creation of our children in an environment that would put them at such a high risk of dying, simply to make us feel better.

If your conscience is burdened because you used IVF, know that you are not alone in your regrets. The apostle Paul teaches us in his letter to the Romans that “none is righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10). He also writes that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). Please, talk to your pastor or a trusted Christian friend about your regrets, and put your faith in Jesus’ words from the cross about His work of salvation on our behalf: “It is finished” (John 19:30). Because of Christ’s mercy, we can live our lives looking backward in repentance yet forward in hope.

Crybaby

by Katie Schuermann

I can cry at the drop of a hat.

This post is not a flex. I am not boasting of any special talent or ability. I am simply trying to put into words the visceral, to explain something physical that happens when being disciplined by the Lord, when barrenness persists beyond everyone’s expectations, when “take up your cross and follow Me” (Matthew 16:24) translates into decades.

It opens you up, that’s what.

So when my optometrist confides in the darkened exam room that she now has to take a hormone-suppressing pill to keep her breast cancer at bay, my tears fog the very lenses trying to correct my vision.

When my neighbor texts me a picture of her positive pregnancy test, I bend at the waist in my kitchen and cry to the Lord both in praise and in pain for His goodness to her and to me, though His goodness bears different fruit in each of us.

When my godson bows his head and begs me not to leave him on his first day of preschool, my tears fall to the floor and splash beside his own.

Why do I live like a fissure — a rock cracked open — my hot-lava emotions always bubbling just below the surface? One little earthquake, one tiny seismic event, and my face becomes a volcano.

From my perspective, it is because the cross of barrenness is so very public, so very painful, so very present. It already demands attention and energy both from me and from those living around me, no matter what else comes our way. It is a heavy thing, a burden carried into every moment, a tax exacted upon every personal and public interaction.

I’m not saying that barrenness is the focus of my life. I am saying that it accompanies my living. It enters the room with me, not like an elephant, exactly, but more like a hole. For it is the absence of my children in the room that everyone feels, and carrying all of those feelings wears a girl down.

But something important needs explaining.

My easy tears do not always come because I am in pain. More often than not, they come because my pain is being relieved.

In the case of my optometrist, I cried because, in bearing her burden, I was unburdened of my loneliness. I have no children in my home to nurture, so when God puts children-grown-up on my path in need of my motherly attention and care, I am more purposed than pained.

In the case of my neighbor, I cried because I experienced relief upon remembering that God does give the gift of children, if not to me. I was able to catch my breath for a minute under the ongoing weight of my cross, because I recalled that God’s withholding children from my own womb must serve some greater good (Romans 8:28), or I would be pregnant, too.

In the case of my godson, I cried because I was stunned with joy to be so wanted and cherished by a child not my own.

My point is this. I am a crybaby, but my weepy ways are not simply the result of world-weariness. I blink tears, because God in His abundant mercy deigns to comfort me in my barrenness day after cross-bearing day.

I am tearing up now just thinking about it.

I’ll Say It If You Won’t

by Katie Schuermann

The thing is, I deserve to be barren.

The list of my sins is life-long and Ten Commandments-deep.

I have made a god of my own wishes and desires so many times in my home life and in my career as an author and musician that I can no longer recall them all.

I continually neglect to call upon the name of the Lord on behalf of others, and I often daydream during the prayers in church.

I have skipped Sunday morning worship in my anger, and I often stare at my closed Bible on the dining room table, picking up my fork and eating breakfast instead of sanctifying the morning with reading the Word of God.

I have gone against my parents’ wise counsel on more than one occasion, despising their authority and imagining myself wiser than them, even going so far as to tell them so.

I have hated so many people. So, so many people. I have even hit people in my anger. All of my excuses be damned.

I have worn dresses too short and gowns too low. In my twenties, I even played the unchaste role of Maggie in a St. Louis production of Lend Me a Tenor, a choice I regret to this very moment.

I once stole a broken stopwatch from a cousin.

I lied to my math teacher about the (in)completion of an assignment.

I frequently look on Zillow for properties bigger and better than my own, and I walk by properties in my community, imagining myself living in their homes in their place.

I see other peoples’ adopted children, and I would rather they be mine.

In other words, I’ve broken all of God’s Commandments, from the First to the Tenth, there and back again, many times over. I am disgusting. I am dust, the kind that dirties everything and chokes people.

So, I’ll say it again: I am barren, and I deserve it. But that is not why I am barren.

I am barren, because God displays His own works, not mine, in my suffering (John 9:1-3).

I am barren, because the death in my womb reminds you and me to repent of our sins (Luke 13:1-5).

