Heart to Heart

To be honest, I don't even know how to start this post...Fair Warning: this post will get personal..I am not looking for pity or advice...just opening up my heart to my friends and family...partly because I think as Christians we are called to walk together and bear each other's burdens...partly because I would love to have your prayers.

Now that I have sufficiently freaked you out and piqued your interest.

When Mike and I decided that we would allow God to control when we had kids 4 years ago, we never imagined that 4 years later we still would not have had another kid.  We always envisioned having 4 kids or so.  We intentionally waited 3.5 years between Mk and Bria because of how much change was going on in our lives with moving to Texas and figuring out jobs.  We kinda figured after Bria, since we weren't preventing any more pregnancies, that we would end up with kids closer together.  Well...4 years and 2 months later...no more kids.  For a long time I told myself that we weren't dealing with infertility...it was just God's timing.  This summer for the first time I started to wonder if something might be wrong.

I went in and had a barrage of blood work done all to no answers...at least in appearance, we should be able to get pregnant.  But we haven't.  As I struggle with trusting God and His timing for our family, I have also struggled with what to call this period in our lives.  Waiting? Infertile? Barren? Crazy?  Probably the last for sure...

As have sought out the Bible for wisdom, something to hold on to, I began to see a pattern through the Old Testament.  You know what...all throughout the Old Testament God routinely opens and closes wombs in order to fit His perfect timing.  This happens both overtly and more subtly.  When you talk about barrenness and open/closed wombs, most people will think of Hannah, Rachel and Leah, Sarai...Instances where God clearly talks about that sort of thing.  However, most people wouldn't think of Noah and his sons.  And its not an obvious one.  But if you read it, Noah was 600 years old when he went on the ark...he had 3 sons all with wives. The Bible doesn't mention how old Noah's sons were, but it is clear that only Noah, his wife, his sons, and their wives entered the ark.  We can assume from Noah's age that his sons were probably also up in age, yet no mentioned children.  In fact they don't mention children until they all leave the ark and are tasked with repopulating the Earth.  No children, then LOTS of children.  God had a plan.  How difficult would it have been to have kids on the ark, or to have to leave kids behind to be destroyed by the flood?  God was instrumental in opening and closing the womb of those women at the perfect time.  But that is a hindsight perspective.  How would those women have felt?  They most certainly would have been looked down upon in that society...there was no birth control.  And your security in your old age was your children. They were everything.  So where does that leave me.

Well, maybe this is infertility...maybe this is barrenness...maybe a season...maybe forever...I don't know.  But God has a plan for us in all of this and in hindsight, the legacy of this struggle will not be defined by the tough days and tears of this moment, but the bigger picture of God's plan for our family and life.  Had we not seen the bigger picture for Noah, we wouldn't have Abraham or Isaac or Jacob or the entire Jewish people. I don't know what our bigger picture looks like in the end...what I do know is this...for some reason God has allowed us to experience infertility right now and has clearly spoken to our hearts to look into adoption.

Adoption...this is such an overwhelming journey to start on.  There is so much out there.  So much information, so many agencies, so many options!  We are both excited and scared.  I am also dealing with a lot of emotions steming from dealing with infertility.  Don't get me wrong, I love my two girls so much and I almost feel like I shouldn't be allowed to call this infertility, but a good friend encouraged me recently and told me this and it rings so true "It doesn't matter whether you have 2 kids, 10 kids, or no kids, if your family is not complete, it hurts"  So there we stand.

* A side note:  I wrote this post about a month ago, but it has taken me that long to decide to post it. I finally decided that I couldn't give any room for shame or fear because this is about God's plan to grow our family and giving Him control...there is nothing shameful or fearful about that.  Also, In an interesting turn of events, Mike and I have the opportunity to attend a one day free adoption conference at a church in Abilene THIS Saturday.  Please keep us in your prayers as we take this huge step towards Adoption!