Fifteen years ago, Issues, Etc. invited me onto their program to talk about barrenness.
Since then, the kind men who produce, engineer, and host the show — Jeff Schwarz, Craig Feichtinger, and the Rev. Todd Wilken — have facilitated conversation after conversation with me and other guests about all of the things that concern us on this blog: infertility ethics, miscarriage, stillbirth, assisted reproductive technology, adoption, foster care, suffering, grief, IVF, embryo donation and adoption, the theology of the cross, and so much more.
This past month, they interviewed me again, this time about the content we’ve been posting in commemoration of He Remember the Barren‘s 15th anniversary. You can listen to those interviews here:
I promised in my last post on IVF that I would write more about the unexpected, unimaginable gifts God has given to me in my barren marriage.
First, please understand that this post is not to be read as one, big brag. Nope, this is a “go and tell what He has done” kind of sharing, so please do not compare your own days and vocations with my own. Remember, I am recounting some of God’s unexpected, unimaginable gifts to me in my barrenness, so they are going to be personal and specific to my own existence.
Second, as you celebrate with me, remember that this post does not serve as a promise that God also will give you the same kinds of blessings. This post is simply a blog-psalm, and I am inviting you to sing it with me.
Third, this is not an exhaustive list of gifts, for my finite brain cannot recall all of God’s infinite blessings over the years. (Isn’t that in itself marvelous? to be so blessed amidst trials and tribulations as not to be able to recount all of the blessings?) Though I do hope this list encourages you to consider waiting on the Lord when it comes to receiving the gift of children rather than trying to give yourself children through IVF. For surely He blesses, regardless of the size of our families.
Now that we are clear on the purpose of this post, here are some of the unexpected, unimaginable gifts God has given to me while also withholding the gift of children from my womb:
+ Because I have no children of my own to keep alive from minute to minute, my eyes and hands are free to attend to other people’s children. This means that I am able to make full eye contact with one child at a time and often for longer periods of time than their own mothers. Which also means that the bond between us forms fast and strong. I then nurture that bond over time with music and stories and catechesis and laughter and tears and long conversations and shared experiences. The result? Often, I am a child’s favorite person in the world (or so that child believes in the moment), and I am rarely in a room with that child for long without also receiving the full force of their attention and affection. This is true of hundreds of children — God be praised! (Dear, hardworking mothers, I know that my freedom in life to pour this kind of attention onto your child/ren is a gift, and I do not take this gift lightly. I see you. I am in awe of the ways you die to self every day for the sake of these children who love me. The distribution of affection is not fair, and I thank you for your grace and mercy in sharing your children with me. xo)
+ Whenever I walk out my door, the precious neighbor girl across the street wants to be with me in my yard rather than with her family in her own. I repeatedly have to remind her to ask her parents’ permission before vacating her own home.
+ Children sometimes ask to have their birthday parties at my house instead of their own.
+ I was blessed to spend six months of my life caring for another neighbor’s infant during the majority of her daylight hours. I helped form her brain and her culture and her sense of being through stories and songs and affection while her mommy worked. I was blessed to teach that infant to sleep peacefully in my house, and that was an exercise in trust I thought I would never experience in this life with a baby.
+ Over the years, I’ve driven a niece, a nephew, and a godson to their first days of school as well as picked them up at the end of the day. Their mommies let me be present for these formative experiences, bonding me further to their children.
+ Children often tell me that they wish I was their mom. What they mean is, “I love being with you right now and want it to last as long as possible.” They just don’t have the words, yet.
+ A young boy staying in my home with his family went on to write the following words for a school assignment: “I like the touch of her house because it is like ours … Her house is wonderful.” A young girl visiting my house was silent the entire visit until just before she left. She stopped short of my front door and, without turning to look at me, said, “Your house is both colorful and comfortable. I like to hear you sing.” And yet another little girl calls my guest room “her” room. I cherish the opportunity to be a home-away-from-home to children from all across the world.
+ Michael and I have been blessed to open our home for weeks at a time to sojourning teens in need of rest from trauma in their own homes. This is a kind of formation that supports families and helps them stay together during their weakest seasons, and I am continually stunned how God takes my empty nursery and fills it with other peoples’ children, working my barrenness for their good as well as my own.
+ I’ve been invited to witness the wedding dress shopping of two daughters in the faith. I thought I would miss out on these kinds of experiences in life, but …
+ Another dear daughter in the faith is wearing my wedding dress down the aisle of her own wedding and …
+ Yet another precious daughter in the faith wore a necklace on her wedding day that I gave her. I didn’t know she was going to do that until I showed up at the wedding. These mother-daughter exchanges are small, giant experiences in the heart of a barren woman.
+ On Mother’s Day, I receive more cards and gifts than actual mothers. This is not fair, I know, but I am always deeply moved and comforted to be remembered and appreciated by so many.