I am barren, because God disciplines His children like the good Father that He is (Heb. 12:5-11). But discipline is not punishment.

For God does not punish His baptized children for their sins. He won’t, because He already punished Jesus in our place. He poured out His wrath fully upon His Son on the cross, and Jesus Himself said before He gave up His Spirit, “It is finished” (John 19:30).

And so, to say that barrenness is punishment for my sin is to confess falsely that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was not enough, that the blood of the Lamb of God did not fully atone for all of my wrongs.

To get right to the point: to confess that barrenness is punishment for my sin is to mischaracterize God’s nature, not mine. Because God is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Psalm 145:8). He saves His people and blesses His heritage (Psalm 28:9), and He does so by punishing Jesus in our place.

I may deserve to be barren, but I am not barren because I deserve it.

I am barren, because God deems it wise for me to be so.

A Wanting Prayer-Life

by Katie Schuermann

By the world’s standards, Michael and I are utter, complete failures at manifesting our own destiny as parents. There are probably even some church bodies who are ashamed to claim us as believing Christians, seeing as our hands remain empty after years of petitioning God for the gift of children. For with God, nothing is impossible (Luke 1:37). Surely our faith must be the problem. Surely our prayers are found to be wanting.

Honestly, I’ve always taken issue with this accusation. It’s as old as my wedding vows, and I’ve received it from church members, family, strangers, readers, employers, movie scripts, false prophets, podcasts, and countless blogs and books over the years.

I don’t mean to suggest that I deserve better than barrenness. No, I can easily imagine why someone would look at me and think my faith little, my prayer-life wanting, my heart undeserving of children, for that is all true.

But such an attack on my own faith does not take into account the faith of the thousands of kind, loving people who have prayed for me all of these years. What about my sweet mama? my self-sacrificing dad? my grandparents and sisters and nieces and nephews? What about all of my godchildren and my church family and my friends and pastors and even the compassionate strangers who read this blog? Do all of their (your) prayers count for nothing? Is God punishing all of us through my barren womb?

Or could it be that God’s good answer to all of our prayers is my barrenness?

Here is what I can tell you with assurance.

I am barren, and that is always bad. But miraculously, God works my barrenness for good, both for me and for you (Rom. 8:28). Barrenness continually calls me to repentance of my sins (Luke 13:1-4), and that is good. God’s persistent withholding of the gift of children from me repeatedly turns me toward Him for help, reminding me that He is my Father (Heb. 12:5-11), and that also is very good. And I maintain hope that my barrenness is something through which God’s works can be made manifest (John 9:1-3). Again, very, very good.

Maybe it would be helpful to consider my daily reality in this particular matter.

If, indeed, my prayer-life is found wanting, then everyone can rest assured. God is tending to this public concern very nicely, for in His wisdom, He continues to make me barren. And I promise you, barrenness drives me to pray to God over and over and over again.

Lord, have mercy.

(Thankfully, He does.)

(Still) The Barren Woman

by Katie Schuermann

I’ve never liked the word barren.

To be known as the barren woman is terrible, because it is true. I am barren, because I am “fruitless, lacking, producing no offspring,” as the dictionary bluntly and boorishly declares to everyone in the room.

I call myself barren, because I am.

I also call myself barren, because God has made me so.

It is that last sentence that really preaches to me. Allow me to explain.

While the word barren chafes my pride, I see it in the Bible and remember that being a barren woman is not unprecedented in the story of God’s salvation of mankind. Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, Elizabeth, Anna … so many of my mothers in the faith also were barren, and it comforts me not to be so special.

Also, when I see the word barren in the Bible, I remember that it is God Himself who makes people barren. He is the Creator, and He sees fit both to give and to withhold the gift of children in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and even today. He is the Author of life, and He works the horrible plot-point of barrenness for good for His People. Surely He will work my own little barren story for good, as well.

This is why I am bold to continue speaking and writing a word that has gone out of fashion in the infertility industry. When I admit to being barren, I am confessing both to myself and to you the truth about my womb as well as my Lord’s will. I am daily exercising my faith under its banner, being humbled under the will of God, trusting that the Creator’s merciful blessings extend even to those whom He disciplines, all the while prayerfully waiting and watching to see if the Man who raised Lazarus from the dead might also raise my barrenness to new life.

By the way, when I call myself barren, I am not confessing to you my eternal state of being. I am confessing to you merely the reality of my today. Today, my womb is closed. Today, God in His wisdom continues to withhold the gift of children from me and my husband.

But calling myself barren today communicates absolutely nothing to you about my tomorrow. God has my tomorrow in His hands, and I fall asleep each sunset trusting that He will give me what is best with the next sunrise.

