Dear God,
I can’t sleep. Maybe it’s the mild flu I’m fighting and the fact I can’t breathe through my nose. (I can’t stand a dry mouth.) Maybe it’s that hot cocoa I drank. Or maybe it’s the racing thoughts, swirling round and settling on the calendar date. Today was our birth mother’s due date.
We found out on Saturday that she had given birth last Wednesday, and through a series of unfortunate events that little boy is now in the foster care system. Our hearts broke in two.
I keep wrestling with the messages you’ve given me. I wonder if I’m just a crazy person for thinking that you, Maker of Heaven and Earth, would impart unto me sweet prophecies. Perhaps I am. But if those words scribbled in my journal really are divine, then I’m waiting with shallow breaths wondering what your next move will be.
In the midst of thoughtful encouragements and heartfelt prayers by friends and family, there’s the lady who stops in to tell me “some things that might help you get pregnant.” I had grace for this woman because, really, it’s wonderful that anyone should spend even a moment thinking about our situation, let alone caring enough to drive over to share with me. But it was all I could do to keep my tongue from spewing, “You really think that after five years of trying to conceive we haven’t heard or tried every remedy or wive’s tale in the book?!”
This conversation came on the heals on my going-to-sleep thoughts last night. When we went to the reproductive endocrinologist last spring he told us the last step, the invasive decision would be surgery. Oh my gosh, this will never come to surgery, I thought. Or if it does surely all my problems will be solved and we’ll be able to get pregnant right away.
My heart grieves the loss of those dreams, those months when I assumed outcomes.
And here I sit, in the dark, still house, late at night, with the tick of clock reminding me of my numbered days, wondering what in the world you have in store for me, God? Is it truly good?
But God.
That conjunction changes everything. There is no greater mystery, that God would come to rescue me from who I was (lyrics from The Gospel Changes Everything by Meredith Andrews).
“And although you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you formerly lived according to this world’s present path, according to the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the ruler of the spirit that is now energizing the sons of disobedience, among whom all of us also formerly lived out our lives in the cravings of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath even as the rest…
But God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, even though we were dead in transgressions, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you are saved!— and he raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, to demonstrate in the coming ages the surpassing wealth of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so that no one can boast.”
And then verse 10 goes on to say, “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”
I have no room to complain, Lord. For it is by grace I have been saved from a life of sin and separation from your goodness. Pour out your green hope into my life.
Scripture passage: Ephesians 2:1-10, the NET Bible
