Trust While Waiting

In highschool, I began a long process of being diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). At the time, this was a newly diagnosable disorder, so it was hard to get a lot of information about it. Today, it is a bit more common, and is not considered a rare condition. I’ll spare you the biology lesson, but the gist is that my hormones don’t all function correctly, which throws off many processes in my body. A major one of those processes is my insulin. So my “unofficial” metabolic condition is prediabetes. We treated this diagnosis like I had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.—medicine, diet, the whole nine yards. During this stage of diagnosis, we also discovered a thyroid condition called Hashimotos disease, which causes my thyroid to not function correctly and creates lumps on my thyroid. These lumps can be cancerous, so they have to be closely monitored. All of this was a lot more than I thought I could handle at the time. But over time, God has given the grace needed, as He always does.

The most major area of concern with PCOS is infertility. I knew from a young age that it would be really difficult for me to have children. I remember thinking if I couldn’t have children, I would just adopt. However, that didn’t make me stop hoping for children of my own. I remember praying often that God would allow me to have children, and that this fear would never be my reality.

When Mark and I started dating, I told him that it was a possibility I couldn’t have children of my own. He said that was fine, and he would be happy to consider adoption. But honestly, I don’t think he ever dreamed it would actually be an issue. During our struggle with infertility, I prayed many times that God would allow us to get pregnant because Mark deserved to have kids. He is such a devoted, loving man, who I jokingly call perfect because he has literally done nothing wrong his whole life (of course, not really, but as close to it as possible). If anyone deserves to have good things in this life, it is Mark Cox! This struggle has been just as hard on him as it has been on me, and it hurt me to see that struggle in him.

We started fertility treatments a year into our marriage. That might seem very soon to some, but we knew this battle was coming and we were just ready to face it head on. We went in very optimistic that God would work a miracle and maybe within a treatment or two we’d be expecting our first baby. Treatment was absolutely exhausting! We tried chlomid, we tried three to five rounds each of three different types of IUI’s, each more aggressive and expensive than the previous. A year and a half later, I told Mark I couldn’t do it anymore. It was so hard on me physically, but emotionally I couldn’t handle holding onto hope every single time. A part of me had just given up.

We agreed to get on our knees and pray that God would intervene in one last treatment. A part of me honestly believed every single time that either I didn’t have enough faith or hadn’t prayed enough the time before, so God wasn’t ready to give me a child until I somehow mustarded up enough strength to believe God enough. (How silly to think God works that way!) When we found out for the “last time” that we weren’t pregnant, something inside both of us just broke. It’s hard to explain the questioning that goes through your mind. Was it you? Do you just not have enough faith? Is God punishing you for something? Maybe God doesn’t want that life for you? Maybe God doesn’t even care? I mean, you hate to admit it, but a lot of things go through your mind as you grieve the loss of a dream.

That same exact day, God hit both of us upside the head with the idea of adoption. We had discussed it, but thought we weren’t ready to go down that path yet. Something that struck us that day was that we were serving children in church, but perhaps God wanted our love to extend further. He wanted us to give a child a home. Mark came to me and said, “My theme for the year is to love in a bigger way. And it just hit me that this is one of the biggest ways we can show love to someone—to give them a home and a family.”

Our pastor just preached a message bringing something new out of an “old passage” that brought all this home to me. In Luke 11, we read the story of how Lazarus died. Mary and Martha had sent word to Jesus when Lazarus was still alive, and the Bible says that Jesus waited to go to them. The Bible says “When Jesus heard that, he said, This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.” Jesus PURPOSELY waited? That seems cruel, right? In fact He tells His disciples, “And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe.” Jesus knew this was going to build their faith, but He was happy?

When He gets to them, Martha (as loud-mouthed and opinionated as she was) comes running up to Him and says, “If you had been here, my brother had not died.” Martha knew who Jesus was, knew He COULD perform a miracle and heal her brother. She trusted Him with the very life of her brother. And yet, she did not trust Jesus’ plan. She had faith. She knew He could heal Lazarus. Maybe she even believed He would raise him from the dead, but she didn’t trust the timing of Jesus’ plan. 

But there’s something even more stirring found in the story. The Bible says that Jesus wept BEFORE bringing Lazarus from the grave. Jesus was God, so He knew Lazarus was about to come out of the tomb. He knew this act was intended to grow everyone’s faith. So why did He cry? I’m no Bible scholar, but I wonder if He wept because He knew what it cost for this moment of faith-building to occur. Perhaps He wept because He knew what Lazarus had been through or what He would go through later when the religious leaders would order his death because of his miraculous testimony of healing. Perhaps He wept because Mary and Martha wept. You see, we serve a God who is touched by our infirmities. God cares! He sees every tear that falls. Even in our struggle, God feels every ping of pain we do. He is not a cruel punisher, but a loving healer who knows what is best for each of us, but shares our hurt as we follow in His steps.

We say we trust God, but do we trust His timing. He makes all things beautiful in HIS time—not OUR time. Could God have allowed us to have our own biological children? Yes, of course. Would it have been a miracle that grew our faith and our view of prayer? Yes, I think so. But I think the lesson God needed to teach us is that His ways are higher than our ways. I’m 100% certain that Mark and I will look back and see that life without adoption would have been a lesser way for us. We’ll have a child that we can’t imagine life without, and we’ll see how much God grew us because of adoption. 

Trust God completely, not conditionally!

—