In the meantime, I wait and I hope and I pray and I look for the good works God has prepared for me to do as a barren woman right now.

This is how I can smile for pictures taken with other peoples’ children. This is how I can write books for other peoples’ grandchildren to read. This is how I can laugh during podcast interviews about being childless. This is how I can sing for joy about my loss and your gain. I am a barren woman, yes, but I am a woman made barren by God. And since the Creator deems it best for me to be barren today, then I am not ashamed in being so.

Though I still dislike the word.

15 years

by Katie Schuermann

It has been 15 years since this blog was born. Can you believe it?

Our lives have changed much since Rebecca, Kristi, Melissa and I first started blogging about barrenness. Some of our crosses remain, others have been lifted, and still others have been exchanged.

We first ceased blogging all of those years ago, not because barrenness and secondary infertility no longer affect us, but because we thought it wise for our readers to start engaging more with their pastors face-to-face about their suffering, especially on matters of the conscience.

But we would like to honor the 15th anniversary of the first edition of He Remembers the Barren’s publication as well as this blog’s birth by announcing that we plan to blog every day in the coming month of October.

Because we are older and, we pray, wiser.

And because miscarriages, adoption, IVF, endometriosis, secondary infertility, grief, and all the things still affect us.

And because we would like to re-engage in that centuries-old Christian tradition of comforting you with the comfort with which we ourselves have been comforted (2 Cor. 1:3-4).

May the God of all mercies be glorified.

Lord willing, see you in October.

No One Knows the Hour

iu-3This final feature from our Lenten writing contest list of honorable mentions is written by Deaconess Michelle Domin.

Oh, LORD, hear our cry.

“I waited patiently for the LORD; He inclined to me and heard my cry.” Psalm 40:1

I have waited many times throughout my life (sometimes patiently and sometimes not so patiently). In fact, my everyday life consists of constant waiting. Waiting for the toast to pop, the phone to charge, the water to boil. Waiting for the kids to fall asleep, waiting for a moment to myself, waiting for the weekend. Every year I wait for warmer weather, special family trips, birthdays, and Christmas. I have also waited on difficult things throughout the years. I have waited to find out if a family member has cancer, waited for physical restoration after a botched surgery, and waited for the pain of broken relationships to subside.

Never have I felt a more intense sense of waiting than when my two-year-old daughter, Eliana, was diagnosed with Restrictive Cardiomyopathy and given a death sentence. The doctors gave her a maximum of six years to live. Unless. Unless they took out her broken heart and replaced it with a strong, healthy one. The incomprehensible decision was made to put Eliana on the heart transplant list, and I waited. I did not know if I was waiting for her to die or waiting for someone else to die and give her a heart. Either way, I knew I was waiting for certain death. Every night I waited to see if Eliana would wake up in the morning. Every day I waited to see if her heart would keep beating. As Eliana’s condition quickly deteriorated, I knew she did not have six years. I knew she did not even have six months.

I cried to the LORD, not even knowing what to pray. I desperately wanted healing for my daughter, but I certainly could not pray for another child to die, just so mine could live. Yet, as I cried to the LORD, I knew that the very God to whom I prayed had already done exactly that. He sent His own Child to die that Eliana might live, securing her life in the waters of Holy Baptism. There at the font she received her new heart. Her heart sick from sin was drowned in Baptismal waters, and a new heart and Spirit were given to her. As she was united to Christ’s death and resurrection, I knew that whenever her temporal death might come, she would certainly be raised to eternal life.

Waiting for Eliana’s new heart felt like a lifetime. In reality, it was five short months. Joy and relief washed over me, thankful the wait was over. Yet, grief and sadness also washed over me, knowing another family had just experienced the death of their child.

No one knows the hour of life or death, but waiting is a key component. What joy we have that the wait for deliverance is over! God has heard our cries and sent His Son. In Christ’s death, He conquered death. In His resurrection, we too will most certainly be raised. Now, instead of waiting for certain death, we wait patiently for eternal life, knowing confidently and fully that we will be delivered from this vale of tears. As surely as Christ has been raised from the dead, He will come again and bring an end to all suffering. He has inclined to us and heard our cry. To God be the glory!

By Deaconess Michelle Domin

Do Not Hinder Them

Pastor Mark Surburg, in his sermon preached on March 24th of this year at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Marion, Illinois, draws from the wisdom of Martin Chemnitz in applying Jesus’ admonition of His disciples (Mark 10:13-16) as comfort for Christians grieving a miscarriage.

