Originally published on March 25, 2022
I made a fresh start again this January, reading my One Year Bible from the beginning. It’s broken down into Old Testament and New Testament daily readings, and I’m fascinated by the infertility stories at the beginning of each.
Early in the Old Testament we read about Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel – three generations in a row. More infertility scenarios will soon follow: Hannah, Sampson’s mother, the Shunamite woman. And the New Testament begins with Zechariah and Elizabeth – another couple who finally had a baby when they were really old.
All of these people waited and hoped and prayed for a really long time before they had children. Meanwhile I’m over here, freshly-turned-forty-two, and wondering the same thing. “How long, oh Lord? How long do we wait? How long do we try? When do we quit hoping for another child?”
I was married just before turning 29, and by the time I turned 31 we had realized we had a fertility struggle. For 7 years we tried health changes, medications, endometriosis surgeries, and eventually moved toward injections and our first IUI at the fertility clinic.
And then I became pregnant naturally. I was 38 when our daughter was born, and my husband is older than me, so we started out as older parents.
Then our Noah was stillborn just before I turned 41. Miracle baby number two, gone to Heaven so soon.
“God, what do you want? We thought we would be done by now?”
When I seek the Lord’s direction for our family growth, which I have been doing regularly for a very long time, I’ve not yet heard God say it’s time to quit. A long time ago I wrote a blog post encouraging people to not quit until God says quit, and here I am, weary and wanting to quit, but desperately asking God for one more living baby to be added to our family.
I’ve told God appropriate deadlines for when I thought we should call it quits. We keep passing by those deadlines. My husband thought we would have called our family complete by now. But both of us, as we ask God’s direction, still remain open to new life.
Trusting God is the most important step we can take. These days there are countless ways to build our families: medications, fertility treatments, and all the healthy-lifestyle changes we could imagine. We could pursue adoption or foster care. We could make peace with our family size and be okay with that. (And I know that any of these can be just right for any family who is trusting God.)
But these old people in the Bible have grabbed my attention once again. No, they didn’t all have happily-ever-after stories. Sampson and John the Baptist died young. Isaac’s children were a mess. But each and every one of these family’s stories made it into the Bible, forever written down in history, forever used to glorify God. Several of these families were part of the family line of Jesus, the Lion of the tribe of Judah.
Yes, these folks made mistakes. Yes, there are a lot of messy things in these stories. But ultimately, they trusted God. Ultimately, God intervened and brought forth His plan. Over and over again, God gave babies to old people.
So as I process these things, as I ponder my own situation of being older (my husband and I have peers who are grandparents!) all I can do is trust God. All I can do is turn to Him every day and ask Him to make His will clear. I can build my faith and trust in Him, knowing that He’s worth it.
And in the words of my three-year-old daughter, who echoes what she has heard me say: “If we have another baby, it will be a miracle.” Okay, she said “when.” If or when we have another baby, it will be a miracle. For now, we keep seeking God, and trusting that for some reason, He sometimes gives old people new babies.
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God was so gracious to us, and a month after I posted this in the spring of 2022, I found out I was pregnant with our daughter who was born at the end of that year.
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