+ My own table is filled with the most wonderful, intelligent, gracious graduate students, international students, and sojourners on Thanksgiving and Christmas. This means that their own parents do not get to enjoy their children on these feast days. The loss experienced by these parents at the expense of my gain is something that moves me to prayer every holiday.
+ Thus far, I’ve been blessed to teach eight children to recite the Athanasian Creed from memory, an accomplishment that is always months in the making with each individual child. So much time spent contemplating the faith with any child results in the most extraordinary conversations, memories, and relational trust, and those relationships continue to bear joyous fruit in my daily life.
+ In my own home, I’ve been awakened on two different nights by two different sick children in need of my special attention (read: clean up all the vomit) as well as administered insulin to a sleeping Type I diabetic teen whose blood sugar was spiking. I thank God for these opportunities 1) to give their mommies a break, and 2) to be a mommy in the night for the briefest of spells.
+ Grown-up children in the faith “come home” to me for entire weekends simply to eat my cooking and tell me all the things.
+ I get to be the first one to hear about the first date experiences of so many other mothers’ daughters.
+ After years of teaching Sunday school children to sing their first hymns, I have hordes of hymns memorized. And so do they.
+ I can get practically any baby to fall asleep in my arms at any time. It is because I am special. God gave me a mother-like bosom, but I never smell like mother’s milk. That, and the vibration of my humming carries with it the promise of music in their dreams. But seriously, the real reason is that God is merciful to me in my barrenness. He blesses me in this little, substantial way.
+ In my barrenness, I have written and published eleven books (twelve if you count second editions) in fifteen years. It is the absence of children in my home that enables such an output, and I know it. I grieve it, but I also rejoice in it. It’s complicated.
+ Another one of my neighbors spent over a year of her life crossing the street to enter my front door and write her doctoral thesis beside me. Just because.
+ Instead of setting money aside for our wished-for children’s college educations, my husband and I get the honor of passing that money directly on to other peoples’ children now, specifically to seminarians and missionaries and church building funds and service organizations and whomever and wherever God needs it.
+ I have the time and availability to sit with women whose mothers are absent or have died, and I get to listen to them like a mother. Repeatedly.
I could go on and on and on … Isn’t that wondrous? Isn’t God merciful?
But I’ll end for now with this.
Michael and I have the joy of being a father and a mother in this life, not through pregnancy as we prayed, not through adoption as we hoped, and not through foster care as we tried, but through the simple yet extraordinary means of attending a church, of living on Clark Street, of working as a pastor and a writer, and of being fatherly and motherly to the people God sends our way. It is the most unexpected of blessings, the most unimaginable of joys!
We are barren and blessed. Truly, our cup overflows!
To this day, I am barren and resting in the Lord’s will.
Does it surprise you to learn that I have no regrets in resting in the Lord’s will all of these years, even though I have no children?
In fact, I not only have no regrets, I also rejoice in my life! For in waiting on the Lord to give or to withhold the gift of children from me, I have received unexpected, unimaginable blessings from His hand.
I would like to repeat for clarity’s sake: I have received unexpected, unimaginable blessings from God’s hand, not from my own, and the goodness of being on the receiving end of the Creator’s gifts is a joy that is deep and mysterious and difficult for me to express. Still, I keep trying to find words to articulate this profound mystery, for if I remain silent, others may misunderstand that, in my decision not to try to produce my own children through IVF, I am somehow left childless, joyless, comfortless, and purposeless in life.
So let me try to explain it again.
It is good to be a creature. It is restful to have a Creator.
To be a creature with a Creator — to live out my days in a prayerful, expectant posture of receiving gifts from the Creator — means that I get to receive good gifts from God, whatever those gifts may be. I may plead for one gift in particular (read: children), but even not being given children is a receiving of sorts. For in this case, I am receiving from God my Father the gift of “no,” and this gift disciplines me, teaches me, sanctifies me, chastens me, forms me, grows me, and conditions me to look to Him, to pray to Him, to cry out to Him, to wait on Him, to trust in Him, to receive from Him, and, yes, to delight in Him and in what He gives.
Don’t get me wrong. It hurts to be childless, and so I wrestle with God. But as I beat my fists against His chest and rage against His powerful withholding, He succeeds in freeing me from being a slave to my own wishes and desires. In making me childless, He literally breaks the bonds that hold me captive to my own passions, and then He reaches for me and bids me, weary and heavy laden, to come to Him and rest.
God reorders my affections in barrenness, and in doing so, He restores me to Himself.
Which means, in my barrenness, I find rest in the Lord.
How can I fully express the relief that comes, not in being barren but in being made barren? For in laying the cross of barrenness upon my shoulders, God actually relieves me of the heavy burden of producing children for myself. Put another way, since giving children is God’s work, then it is not for me to give them to myself. I simply abide in His giving and withholding, and in looking to the work of His hands rather than my own for value and vocation in this life, I rest from my laboring.
