March 23, 2014

When God's Not There

I was recently looking back through the journal that I kept through our year and a half of infertility, leading up to starting the adoption process.* It was hard to read through it all again and remember the despair and the panic that I felt.  There was a particularly hard three months that came last fall, after we had decided we were going to switch our focus to adoption.  I threw myself into the adoption process when that time came. I was excited to get started and knew that God had called us to adoption a long time ago.  So, I was surprised and frustrated when, the deeper I got into it, the worse I felt.  Nothing about what I was doing felt right, and it got to the point where I quit working on it all together.  I felt stuck and desperate to hear God.  I begged Him for clarity.  Why would he call us to adoption, only to leave us confused and uncertain?  But, He didn't answer me.  He had abandoned me, I was sure.

Sometime during those three months of confusion, Silas was conceived.  In those three months, God began to knit my son together in another woman's womb.  He had not abandoned me.  He was creating the little life that would become mine, and He knew it. And, while I do not believe that God caused this conception to occur for my sake, I do believe that he intended Silas for us once he was conceived.  So, he had to make me wait.  And that meant withholding the "good feelings" I wanted him to give me.

God couldn't give me the feelings I wanted.  He couldn't tell me to keep trying to get pregnant, because I wasn't going to. He couldn't tell me to move forward with adoption, because my son wasn't ready for us yet.  I needed to wait, and I had no category for this. To me, God's silence meant abandonment.  I couldn't fathom it meaning that God was preparing something far better than I could have imagined.  But, that's exactly what he was doing.  And when the time was right, God made it perfectly clear, and I was released from all the confusion and angst that I had experienced during that time.  I was able to pour myself into the adoption process the way that I had wanted to all along.

I did not wait well, but God is gracious.  My son is a daily reminder of that.  And now, I look back on those three months, which were one of the lowest points of my life, with the deepest gratitude for what God was doing.

So, when God's not there, He really is.  This is something that I still have to remind myself of now, as we sort through next steps in our infertility journey.  But, waiting doesn't seem quite as scary to me now, because God is trustworthy, and I have seen that first hand.



*For some reason, I only seem to journal when things are hard. My poor children will probably find these journals when I die and think that their mother hated her life.  I don't.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing--if only we could have the patience during a time of testing to watch and wait and see God's hand in it while we're going through usually it's after we look back that we see it. But you are right, God is so gracious and so good to show you these truths!

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  2. Don't forget that these kids will also be able to read your blog one day and will be able to see how much you prayed for them and wanted them in your life and loved them. All they will know is that they were blessed to have you as parents. God always answers our prayers one way or another.

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