Infertility

Why Me?

When asking God the question “Why me?” in regards to my suffering, I replace the clear promises of God in the Bible with a false expectation for something which God’s Word doesn’t actually promise.

I am not promised success or wealth or happiness or health or easy living or children. I deserve none of these things. My goodness is as filthy rags, and God owes me nothing good in return.

Only because God is good Himself does He graciously promise and grant me forgiveness and salvation and peace and my daily bread. In fact, He is so good and wise that He also promises and grants me suffering and fatherly discipline and the refiner’s fire.

“Why me?”

Because I’m baptized into Christ to die with Him and live again. Because I’m loved. Because my Father in heaven keeps me, a dumb sheep prone to stray, from wandering away from the flock. Because the Bible tells me so.

The Bible tells you so, too.

The Great Temptation

The great temptation of barrenness is to believe that God’s blessed favor will only come to you in the form of a child of your own.

Well, it doesn’t, though it does come in the form of a child – the child Jesus, born to die for your sins.

“Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear; Break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor!” (Isaiah 54:1 and Galatians 4:27 [ESV])

God’s blessed favor is for you.

“To the barren ladies I know and the ones I don’t”

Someone loves you and prays for you and bears with you, dear sisters. Read this and rest today while a sister in Christ shoulders your cross.

I’m the one with more children than you have fingers on your right hand. I feel ostentatious and gaudy around you. I feel like having my babies with me is in poor taste, like I am flaunting my riches. I cringe to imagine that you might feel the same way, you who have suffered so much in your own mind and who are now subjected in real time, in public, to stare in the face the dream that hasn’t come true for you. I am so sorry it hasn’t. I am so sorry to think that I might be causing you more pain. I ache for the love you show my silly little people. I don’t know if I could.

I sin your sins. When I see all the world’s human trash with its ill-bred and empirically worthless children, I seethe to think of the pearls cast before them while your clean neck and open ears and graceful wrists and industrious fingers are bare. When another moron teenager turns up pregnant, I want to rage at God for what I can only see as unimaginable injustice and just plain poor planning. I want to make it right. I want to distribute the world’s children sensibly by my own self-righteous fiat. I want YOU, you wonderful, smart, talented, responsible, faithful Christian person, to be a mother of nations. NOT THEM.

I see it. I didn’t want to, but I loved you so much I finally looked and really saw it, or saw it as well as one such as myself is able to. It was the worst thing I have ever seen. It looks like utter desolation, like horror. I can’t look long. I can’t believe it’s the view out your window every hour of every day. Oh, you. You have lost what you never had.

But I know also that we are nearsighted. I am so nearsighted outside of this metaphor that, without my glasses, I can look into a dark bedroom where I know there is a digital clock and still see no light whatsoever. This is how we see into eternity also. No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him. So I know that, despite its appearance to myopics like us, the desolation is not utter. I know you know too, and we walk by faith together because our sight is untrustworthy.

I cannot tell you how much I respect and admire you for not trying to take by force what God has not given. You are like the man on a lifeboat, crazy with thirst, who still knows better than to drink seawater even though his companions fall to the temptation. It must be so hard to watch them–to watch them sicken, to watch them die, to watch them live. You are the one who clings to a true hope and has the best chance of healthy survival. You trust the Lord, though he slay you.

I thank you for the witness that you are to the sacred blessing of marriage no matter what the quantifiable yield of that marriage. I thank you for the witness you are to the inherent value of femininity no matter what the quantifiable yield of that femininity.

I don’t say these things to you because I feel I don’t know you well enough, or I don’t know how you are doing with all this right now, or I know you feel as sick of this being the relentless topic of your life as I am of the relentless topics of my life. But I want you to know that I am always thinking all these things even as you are, and I pray for you always. I’m sorry if my not saying something makes it seem like I don’t care or I don’t really get it. I know I don’t really get it, but I try to, and I care so much.

I know you feel empty, but you bear the heaviest burden, and bearing is never without gain. God bless you, strong one.

The Control Factor

There is comfort in control.

It is common for victims of assault to comfort themselves with illusions of control. For example, women who have been beaten or raped often find blame in themselves for the crime that was committed against them, because, as long as they are somehow at fault – as long as they are not truly victims of some terrible atrocity outside of their own control – then there is something they can do to keep it from happening again.