And while I rest, He blesses me.
He blesses me, not with children but with unexpected, unimaginable gifts.
Are you ready to be scandalized?
I would not trade those unexpected, unimaginable gifts from God for any child I might try to make with my own hands.
Why? Because it is so very good to be a creature. God said so in the Garden of Eden, and He continues to prove it to me and to you over and over again in this present age.
Still unclear?
Then I probably need to describe to you some of those unexpected, unimaginable gifts given to me by God in my barrenness. They will blow your mind.
But I’ll leave that for another post.
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.
$30,000.00 is the average cost of one fresh IVF cycle.
However, because the average success rate of births associated with IVF is so low, a couple can expect to pay for more than one cycle before achieving a live birth.
The Global Fertility Network explains, “Despite per–cycle savings, be aware that the average total cost to achieve a live birth can range from $30,000 to $63,000+, as multiple cycles (with a median of two in younger patients and three in older patients or those with highly complex infertility cases requiring sophisticated strategies and more medical services to resolve them) [are] often required.”1
My pastor-husband’s salary was not designed to stretch far enough to accommodate even one fresh cycle, so we passed on IVF.
But our budget’s restrictions aside, our consciences were burdened at the thought of purchasing a vocation, especially one that God Himself was actively withholding from us. The more we thought and prayed about it, the more clear it became that our money would be best served supporting the people already born and living — our neighbors — that God was putting directly in our path rather than devoting so much money to trying to produce new neighbors.
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.
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!”
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).
Andy Bates and Sarah Gulseth of KFUO Radio’s “The Coffee Hour” chatted with us last week about our Lenten writing contest.
Listen here for details on what we’re looking for in your submission on the prompt, “I waited patiently for the LORD; He inclined to me and heard my cry” (Psalm 40:1).
Remember, this contest is for anyone who breathes, has chromosomes, and reads the Bible.
Submit your entries to katie@katieschuermann.com by noon on March 25th to be considered for the grand prize: a museum-quality giclée print (14.7″ x 18″) of artist Edward Riojas’ cover art for the second edition of He Remembers the Barren.
Have you had a chance to read He Remembers the Barren, yet?
If not, catch up on what’s new in the revised and extended second edition by listening to these recent interviews on Worldwide KFUO’s Faith ‘n’ Family show:
Thank you to Pastor Ryan McDermott for reminding us that we, like Joseph, are sometimes called to take on the legal and ethical responsibility of caring for children that are not our own.
“WWJD: What Would Joseph Do?”
It occurs to me that, as a husband, a father, and a pastor, I fulfill many of the same roles as St. Joseph. And yet, at the same time, my roles are nothing like his. I cannot imagine the situation of living with and taking to wife the Mother of God, let alone raising God Incarnate as my son.
St. Joseph is known as the Nutritor Domini, the Nourisher of our Lord. He was responsible for protecting and providing for the physical well-being of Jesus from the time of the Annunciation onward. This child was not his, and yet Joseph took on the legal and ethical burden. This is not unlike the vocation of a pastor toward his congregation. My people are not, strictly speaking, my people – they are the people of God, the children of our heavenly Father. And yet, they are mine because they are entrusted to me by that same Father. It is my charge to bring to birth, bathe, feed, teach, and nourish them in the faith, just as Joseph was charged with the same duties for our Lord Christ. I hold them as a trust from the Lord, to deal with them according to His command.
As a father, I am in much the same position. My children are my own – biologically, legally, and ethically speaking. And yet they are not mine. Although they come from my flesh, they are the children of God entrusted to me for only a lifetime. It is my vocation to bring them to birth, feed, bathe, clothe, house, and raise them in the fear of the Lord. They are a gift, a trust from the Lord. They are His, and finally I must surrender my will, my hopes and fears, my desires and wishes for them, and I must let His will be done for and to and through them.
To be married to the Mother of God is something I cannot fathom. I have no words to talk about that because it is truly extraordinary. However, I know the love that flows between a husband and wife. And I know the sacrifices and difficulties, as well as the triumphs and unspeakable joys, that happen in a marriage. There is something to be said about Rome’s idea that a priest is wedded to the Church. St. Paul speaks of the marriage relationship as a living icon of the relationship between Christ and His Church. It is my duty and privilege to stand before my wife and before my congregation as their Defender against evil. It is my vocation to provide them with all that they need to support their daily life. It is my privilege to speak to them, both privately and publicly, the Word of the Lord to forgive their sins and strengthen their faith. It is my duty to stand in the gap, between them and the evil forces of this world, to beat back the darkness with the Light of the World.
Lord God, our heavenly Father, thank you for the example of St. Joseph, the Guardian of our Lord and the Protector of the Church. Strengthen all faithful men to be guardians of Your people and defenders of the Faith as You have given to us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
