How to Care for the Barren

The Sisterhood of Suffering

by Kristi Leckband

The apostle Paul writes these words in 1 Corinthians 12:26 — “And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.”

There is so much suffering in this world. We, the members of the body of Christ have suffered much. We have not suffered all, for Christ took that upon Himself for us. We should have suffered death, eternal death. God, in His mercy, sacrificed His own beloved Son, so that we might not suffer eternal death. God is gracious!

And now, dear friends, we can help carry the burden of suffering with our sisters in the faith. It’s sad to hear that a friend’s pregnancy has failed. Your sister in Christ tries to be strong, but it hurts so much. The birth mother chose to care for her child rather than place the little one in your dear friend’s arms. Your friend’s arms are heavy with sorrow but empty of children. Your friend’s children despise her as a parent. She questions where she went wrong.

What, as the Body of Christ, can we do? What can happen within the sisterhood of suffering? I have some ideas.

The sisterhood of suffering is one where you can…

NOT offer her false promises.
NOT tell her to simply “get over it.”
NOT dismiss her pain.
NOT ignore her tears.
NOT judge her sorrow.
NOT look the other way.
NOT leave her to drown in her despair.

The sisterhood of suffering is one where you can…

spend time with her.
hug her.
sit quietly beside her.
cry with her.
acknowledge her pain.
speak truthfully to her.
pray for her.
share God’s Word with her.

We are called to care for one another, and I’ve listed only a handful of ways we can do this. When one sister suffers, many suffer. We can only help bear the burden when we KNOW one another. Thus, we spend time together. We ask questions. We listen to one another. By the grace of God, He will help us share the suffering of a hurting sister. Can we take the hurt away? No, but perhaps we can be the hand of God to hug her. Perhaps we can be the voice who reminds her that God loves her and does not forsake her. Perhaps we can hand that pens a note of encouragement to her.

St. Paul exhorts us with these words from Romans 12:15 — “Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.”

Dear sisters, let us love one another in the sisterhood of suffering.

Reasons We Never Used IVF – #4

by Katie Schuermann

I could not fathom asking my children to spend their earliest days away from the warmth and safety of my womb’s embrace.

To be created in a petri dish means living in an environment that cannot sustain life. If I used IVF to create my children, then their first home would be in that unsustainable, dangerous environment. They would be far away from me, and I would be unable to protect, defend, or nurture them at their weakest and most vulnerable state. I would be unable to mother them.

It would be a hired clinician, not me, overseeing my children’s initial cell-division. This means that my children’s earliest caretaker in life would be a stranger tasked with grading them by sight alone for their viability, determining which of them should be transferred to my womb and allowed an attempt at implantation, and, if any remained behind in the petri dish, which of them should be frozen and stored at the clinic in liquid nitrogen.

Subjecting my children to such indignities and clinical abuses seemed the very opposite of parental love to me.

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.

A Bit of Hosting

by Kristi Leckband

For years, I prayed that my table would seat a gaggle of children. However, the Lord did not fill my table with children. Rather, He taught me that my table can seat people of all ages, and they do not have to be born of my womb.

Upon our move into this house, we have hosted many people in our home. Some come for a meal. Some stay for several days. One even stayed for a couple of months.

And we LOVE it. We share holiday meals with college students and friends who are not able to see family. We host evening gatherings for friends. While we did some hosting in our first home in Nebraska (many nights of cards), we do even more of it here. Part of that is the result of more space in our house. Part of it is because our children are old enough to handle a break from the home routine. Part of it is they can handle a later bedtime. Our dining table does not seat just five of us anymore. We have the privilege of welcoming others to a meal around our table, and it is delightful.

When you open your home to others, you invite them to share community with you. It tells your guests that you want to know more about them. It shows them that you care.

Hosting doesn’t have to be a big, fancy meal. It can be something as simple as dessert one evening. Perhaps you have young children at home. You can be the one to arrange a playdate for others; that’s hosting. Maybe your home seems too small to have a lot of people in it. Invite a small group or just one or two others. Hosting doesn’t mean you have to put on a big party. If your friend asks what she can bring, let her. Keep it small and simple. Ask her to bring some crackers or some fruit or some wine. Invite a friend over to play a game. Share a cup of tea.

The purpose of hospitality is to spend time together. True friends are not coming to inspect the cleanliness of your home. (Please make sure your bathroom is clean, though.) They are coming to be with you. The Lord desires us to be in fellowship with one another. He invites us to befriend our neighbors. We value people, and we want to support them in good and bad times. We can do this better when we actually KNOW them. When you share your table with others, you share yourself. That, in turn, invites others to share of themselves with you.

I taught my children that family doesn’t just have to be your blood relation. They learned that through adoption. I also wanted them to see that the people with whom we share time can become our family. This includes the older woman who treats my children as her grandchildren. This includes the unmarried college man who desires a spouse. This includes the young couple who await children of their own. This includes the high school students who need to see a stable family in action. All are important, and all need our love.

When we’re hosting people, my children get excited. They want to help get ready for our friends. In younger years, they would make name cards for everyone. Now they help set the table. They help prepare the meal. They pour drinks. They clear the table. They sit and listen to adult conversation. They laugh, and they ponder. It’s the blessing of community.

Our Lord creates the perfect community in the Lord’s Supper. He is the ultimate Host. He spreads a table before us and gives us to eat and drink of His very own Body and Blood. His is the perfect meal, and we are His guests.

It is now our privilege to extend that kindness to others. Perhaps you’ve wanted to host people in your home but just aren’t sure what to do. Know that you can do it. Maybe you start by meeting somebody at a coffee shop. Go for a walk with someone. Get together for appetizers one evening. Hosting doesn’t have to be a big production. Find what you can manage and start there. It’s really about treating others with loving care.

I’d love to host you in my home sometime.

Reasons We Never Used IVF – #3

by Katie Schuermann

For IVF to work, my husband would need to collect his own sperm and hand it over to a stranger for handling.

The primary means of collecting sperm in IVF is for a man to masturbate¹ in a clinic while looking at images of women other than his wife. There are other options for collecting a man’s sperm (surgical removal, Onan’s method, etc.), but none of these options are good for my husband, nor are they beneficial to our marriage.

I just asked my husband if he has any regrets about never masturbating all of those years ago, though we still have no children today. He says no.

1 “The usual way to collect sperm is to masturbate into a cup.” WebMD.com

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.

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 try to make 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.

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.)