My husband and I have found ourselves returning to one enduring truth: Everything we have is a gift from God.
Entering into marriage, I was eager and open to start a family with my husband. Both of us were raised in devout Catholic households and remained close to our faith, so we could hardly wait to cultivate our own domestic church and rock the fruit of our love to sleep in our arms. So much of my identity was wrapped around the idea of being a mother.
But as months faded into years of waiting for a baby, Evan and I began to sincerely question if the gift of physical parenthood was intended for our marriage. Every trial has its own burdens, so there’s no sense in comparing crosses to crosses. But there are unique pain points that exist for those who have struggled with fertility: the desire to bear fruit, but the question of “how?”; the vulnerability of the visibility of your cross; the temptation toward shame that lingers in a body that seems to be working against you; the dissonance between what you thought God wanted and what he’s actually asking of you.
As my husband and I wrestled with these questions and concepts, among many others, we found ourselves returning to one enduring truth: We deserve nothing. Everything we have is a gift from God. Though we may hope, strive, pray, aim and act, we deserve nothing. Every good thing we have in our lives is a pure gift, and perhaps we may even come to understand our sorrows this way, too. The author of life and death will always have the final say, and it is always for his glory and our good. In the most trying moments, and at times clumsily, we’ve prayed for the grace to accept God’s will.
For more than six years, my husband and I have reflected on this humbling truth — that nothing is owed to us — as we strove to remain hopefully and vulnerably open to the gift of a child if the Lord willed it. Simultaneously, we’ve been learning surrender.
During these many childless years, speckled with grief and glory, the Lord has revealed himself in new ways. In moments of both consolation and desolation, I have become ever more confident that where I have been pierced is where he pours his light.
This truth has become physically evident to me, as my belly swells with a gloriously unexpected, miraculous life within my womb. In his time and in such a fashion only he could manage, my deepest wounds have become a vessel for his wonders. Our baby boy’s expected arrival is the week of our seventh wedding anniversary: He is faithful in all seasons.
Our story is not to prove that we waited “long enough,” or prayed “hard enough” that we now have finally “received our miracle.” I am painfully aware that not all sufferings will be relieved on this side of the veil, and not all mysteries will be solved. I still carry plenty of those aches, too. Rather, our story proclaims the Lord’s victory. It reminds me, and hopefully you, that he is not bound by days and months, and he is always working things together for our good. If our story inspires anything within you, I pray it’s this: that God is more generous than we can imagine, closer than we often perceive, and is always, always good.
“Behold, now is the acceptable time” (2 Corinthians 6:2).
