epiphany

The other week, I had an epiphany (not to be confused with an epiphanie, which would also be cool).

(gratuitous spring shot, in no way related to this post)

I was sitting in church, and our pastor was preaching about...well...frankly, I don't remember what he was preaching about.  But to illustrate a point, he told a story about a man who was gradually going blind from an eye disease.  As he struggled to come to terms with his new reality, he prayed a prayer that went something like this:  "Lord, if it's your will, please take this hardship from me.  But I know that my purpose is to glorify you, and if I can do that best as a blind man, then so be it."  (He is still blind).

And I thought, "YES." 

It was as if things suddenly made a whole lot more sense.

Dealing with infertility is hard.  Really, really hard.  And it is very easy for the infertile woman to feel like God doesn't care.  He may or may not be listening to all the prayers and cries she (sometimes angrily) sends his way, but He doesn't care enough to change her circumstances.  And it is also easy to feel like she isn't good enough.  I thought many times that God might be preventing me from having any more kids because He didn't think I was a good enough parent to handle more than one child.

But as I have grown through my struggle with infertility, I have come to realize that I am not being punished.  God does care.  He does listen.  He has not healed me (physically, anyway), but that doesn't mean that He is gone.  He has allowed me to walk the rough road of infertility, but He is there on that same road with me, sometimes walking alongside me and Hubby, sometimes carrying one or both of us.  And I can choose to wallow in self-pity and rant at Him about how unfair life can be.  Or, I can choose to glorify Him through the unfairness.  I can choose to believe that maybe He does have a plan after all.  That maybe He really can make something beautiful out of something ugly.  I have already been learning this lesson on my own as the raw pain has slowly healed, but this man's prayer puts my vague hunches and nebulous thoughts into concrete words.

There are others who have taken this man's prayer to heart - Steven Curtis and Mary Beth Chapman come to mind.  Through the tragedy of their daughter's death, they are choosing to glorify God through the pain.  The people of Haiti, who danced through the streets, praising God days after they had lost so much in the earthquake.  And many, many others.

So.  I am choosing to believe that I can glorify God more through my infertility than I could have with the four children (spaced two years apart, and they would always get along with each other and be best friends) that we had planned on.  How, exactly, I don't know.  In some ways, I feel there are big parts of our story that are yet to be written.  But it helps, somehow, to have a purpose.  Not the purpose I had chosen for myself, but one that God (who knows a whole lot more than I do) has chosen for me.

P.S.  The blind man is John Hollenbach.