Kindred Grace

I still remember the doctor looking at me over the top of her glasses. “What this means,” she explained, “is that it is very probable you will never bear children.”

And something inside me just withered up and died right there.

I stumbled through weeks, then months, and then years before I finally started breathing easy again. Through the gentle love of friends, and the incredible grace of God, I learned five important things about facing life with the label of infertility.

1. Let yourself grieve. More than once.

When I found out that my sister-in-law was pregnant with twins, I cried huge blistering tears over the ultrasound pictures. And I thought, “There. I mourned never seeing an ultrasound of my own baby.”

Wrong.

Every few months I mourn the babies that will never be.

Do you want to develop a close-knit family? Do you long to have close relationships with your extended family members, improve communication between parents and grandparents, and develop friendships with those who live far away?

Most of us want these things, but often we don’t know how to “get there.”

There is no perfect family. We are all a mess to some degree.

The early spring air felt crisp the morning I stepped off my front stoop and walked down our gravel drive for the last time until summer. On the last stretch of a short run, I slipped on a patch of mud and fell, fracturing my ankle. I called Nate in tears. He came, picked me up, put me in the car, and drove back to the house. My feet wouldn’t travel that same stretch of driveway again until August.

Spring is in the air here on our little plot of land. Black-eyed Susans are popping up, the yard is shaded by a fresh, green canopy and our first brood of bluebirds has already fledged! It makes me thankful to stop and take a breath of springtime air and realize Easter Sunday is still ahead of us. I am looking forward to seeing my two nephews hunt Easter eggs. This year, two of my sisters are getting baptized at Easter, too.

However, I’m even more grateful that Easter is behind us. That is to say, Jesus has already risen and we’re now living in the Easter era! We don’t have to wonder if the cross is the end of our story. The prophecies were fulfilled and Christ rose, appeared and ascended. When I reflect on that truth, it’s no wonder this season gives me a strong sense of hope and excitement.

I’m perpetually desperate for a good read and ridiculously horrible at finding new books. My typical system? Filter through Amazon.com’s free Kindle offerings, choose the prettiest covers, download to my tablet, read as little or as much as my attention span will allow, ultimately devouring (up to) a book an evening.

My pickiness in five steps: I want clean entertainment, a biblical perspective, an engaging and entertaining storyline without a predictable plot, some thought-provoking dialogue, and at least a little romance somewhere in the mix. (I’m a love-loving girl, after all!)

Rachelle Rea’s Steadfast Love series is basically my ideal series, consisting of three of my favorite books. The Sound of Diamonds and The Sound of Silver and The Sound of Emeralds make up the perfect trifecta of reading entertainment. Especially because I married into a Dutch family and love the Dutch-British historical context and conversations.

I’m sitting here at four in the morning writing you this letter.

My two month old got sick and threw up all over my side of the bed. I’m now on the couch, with a towel on the floor beside me in case she has another round.

I’m in a medium amount of pain because she was only halfway done nursing when she threw up, and she was so miserable and sad afterwards that she never finished.

Now she’s sleeping fitfully on my lap and I am loath to move her to wake her up to eat more or to go pump, so I just wait, praying the build up doesn’t cause something worse like a clogged duct or mastitis.

I’m looking at my Christmas tree that is still in the living room even though we’re well into January. There are needles everywhere and half the branches are bare.

It was almost Christmas, I was five years old, and my class at school was preparing for the Nativity play. Our teacher, Mrs. Davies, allocated the parts while we waited with anticipation, all the girls hoping to be chosen to play Mary, or at least one of the angels.

When my name was called, it was to play the part of the donkey. While Katie Hill would get to wear the lovely long, blue dress and put Baby Jesus in the manger, and the other girls would get to wear pretty white dresses with wings and tinsel halos, I would be wearing brown corduroy pants and a brown ribbed turtleneck, with long donkey ears attached to my head. The disappointment and humiliation were overwhelming, and I hid my face in my arms, put my head on my desk and sobbed.

Mrs. Davies did her best to console me, explaining that the donkey was a very important part of the Christmas story.

“Well they must be dumb.” The young, thin postal worker’s eyes bulge a little in the light of his computer screen. “They tried to send your letter to…Nebraska.” 

He turns again to me, lips pursed.

“Aha,” I say, eyebrows raised. “Well, that’s not even close to Germany!” 

“Right?” We both laugh. 

My letter will be outdated by the time it arrives in Heidelberg, by the time my friend opens it and reads it. Even now I’m not sure if it has arrived or not. And yet, that’s okay when it comes to letters. We don’t expect them to be “in real time.” In that sense, every letter is a little late. We expect them, like starlight, to speak to us of another day.

The same week, my two younger sisters receive letters from our little cousin, Audrey.

“Christmas gift, give it to me!”

That’s how my grandfather would greet us at the front door on Christmas Day every year. I remember him sometimes having a bell, but always wearing a smile. We’d walk in past the columns on the front porch that he so proudly wrapped with red ribbon to look like candy canes, exactly eleven inches between each stripe. Mema was in the kitchen, but she would stop working on the biscuits to hug our necks. I remember the mistletoe near in the foyer, and rearranging the lights on the little ceramic tree in the living room (you know the one).