Pastor Surburg graciously granted us permission to reproduce a portion of his sermon here. You can read the sermon in its entirety on his blog.

iu[T]he loss of a baby in miscarriage is a source of profound grief. The joyful expectation of knowing this little one abruptly ends, and we are left with nothing but sonogram images. Where a miscarriage occurs in the setting of ongoing fertility problems, it can be particularly crushing.

Yet it is not just the grief of a life lost. Our knowledge from God’s Word about the nature of man since the Fall also means that miscarriage presents us with troubling questions. Our Lord Jesus told Nicodemus, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” We know from Scripture that sinful, fallen man produces sinful, fallen man. It matters not how cute that sinful, fallen man is. 

For this very reason Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Our Lord has given us Holy Baptism as the means by which babies receive a washing of the new birth in the Holy Spirit, and become saints forgiven because of Christ. What then are we to say about these babies who were never born alive, and so never could receive rebirth in Holy Baptism?

Our text from Mark chapter ten provides encouragement to think about these things on the basis of our Lord’s word. It does not provide an exact answer. But it sends us to Christ in faith and hope. Mark begins by telling us, “And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them.”

Presumably parents were bringing their children – and the term used here includes very young children – so that Jesus could touch them. Now in Mark’s Gospel, every other time that Jesus touches someone it is order to provide healing. The saving power of the kingdom of God – the reign of God – was present in Jesus. People recognized this. On three different occasions in the gospel, Mark tells us that people in need of healing hoped to touch Jesus, or even just to touch his clothes.

Why did these parents want Jesus to touch their children?  They did because Jesus came proclaiming, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” They did because Jesus healed the sick, the blind and lepers with his touch. They did because the demons cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are–the Holy One of God,” before he cast them out. They wanted Jesus to touch their children because Jesus and his touch brought God’s saving reign.

However, we learn that when this happened “the disciples rebuked them.” Since the text never actually mentions who brought the children, I think we have to assume that the “them” refers to the children themselves. This fits with an important piece of cultural background that we need to understand. 

In our world children are revered. They are viewed as pure and untainted sources of wisdom. “Listen to the children” we are told. However, in the ancient world children were viewed as inferior because they were helpless and not able to work like adults; they were physically weak; they were likely to get sick and die; they were not guided by reason. They were looked down upon and were not held up as role models for adults to imitate.

But in response, the Lord Jesus was indignant about what the disciples were doing. He commanded them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” And then Jesus took children in his arms – he embraced them – and blessed the children, laying his hands on them.

Jesus says in our text that the kingdom of God – the saving reign of God – was meant for those children. It was his will for them to receive it. He did not want them hindered from being brought to him. In the experience of miscarriage these words give us comfort and hope. Jesus wants these children in the womb to receive the reign of God. When Christian parents are prevented by miscarriage from bringing a child to baptism, we take comfort in the knowledge that our Lord does not want children to be hindered from receiving his saving reign.

Jesus Christ was so intent on bringing the reign of God that he suffered and died on the cross for you; for me; for every child we have lost in miscarriage. It is in this same chapter that our Lord says, “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Christ offered himself up in the suffering of the cross as the sacrifice for our sin.

But God’s reign in Christ could not be defeated by death.  Instead, Jesus passed through death in order to defeat it.  On the third day God raised Jesus from the dead. In his resurrection Christ has conquered death – even the death of infants in the womb. He has begun the resurrection of the Last Day that he will bring to completion for us when he returns in glory.

We entrust the little ones we have lost to the crucified and risen Lord. He has said that the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. He has said that he does not want them hindered from being brought to God’s reign. We know that he has bound us to the Means of Grace. But as God he knows no limitations. Indeed, it is immediately after our text that in response to the disciples shocked question, “Then who can be saved?”, that our Lord says: “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.” We know the kind of Lord that Jesus has revealed himself to be in his death and resurrection, and so in hope and faith we entrust these little ones to him. They rest in his hands. That is all we need to know, because we know him.

And because we know him, we find comfort in the midst of our grief. In our text Jesus says, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.” Our Lord declares that the kingdom of God – the reign of God – belongs to children. It belongs to those who were considered weak and helpless – those who had nothing to offer.

That is what we are.  We are weak and helpless. We are not in control. The loss of a child in miscarriage unmasks all of these realities. But Jesus Christ came to bring God’s saving reign to just such people. He came to bring forgiveness and life. He came to bring comfort. He came to bring hope. Sin, sorrow and death do not get the last word. They do not because Jesus Christ has risen from the dead.

Written by Pastor Mark Surburg + Sermon for Life Service + March 24, 2019