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Barren it All
It was closing in on 12:30pm on March 14th when I was driving down the road, returning to my teaching job after an extended lunch break at a nearby restaurant. With tears streaming down my face, I faced the reality of yet another month of an unrealized dream. It was now the 14th month, to be exact, that I was met with the familiar pain and discouragement of the unmet desire of becoming pregnant.
Steven and I had already spent one year of a “not really trying” but “not preventing either” season —we were just open and excited for whatever timing pregnancy may come along for us- secretly hoping that we would never have to enter a season of “trying” to get pregnant. But the desire to start a family only increased more and more in our hearts. Before we knew it, we had become more serious about wanting things to happen, and soon joined the ranks of “couple trying to get pregnant.”
Month after month of failure, disappointment, and longing led us to assume the identity as “couple desperately wanting to get pregnant” and we refused to hide it. On multiple occasions, the prayers of close family and friends were prayed over us, over my womb, over our future child. Prayers for healing. Prayers for God to hear our cries and to fulfill our desire of becoming parents.
So by March 14th, it had now been a year plus in our journey of “trying” and we had now invested 2+ years overall into this waiting game.
As I coasted down the road of that oh so familiar path back to the school on that March afternoon, I felt the symbolic tension of this season of spring beginning to come to life all around me, and yet my heart and body still lying dormant in what felt like a never-ending barren winter.
The road was blurry and my heart so heavy I could barely breathe. I was praying to God, bearing my soul and begging for his mercy and comfort to come over me. And that’s when the softest whisper came into my heart and the words of my prayer shaped into surrender. I heard myself confessing something brand new,
“God, if you want to start our family in a way that is not biological first,
I am willing.”
I am willing.”
I felt in that moment both freedom and sorrow. My mind tried to tell me that in my surrender I had lost something. But my spirit combatted that lie ever so quickly and flooded my heart with joy— and an awakened desire for this idea of adoption budded inside of me.
It’s not that God had to create the desire in me for adoption in general. Steven and I had always talked about adoption being part of our family in the future. We talked of a “multicultural family” that we envisioned having one day. But these thoughts and ideas lived in the future— we always assumed that God would bless us with biological children first and then we would add to our family through adoption down the road. We were always open to it! But it was a brand new concept for my heart to consider adoption being the first step in growing the Link crew.
I found a sweet freedom that afternoon in my car, and I wrapped up my honest prayer to the Lord with a phrase that went a little something like this,
“God, if you want us to move forward with adoption, will you speak to Steven’s heart and have him initiate the conversation?”
I went about my day… feeling different. I felt that I had given God a piece of my heart that maybe I was holding back from Him without even realizing it. I had, in a sense, put my “yes” on the table, even if I had no idea what it all might look like.
I finished teaching my classes that afternoon, headed home to get ready for the next task on the agenda for that evening, and eventually landed at home for a late night dinner after a full day behind me. Steven had been going non-stop that day, too, and so there we found ourselves popping a frozen pizza into the oven together, and we spent a few ordinary moments just catching up on each other’s day. The timer buzzed, our pizza ready, and Steven slipped on an oven mitten. He opened the oven, and as the warm oven air filled the space between us, Steven casually says,
“This is random, but what do you think about adoption?”
As the hot pizza pan met the stove top, I burst into tears. In slow motion, I took two steps back and my face displayed a twisted look of shock and disbelief. Steven ripped the oven mitten off of his hand and hurried to me with worried eyes. “Oh, babe, we don’t have to. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”
“No.” I defend him, “You don’t understand.” I shake my head in awe,
“That was quick.”
He doesn’t understand the words I choose as my response.
“Steven, I just prayed this afternoon that if we were supposed to adopt that God would put it on your heart and that you would be the one to bring it up.”
What I didn’t know is that in the early hours of that very morning, my sweet husband was in a prayer meeting with some pastor friends, and as he had opened up to these men about his desire for children, God did something tender and private in his heart. He shared with me that God had placed a desire for adoption in him that morning as the men prayed over him for a child.
Funny how God had led me to pray the prayer that I prayed that afternoon— after my husband’s heart had already been softened and readied hours before my own.
Our vulnerable hearts met in the center of our open kitchen as we embraced one another, and warm tears flowed from eyes that had cried for a different reason over the past months. Four loving arms wrapped around each other in agreement that all the months of uncertainty and disappointment that had preceded us had now come to a sudden stop. And hope, if nothing else, for the first time was conceived.
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