LETI
I want to share about how our infertility journey has impacted my faith, in hopes that it may encourage others who are struggling through the same battle. I can remember when I first became a Christian, all I ever wanted was for God to use me for His glory, but I never really knew how or what that would look like. I see how He built my faith and refined me in the trials that my husband and I faced through trying to conceive. I remember growing up in such an unstable and dysfunctional home and all I ever wanted was a family and kids of our own that I could shower with love! I wanted to break the cycle of abuse, dysfunction, and chaos.
When my husband and I got engaged, we knew we wanted children, in fact, we began to pray for our firstborn by name a couple weeks after our engagement! After getting married, we spent the first year enjoying our time together as newlyweds, but we still prayed every night for our future baby by name. In January 2015, we began trying to grow our family. At that point, the only people who knew was a couple in our church who helped and mentored us.
At first, it was fun to have a secret just between us. We wanted our pregnancy announcement to be a huge surprise, but after 6 months of trying on our own, I started to get worried, especially since I stopped birth control and still hadn’t gotten a period. After 6 months of trying to conceive without any results, I pushed my doctor because I knew in my gut that something wasn’t right. I was beginning to get pretty discouraged.
After months of advocating for myself, they finally ran a bunch of tests and diagnosed me with PCOS. They put me on a medication that was supposedly supposed to help us. Along with that, they also had me taking pregnancy tests every month. Unfortunately, I had some pretty terrible side effects to the medicine. I was sick a lot, I gained over 30lbs, I was extremely moody, and I was becoming more and more discouraged with each negative pregnancy test.
The more time that passed, the more I became faithless that we would ever be able to have kids biologically. I started to doubt my worth in God’s eyes and it was a struggle not to allow myself to think that it was my fault that all of this was happening. We started to tell a couple more people because I couldn’t handle the stress and the loneliness that came with only us knowing.
The more people we told, the more we kept hearing that I just need to stop stressing and THEN it will happen. So again, I felt even more that it was my fault, because, I was the one who was stressed and I was the one whose body was broken. I even started believing that my lack of faith was causing God to withhold from not only me but also from my husband.
So fast forward to Christmas. We were really hoping that by this time we would be able to tell our families that we were expecting and it’d be the best Christmas ever, but God had a different plan. By December our doctor had said we needed to go to a specialist and at that point, the stress and discouragement had brought me to a breaking point.
We were sitting at Christmas with my whole family. Everyone was happy, laughing, eating, and having fun but I was sitting there depressed and sad because my womb was empty. At that very moment, I decided that I needed to stop blaming myself, stop keeping it a secret and trying to carry all the weight myself, stop listening to Satan's lies, and be more faithful and trust in God's timing. So we told all our family and friends, saw a specialist, changed medicines, and switched to a different Obstetrician. We even started documenting our infertility journey and posting the videos.
After we started posting our videos, I've had women from all over getting in touch with me to thank us for sharing our story. So many of them began praying for us. Some woman just wanted to share their struggle with infertility and the successes they've had, and other women were just encouraged to have someone who was going through the same trials, someone they could relate to. I feel like the women that contacted me were little faith building nuggets that God was depositing into my heart.
Through all the ups and downs, my faith was tested but it also grew immensely. I remember dwelling on the pain of our infertility and wondering how long it would be until all of it would be over and how long it would be until God answered our prayer. But I would stop and think about the bleeding woman in Mark 5. She bled for twelve years straight! But she was so faithful that all she needed to do to be healed was reach out and touch Jesus' clothes! Not even Him, so she did! She reached out in faith and touched His clothes, then in Mark 5:34 Jesus said, "Daughter your faith has healed you, go in peace and be healed from your suffering". How cool that Jesus healed her because of her faith!
When I reminded myself about her, I was truly convicted. I couldn’t help but think how my husband and I started posting the videos to help other couples who were struggling with infertility and instead it seemed as though God had been helping me build my faith in Him and His plan for our lives. The best part about it is, we received our answered prayer on March 15, 2017. That sweet little baby that we prayed for by name is no longer a yearning desire in our hearts. That baby is forever a part of our family and every needle, blood draw, oral medication, sleepless night, negative pregnancy test, doctor visit, ultrasound, procedure, and tear was worth it!