Today, I’m continuing to share our testimony of victory over Secondary Infertility. If you haven’t read it already, the first part of our story can be found HERE: Part 1: Expecting: Learning to Rest in the Waiting. In the last post, I left off with our decision to stop pursing fertility treatments and to instead, rely on the Lord and allow Him to work on our behalf. As I said in my earlier post, this time of pursing fertility treatments and options became a very chaotic time for me inwardly. I knew enough about resting in the Lord to know that anxiety, frustration, and overall lack of peace just aren’t reflective of how it looks when a Believer has surrendered everything to the Lord. His yoke is easy, His burden is light (Matthew 11:30) and that was the opposite of how I was feeling. Don’t get me wrong, it’s OKAY to have those feelings and the Lord isn’t condemning you for your emotions. It’s just that, often times, our emotions can be a signal to us that we need to pause whatever we’re doing and spend time renewing our minds to the truth of who God is and what His word says. For me, this involved going back over the last few years of what the Lord had been showing me about what it means to fully rest in Him and to stop trying to provide for myself what He had already freely given to us. There were two things that the Lord had ministered to me, years before, that I knew I needed to revisit: First, that understanding the free gift of righteousness given to us at the cross was the key to receiving everything from the Lord. Second, that rest would be final key to victory in every situation. In fact, I blogged about this in 2015 and this would have been around 7 months after we had stopped treatment. You can find that blog here: REST: Your Final Key to Victory in Every Situation.
As soon as we made the decision to stop pursing fertility treatments, but instead, wait on and rest in the Lord, I had an overwhelming sense of peace and calm. That whole year was just a journey of me realizing where I was trying and not resting. One of the main things the Lord showed me at this time was that I had become too focused on wanting another baby. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that He had put those desires in my heart, but at some point, I started giving more weight to the “gift” of another baby than I was to the ultimate Giver. The Holy Spirit started taking me through different verses in Scripture that talk about unjust weights and scales. Such verses are really prominent all throughout the book of Proverbs. In the street markets of Biblical times, goods were often weighed on scales. Your produce would be weighed on one side, while the market owners would place weights on the other side to determine the cost of your goods. Sellers could deceive buyers by adjusting those weights in their own favor and, thus, charging the buyer more than they should pay. All throughout Scripture, the Bible tells us that dishonest weights and unjust scales are an abomination to the Lord, that He detests those practices. God’s attitude towards those taking advantage of the poor is always extreme throughout Scripture. However, as I meditated through these verses, the Holy Spirit also began to show me how it’s possible to give an unjust amount of weight to whatever circumstances I might be facing. For me, it was my desire for another child. When we give too much weight to our circumstances, we lose sight of what’s on the other side of the scale. I got a picture in my heart of a double sided scale and realized that if Jesus was on one side of that scale, He alone outweighs everything else. When I have Jesus, I already have everything. I love what Romans 8:32 tells us, “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not, with Him also FREELY give us ALL things?” Looking back at my prayer journal from this time, these are my specific words: “I realized that when I have Jesus, I have everything already. While children and babies are a special blessing, all things good (love, joy, peace, enjoyment, fulfillment) can be found in full supply in Him. There is nothing missing. If I’m looking at a scale and Jesus is on one side— He outweighs all else, no matter what I put on the other side. There is nothing missing. When I have Him, I am not in the waiting.”
I sat with this revelation for an entire year. It was a marked time of realizing how much I already had in Jesus and that, having Him, trumped having any other thing. It was a time for my focus and my gaze to be pulled back to Him, to His beauty, His goodness, His lovingkindnesses and tender mercies. It was a time of becoming, again, so satisfied and content in Him. His love was like a healing oil that seeped through every depth, crack, and crevice of my heart. It filled every desire, every longing. It completely dissolved my will to “try” and make things happen. It was a time of surrender, of letting go and giving back to Him the desires He first gave to me. By the end of that year, I had such peace, contentment and joy, I no longer felt like our family was “missing” something, not even another child. I knew I was right where the Lord wanted me to be. I had laid the deepest desire of my heart on His altar and He was glorified in my contentment. Interestingly enough, it was just at this point that He began to tell me to not allow my contentment to drift into complacency.
In the time since discovering baby #2 was on the way, the Lord has taken me back through the last 8 years and has been bringing into focus different nuggets or gems along the way that have really shaped this journey for me. At the time, most of them were just the next step on the path for me, but now I can look back and see them as hallmark truths or revelations which took me to the next level of faith. I think this concept is one of them. There are many times when we’re pursuing righteous things. Things that are in line with God’s will as seen in Scripture and even desires that the Lord Himself gave us to begin with. But sometimes, the Lord calls us to give those desires back to Him, to lay them on His altar. When we do this, He purifies our desires and gives them back to us in a way where we want these things for the same reasons He wants them for us. He cleans off the humanity and flesh and gives us back those desires, refined in the fire of His love.
This is a principle we can see clearly in the life of Abraham. From the time God told him to number the stars in the sky until Isaac was born, 25 years had passed (more than 3x longer than I waited for this second child). The Lord didn’t just promise Abraham a child, He promised him that, through this child, would come generations of people which would outnumber the grains of sand on the seashore. Then one day, God calls Abraham to make the ultimate sacrifice and to lay this child of promise back on the altar. When this story is recounted in Hebrews 11, the Bible shows us that Abraham was SO convinced of God’s love, goodness and promise, that he reasoned that, if nothing else, God would raise Isaac back from the dead. Abraham’s gaze was so fixed on the Father that he was willing to give back to the Lord this greatest gift. We know how this story ends, that at the very last moment, God provides a ram to be sacrificed instead. This wasn’t just a test, God took Abraham’s sacrifice (and willingness to sacrifice his one and only son) and refined it. This story would be forever included in the canon of Scripture and more than 1,700 years later, a carpenter’s son would find Himself and His calling as the ultimate Lamb and sacrifice of God in the words of this story— only this time there would be no substitutions. The moral of the story is this: when our hearts are completely convinced of His love and goodness, we can confidently lay our deepest desires back on His altar with full confidence that He’ll breathe His life into the ashes and bring back to life those desires, refined like gold, and indelibly write them onto our hearts.
At the end of a year focused on seeing Jesus as my everything, my desire for another child returned, but this time, it was wholeheartedly for His fame, His glory, His honor, and His renown. I wanted my life to be a testimony so others could taste and see just how good the Lord is.