We comfort ourselves with illusions of control, as well. As long as there is something we can do to get pregnant – some dietary change or surgical procedure or herbal cocktail or adoption agency we can utilize to give ourselves the gift of a child – then we are not really barren. Don’t get me wrong. I am thankful for all of the healthy foods, vitamin supplements, doctors, procedures, and foster care training I have utilized over the years, for they have offered me physical relief and instructed me in how to better care for my neighbor; however, none of these things have given me control over my parental status.

If we could really control our barrenness, don’t you think all of us would be parents, already?

Seeking control of our fertility is a chasing after the wind. Children, birthed or adopted, are a heritage from the LORD, a gift from Him to receive. Turn back to your Father in heaven and ask Him to give you all good things according to His will. Then, rejoice, for He is wise in His giving.

Glory vs. Cross

That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened [Rom 1:20]. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross. A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is. That wisdom which sees the invisible things of God in works as perceived by man is completely puffed up, blinded, and hardened. (Martin Luther in his Heidelberg Disputation, points 19-22)

For example:

A theologian of glory calls barrenness a trial to be overcome, a burden which can be revoked by some great act of faith on our part, a curse that can be lifted by true love’s kiss. (Works Cited: My Own Wishes and Desires: A Treatise, The Complete Works of Joel Osteen, and The Wisdom of the Disney Princesses)

A theologian of the cross calls barrenness a terrible brokenness of the flesh which results from Sin in the world, a cross to be endured joyfully in light of Christ’s promise to make all things new on The Last Day, a suffering given to us by God who loves us and molds us and disciplines us and shapes us and points us straight to Christ’s own suffering on the cross for our own salvation and comfort. (Works Cited: God’s Word as revealed in The Book of Romans)

Blessed

Do you know what calms and comforts the barren beast in me? Two simple truths gathered from God’s Word:

1. To be blessed is to be forgiven.

In Christ, I am blessed, mother or not. I could have all of the children in the world and still languish apart from God’s forgiveness and reconciliation. God has given to me that which I need most, and I can now live in true peace with or without children.

2. God is wise in His giving.

I don’t need to worry about why God gives some women more children than I have fingers on my right hand and me none. He has promised me in His Word that He works all things for my good and for the good of my neighbor. That’s exactly what I want – God’s best. Enough said.

These Biblical truths don’t mean that my days on this earth are all sunshine and rainbows, but they do provide an anchor to which I can cling in the raging storm of grief. They part the sea of suffering and allow me to pass onto dry land. They tell me the truth of God’s fruitful work for me when Satan would have me despair in my own, pitiful, barren works.

And the truth sets me free.

The Grief of Others

We are not the only ones who grieve over our childlessness.

Everyone else – our parents, grandparents, siblings, nieces and nephews, friends, acquaintances, pew sisters – all experience grief over that which should not be. And, just like us, their grief goes through cycles.

Think about it.

Who in your life assures you that pregnancy can be achieved if you simply relax or start the adoption process or fast from sugar or go to Dr. Suzie-Q for treatments? Denial.

Who insists that if you prayed harder, believed more fully, gave enough money to the church, displayed enough faith, God would reward you with a child? Bargaining.

Who refuses to go to church or punches pillows or blames your husband’s family for your barrenness? Anger.

Who goes numb or bursts into tears every time the subject comes up? Depression.

Can you recognize the different phases of grief in the people around you? Just as we want others to allow us to grieve our childlessness without expectation or rule, so it is for everyone else who is grieving for us. It is loving to patiently bear with their grief, even if that means listening to and enduring and forgiving the thoughts, words, and deeds of the very ones who hurt us the most.

Remember, it may take years of your not getting pregnant or your not being able to adopt a child before any of these people will join you in the acceptance phase of grief.

In the meantime, I am so sorry it hurts. You are not alone. xo

Hopeless?

Question Submitted: I’ve been married for nearly 15 years. I have no biological children and desire so much to be pregnant and to have children. I am resistant to just giving up but also feel like a fool for hoping otherwise. My friends don’t understand, they just keep hoping for me. Am I just supposed to be barren? I am sadly and regretfully uncontent at this point. We are pursuing foster care and open to adoption but I want more. I want to hold that precious life to my breast after carrying it in my womb! I just ache and am hopeless!

He knows exactly what you’re going through. The Creator of the universe, the Triune God, knows and He hears your cries. He shows you this in His Holy Word, through the story of His servant, Job, who lived thousands of years before you. “Where then is my hope?!” Job called out, and God heard his hopelessness (Job 17:14). God sees your friends and the lack of support they seem to be giving you, just as He saw Job’s friends and heard his plea to them: “Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me!” (Job 19:21).