Cousins would arrive. We would feast, open presents via our Secret Santa exchange (I always drew Emily), and then we would spend the rest of the chilly North Carolina day playing capture the flag outside.

It was yearly, it was ideal, and naturally, I imagined giving my children a similar experience.

I was confronted not long ago by a fellow Believer.

She questioned my actions in a situation and then gave me Scripture references to back up her words. She wasn’t mean, or spiteful in any way, but of course it still hurt.

This wasn’t the first time this has happened. In fact, over the course of my life as a Christian there have been multiple times when I have been confronted. It’s a good thing, one of the best parts of being in community, but also one of the very hardest. It’s painful to have your faults (real or imagined) pointed out to you.

And yet, we are instructed in Scripture to do this. Matthew 18:15 tells us to go to the brother who sins against us. Galatians 6:1 reminds us to restore, with gentleness, anyone who is caught in transgressions. 2 Timothy 3:16 explains that all Scripture is useful for teaching, reproof, and correction.

Before my son passed away, I spent almost every night hunched over his medical bed, checking to make sure his feeding tube was working correctly, adjusting his body in the darkness, rolling him on his side so he wouldn’t choke on his saliva.

This was my nightly medical drill as the parent of a child with a rare disease. My son was dying and the weight of that reality meant I did everything to keep him alive while praying for a miracle.

But what happens when there is no miracle? No immediate healing? No answer in the long darkness?

My husband, Devin, and I attended a marriage conference earlier this year with our church and left with an assignment: to read the book Cherish by Gary Thomas.

Since we are both readers, we were not only excited to read a book together (something we’ve done sporadically since our dating days) but even more excited because the book was written by Gary Thomas. Although Thomas has been my favorite marriage author for four years now (ever since I read his book The Sacred Search the autumn before I met my husband!), Devin had not yet read any of his books.

A talented nonfiction author whose books about marriage are grounded in Scripture, Thomas may have written his best book to date in Cherish. Together Devin and I would like to tell you why we think that is!

“In our marriage vows, we promise to love and cherish each other, so why do we talk so much about love and so little about cherish?” (Gary Thomas, Cherish, page 25)

His Perspective on Cherish

Devin: Cherish, I would say, is that pursuit, that feeling you get when you see your spouse walking in a room and you’re excited to see them, that feeling you get when you see them smile and want to make sure they always have something to smile about.

I begin my broken-story narrative on February 10, 2014--the day my son, Titus, had a seizure. What followed was a massive and swift wave that rocked our lives hard between fear, anger, mystery and defeat.

April 7, 2015, Titus was diagnosed with a rare, genetic, and fatal disease. The doctor had no treatment he could prescribe, no cure in sigh. We were going to lose our boy. And worse yet, our youngest son, Ely, was also in danger of having the disease.  We were encouraged to get him tested as well.  

For whom do you carry the stone today? For yourself? For success? For notoriety? For the accomplishment of some great dream that you have held always in your heart? Or is it for Jesus?

The story of the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 has always been a favorite of mine. Perhaps because our first meetings with Jesus were so similar: a thirsty and hopeless heart living an ordinary day suddenly transformed by an extraordinary encounter with the Savior of the world.

Jesus went out of His way to pass through Samaria. Most Jews of His day avoided the land because the Samaritans weren’t considered “true” Jews. This is why the Samaritan woman was incredulous when Jesus asked her for a drink. “Doesn’t He know He shouldn’t be talking to me, much less asking me for water?” she must have thought.

I thought the same thing when I first met Jesus. I couldn’t believe He had descended to earth and become man just so He could die and rise again, defeating sin and death for me. Neither could I fathom that He really was offering me eternity with Him.

It was just like God — days into my school year in Jerusalem, when I finally had a little time to feel a twinge of homesickness — to prompt my friend Jan to call. Jan is definitely walking in a tradition as old as Job: “the dark night of the soul.” As long as I’ve known her, she’s hardly known which end is up: where God is, and what He is doing with her.

I can’t tell you how many times I talk with friends and then realize that I would have done much more good by just shutting my mouth, listening, and praying. But this time, it appears, the Holy Spirit decided to choose me from His shelf-full of tools. I do know that as I talked with her, God was talking to me.

“He will come to us,” Hosea promises, “as the rain that waters the earth.”

In the land of Israel, rain is not a given: it only comes when God sends it…and (it’s clear from the Bible) He only sends it when we’re obeying Him.

Diamonds draw me. Christmas lights mesmerize me. Anything spangled, sparkly, sequined, “who knows how,” anything glittered or glowing has an unmitigated effect on my soul. I’m always on a quest for that shine, as if it is somehow inexorably linked with the meaning of life.

When I read the words from the Gospel of John, “In Him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind,” I then understood that the meaning of life was not about me; it was for me. My life originated in the person of Jesus Christ, the creator, originator.