I got to see my baby today.
He’s eight weeks and the size of a wild strawberry, tiny as a jelly bean with little limbs. The heart is already flickering at 172. I’d never seen my baby’s heartbeat. I’d never had a happy ultrasound. On the black and white screen this rainbow baby was hanging out upside down like a trapeze artist, already a wild one, already breaking the mould. The doctor thought it was funny so he snapped a picture I took home and placed in my journal. I smile every time I look at it.
(If you think this isn’t about missions too, just wait for it…)
It’s been five years of brutal infertility, the kind that paper cuts you into shreds with every monthly failure. It’s been PTSD with every ectopic loss, the anguish roaring with every blood stained sheet.
The drive to have this little one upended every schedule, spoiled every plan, overshadowed every other life goal, consumed our world with IVF and hundreds of shots, and unwanted travel. I was going to write a second book (ha!) My life was subject to the whims of hormones and cycle calendars. There was disappointment and delays, howling grief.
There were days it felt like breakthrough was something I dreamed.
Many days it felt like the enemy was winning and I was just taking hits and losing ground. Mother’s Day was a wide ache. I’ve written plenty about failure and dreams not working out.
Still, I fought hard not to lose myself, to grow in spite of, to find beauty in the messy longing, to grasp hold of God and my faith, to cling to Him even when I didn’t understand.
I excavated the suffering for monuments of joy.
I found they were there. Sometimes hiding, but they were there.
In the middle of the most gut-wrenching battle of my life, what kept me going was this unshakeable belief that my Father would keep His promise to me.
You see, years ago in Africa, before I knew of my infertility, I saw my child.
I saw him in a daydream that was as real as any reality. I knew him before there was a name for him. Through the many years of doubts, setbacks, and longing, God whispered in the quiet, “You will be a mother. Trust me.”
There are so many ways to mother in this world, yet somehow my spirit knew this meant through a biological child. I don’t know how I knew. I just knew.
I think God surmised for the adversity ahead of me, I needed a promise to hold onto, a picture, a word to sustain me as bread in the years of famine.
So many times I went back to God in my lack, in my disappointed dreams after my second baby loss, and asked if I misheard Him, if I could really trust this truth inside me, and every time He reminded me. He led me to Ruth, He led me to Hannah, He laid foundations in me that would lead to my miracle.
His words were life in my soul when I was barren.
When the doctors told me I would most likely not have my own child, everything in my being rejected it. I re-read the words scribbled in my journal like prophecy.
When we are knee deep in the cavern of our pain, exhausted from the struggle, we must turn our hearts towards the promise, towards the hope.
We must replay the dream again before our eyes until we believe it, until we can gather strength again to forge on. We must let the darkness fold us deeper into Father’s embrace, we must tell Him, “I can’t, but You can,” until the echo of those cries, of surrender, releases zoe life.
Because love releases something, even when we can’t see it.
Our honesty is the bridge back to our Father.
Opening up our hearts again, not shutting them down, is the journey back to love.
It was not easy. It’s one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. But I did not let the experts, or the opinions of the world drown out my inner voice. I followed it and I found it led me to the right doctor who had answers for my ectopics, who didn’t let my diminished ovarian reserve, or my low AMH, or my endometriosis, or my auto immune issues deter him. Together, we endured.
It’s easy once you have the dream to forget to be thankful for it. It’s amazing how fast we lose sight of how far we’ve come (especially when there’s sickness, or nausea, or challenges:)
But every day I gratitude walk and I praise God for this life growing inside me, but mostly I’m just honoring Him for fulfilling His promise to me.
I don’t think I’m special, or any more spiritual, or that I believed more, or had more faith.
I don’t think God sees me and doesn’t see you. I don’t think that breakthrough always looks like getting our prayers answered. God is not my personal genie in a bottle. I already knew my enoughness before I ever got what I wanted.
I know better than anyone sometimes it takes the death of one dream to birth a new one.
But I don’t believe God would have been any less good had I failed to get pregnant, although I’m sure I would have questioned it in my humanness.
What I do think is that I didn’t give up. I ruthlessly held onto a kernel of life inside me and I was annoyingly persistent.
[ctt template=”2″ link=”AsxbG” via=”yes” ]Overcoming is wringing life out of broken things. It’s the fierce defiance that dismembered dreams will not be the end of your story[/ctt]
Your purpose will not be handed to you. It is wrought out of the furnace of your undoing, fashioned from your fortitude.
It is being stripped to nothing and rising again. It’s squeezing gold out of suffering.
Breakthrough isn’t about “winning.” It’s about what happens in your soul when you say “Yes. Yes, I will trust You. Yes I will stand, yes I will choose love and life and I will not be destroyed.”
We’ve had scares in this pregnancy already, times the faith falters. I’ve learned falling is ok.
Terror always rides sidekick to joy.
I’ve learned to keep feeling the feelings because God can handle them all. Even the doubts.
But there is something in me now that cannot be extinguished. Maybe this is something only suffering unearths in us. An identity that flames hot in the face of adversity.
[ctt template=”2″ link=”u2hBi” via=”yes” ]When we know there is something indestructible inside us, we know we can face anything. [/ctt]
I think that makes us dangerous, in a good way.
Every dream fulfilled has a ripple effect, infusing new breath into other dreams, reawakening us to the potential of more miracles.
The seed of my testimony is making room for yours.
Maybe like me, you’re believing for a baby, or maybe you’re pursuing justice and healing for the oppressed, maybe you’re building a ministry overseas, or launching a business, or believing you won’t be sick anymore. Maybe you’re just trying to get through the next day. Maybe like me you’ve been waiting for your breakthrough for many years and you’re tired. You don’t feel you can push one more time.
Let my words hold you.
Sometimes we are the ones holding on and sometimes we we are the ones being held.
Reach out. My community has believed for me in times when it was hard for me to.
If I can say anything about holding onto your dreams, or believing for breakthrough, it’s that you must trust yourself, you must trust God in you, you must follow your intuition and you must fight. You must forge your own path and let nothing terrify you to the point that you relinquish.
You will persevere and the writing of that story will be both beautiful and savage, tender and tumultuous, agonizing and joyful.
Somehow, in the end, a dream fulfilled will be life somersaulting inside you.
It will be life not just for you, but for someone else.
What dreams are you still holding onto?
**This week is National Infertility Awareness Week. This is meant to be a message of hope, but I haven’t forgotten the pain of being in the struggle. I encourage you to reach out to ask for the support you need.