“Though He slay me…” Job started to tell his friends, admitting again that God is in control of his life (Job 13:15), “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him.” Job knows he has no choice. It is God alone who can rescue him from his hopelessness. And what is it that Job realizes he should be hoping for? Does he hope for healing from his physical suffering? A restoration of his wealth? More children to comfort the loss of his family members? Yes, I’m sure he does, but these hopes are not what are revealed to us. The words we do have from him are universal. They apply to not just Job, but to you as well. And to me. This is one of God’s great gifts to us, these words that were written so very long ago, with us in mind:

“For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another” (Job 19:25-27).

The breasts that long to nurse, the womb that longs to carry–these are part of the “skin” that will eventually be “destroyed”. These maternal experiences, precious though I’m sure they are, pass away quickly. It is so easy to dream them into more than they are, to put our hope in being able to make them our own instead of hoping in the One who has made us His own, and “is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Eph. 3:20). Yes, Christ did more, and still does more, than we could ever ask for, when He suffered and rose on our behalf to save our souls from being destroyed as well. And our bodies, thanks to this great Atonement, will be recreated and no longer broken as they are now.

King David was yet another biblical figure who wrote about hope. He knew what it was like to lose a child and, like you probably have done, asked the question, “And now, O Lord, for what do I wait?” (Ps. 39:7). But by the power of the Holy Spirit he was able to immediately answer his own question: “My hope is in You.” He, too, worshiped the same Redeemer as Job and looked not so much to earthly deliverance from tragedy, but to his Savior for all eternity. His book of Psalms records the many things in which he placed his hope: God’s Word (Ps. 119:74), the Lord’s salvation (Ps. 119.166), the Lord’s steadfast love (Ps. 147:11). These do not pass away. Menopause or hysterectomies don’t remove them. They remain forever, for you.

And if you feel that it is time to let go of the hope of pregnancy, fear not. There are many hopes left to be had.

“No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9).

A “You-Turn”

In my hours of self-pity, I am angry with God for the gifts He has given to others. In particular, I am angry that God has bestowed children to those who, in my opinion, don’t “deserve” them. My anger spews out words of jealousy towards the parents who seemingly let their children do whatever they wish. I tell myself that I could do so much better than those parents. I despise the Lord God for not giving me more children so that I might be a role model for good parenting skills. I am upset with my doctor who can’t seem to find the root of my barrenness. I chastise those closest to me for offering suggestions and encouragement. The anger builds. I am quick to point out the shortcomings of others, and it makes me feel good.

But then comes the you-turn. God shows me my sin, and I recall that I am steeped in self-righteousness. By God’s grace, I remember that children are GOD’s gift to give. Perhaps a larger brood is not what is best for me. I recognize my pity-party attitude and turn that around. I have made myself into an idol by thinking that I could do a better job with somebody else’s children. Thus, I see my sin, and I repent. I turn from my inward self and look to the cross of Jesus. In Him only can my anger be calmed and removed. That sin of anger is taken away by Jesus’ body and blood, shed for me. It’s time to turn my face back to Jesus, for only He can restore my soul.

Dear God, Forgive my sin of idolatry. Teach me to follow You and trust that Your will is best for me. Help me to love my neighbor. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.

The Lord Is at Hand

At last weekend’s retreat, the following was said to Pastor Cholak: “I understand that my victory is in Christ. I know that He has promised to make me new on the Last Day, but that doesn’t help me today.”

I don’t think I will ever forget what Pastor Cholak said in response.

He talked of Peter on the boat in the raging storm. The wind. The chaos. The noise. The fear.

And, amidst his terror, Peter saw Jesus out on the water – His Lord, walking towards him upon that churning, spitting sea.

“Come,” Jesus said. At his Savior’s bidding, Peter got out of the boat and walked into the storm. He crossed those tossing waves and salty white caps to Jesus’ side.

But Peter “saw the wind” and was afraid. He began to sink – down, down, down into the dark, cold, suffocating water. He would die from this.

Except, the Lord was at hand. Literally.

Jesus reached out with His hand and pulled Peter out of the sea – out of death – and took Peter safely through the raging madness to the safety of the boat.

So, what of our own fear when we see the wind, when we sink, when we feel the coldness of our cross’s suffocation creep up our throat?

“The Lord is at hand,” says Pastor Cholak.

Amen. Thank you, Pastor.