Thank you, Pastor Esget, for harvesting this gem from author Russell Moore.
Miscarriage
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)
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
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.
All My Children
It’s not something I think about very often, nor do I talk about it.
Maybe I’m in denial, or maybe my brain simply can’t put the cold reality into actual thoughts and words.
Honestly, whenever the thought has crossed my mind, I usually tell myself that I am not worthy to join in on the conversation. After all, I don’t have any positive pregnancy tests to wave around as proof, but, then, I don’t keep any on hand to take.
Still, it feels like I am living a lie to assume such things.
But, at our retreat last weekend, Dr. Gosser kindly and gently affirmed the reality I know to be true deep down inside. Those unusually heavy periods, those times my post-ovulation cycle stretched beyond the normal 12-14 days, were probably miscarriages.
I have been married eleven years.
All my children.
My only comfort is that God is wise in His giving. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Is procreation an intrinsic quality of marriage?
Question Submitted: At a recent theological symposium, I posited that we in the Church need “to return to teaching properly about the positive locus of marriage – teaching about its procreative purpose and nature.” Another attendee replied in part that “procreation is NOT an intrinsic quality of marriage, as we do not say the infertile are not married.” If I had had a chance for rebuttal, I would have pointed out the error of his logic. Bipedalism is an intrinsic quality of humans, despite the sad reality of paraplegia. It would be very helpful to hear how you would counter the idea that infertility invalidates the argument that procreation is an intrinsic quality of marriage. I have my own answers to this false argument, but I would like to make sure I have an answer that is sensitive to the minds of those who suffer from infertility.
My pastors taught me that God institutes and defines marriage in Genesis Chapters 1 and 2. We learn in verses 1:27-28 that God created man in His own image; male and female He created them, and He blessed them. He told them to be fruitful and multiply, and God saw that “it was very good” (Gen 1:31).
The gift of procreation is not only a blessing God speaks over marriage, but God sees the blessing of children as good.
Barrenness is not good. Barrenness is a brokenness of God’s good creation. Endometriosis, PCOS, fibroids, hashimoto’s thyroiditis, low sperm motility, ovarian and cervical cancers, miscarriages, childlessness, and the groaning of all creation came about as a result of man’s fall into Sin; and we don’t use the effects of Sin to redefine that which God institutes and calls “good” in His Word, nor do we use the effects of Sin to defend the notion that procreation is somehow not a part of God’s intrinsic design of marriage. That is my biggest qualm with the other attendee’s rhetoric. His thesis does not fully confess barrenness as a post-Fall reality. Barrenness proves nothing about God’s procreative intent for marriage other than that God, post-Fall, allows the cross of barrenness to burden the shoulders of some married couples.
In regards to being sensitive to the barren, we should be careful not to turn God’s good, fruitful blessing for marriage into man’s good work. Scripture tells us that having children is not a law of God for us to keep but a heritage from Him for us to receive (Psalm 127:3). None of us would have children apart from God’s merciful blessing and giving. Only God in His wisdom knows why He does not open the wombs of the barren, and we should not burden the consciences of those who are unable to have children by suggesting they should be able to outwit the very Author of Life.
And as for using the existence of barrenness as an excuse to avoid the gift of children in marriage, I can think of no place in Scripture where God calls that good.
My Husband Is a Father
My husband is a tender father in the Faith.
He sits at the bedside of his world-weary children and leads them beside still waters. He walks with them through the valley of the shadow of death and sings to them Simeon’s Song. He restores their souls in the reading of God’s Word.
My husband is a faithful father in the Church.
He baptizes and teaches his parishioner children. He catechizes, comforts, consoles, and counsels them with all fatherly affection. He speaks the unpopular Word to them for their eternal benefit, slaying straying hearts with the Law and resuscitating the repentant with the Gospel breath of God, Christ’s blessed work of atonement on the cross for them.
My husband is a warrior father in the marketplace.
He picks up the banner of life and waves it before his neighbor. He wears a precious feet pin on his lapel to remind himself and others of the children destroyed every minute of every day through abortion. He defends the rights of the least of these, entreating parents not to abandon their children to be frozen in fertility clinics. He gives his time, talents, and treasures to those who have none and opens his heart and home to the fatherless.
My husband is a devoted father to our nieces, nephews, and godchildren.
He patiently endures guerrilla attacks of tiny, would-be wrestlers. He reads pink-and-purple books about fairies and princesses to sleepy, little dreamers. He stands guard next to half-pints in hospital beds awaiting their turn in the operating room. He jumps off two-story pontoon boats into smelly, murky lake water for the entertainment of squealing, human fish, and he daily remembers those fish in prayer.
My husband is childless, but he is a remarkable father.
Happy Father’s Day, Michael! xo
He Remembers the Barren 