Growing in Christ
barrenness
Pregnancy v. Children?
42 years ago
A couple months ago, Michelle and I were on a date, talking through life (a normal, weekly practice for us). As usual, pregnancy stuff comes up where we check in and see how each other are doing – struggles, sins, weariness, dreams, longings, evidences of grace, etc. The question had been stirring around my mind for a couple days. I knew it wasn’t, well, the nicest type of question to ask, but it needed to be asked nonetheless. So in the best possible way, I ask the question to Michelle, “So, you know, pregnancy isn’t just about that 9 months, it’s about children after that. Do you think you want to be pregnant more than you want to have children?” The question really opened up an avenue of discussion for us that proved very insightful and helpful.
The question might seem a little odd at first, even callus. But I think it’s a Biblical question to think about. Is the desire for children so wrapped up in “just being pregnant” that the whole aspect of life after the delivery room is a distant mirage?
Pregnancy is, of course, a unique experience like none other. I’ve passed a few kidney stones (the Lord’s thorn in my side – literally – to humble me), but I don’t think that really counts. But in thinking about the building of a family, pregnancy is not the only way a family grows. The distinction is one of categories. The desire for children is one category, the desire to be pregnant is another category. Certainly the two have significant overlap, but we should see them separately ultimately because the desire for children supersedes the desire to be pregnant. A woman is only pregnant for 9 months at a time (and all the women of the world stood up and said, “Praise Jesus!”), but a family continues from generation to generation.
What this distinction does, especially for couples facing the challenge and suffering of infertility, is frees them to consider other options of what growing a family looks like. Infertility is an interesting place where the creeping question sits around, “If we try something else, or look at adoption options, are we not trusting God for children?” That’s a Satanic question. Not trusting God and looking at other options for fulfilling the desire for children are not coterminous. Can a couple pursue adoption as a means of not trusting God? Sure, but let’s keep the issues of the heart separated out on the dissection table.
This category separation has been helpful for us. We are able to see the desire for children as “the goal”, and pregnancy or adoption as “the means”. (This also has the devastating effect of destroying any genetic snobbery one might be harboring.) We desire children. We long for little cute faces running around our home. We look forward to our parents being grandparents. So, for us, the trajectory is looking towards both medical help to conceive, and adoption. We are pursuing both and seeing what God does with this. God loves children, and we know he desires children in our home. However we receive that gift from him is up to him.
The Imago Dei, Infertility, and The Gospel
22 years ago
I got into a discussion the other day with a friend about infertility regarding an article I sent his way, and he asked the sort of question that one feels awkward asking, but had been on his mind for a while: “So, what’s the big deal anyways?” I can appreciate the blunt honesty here. When thinking about infertility, the idea of infertility being a sorrowful experience seems, well, rather melodramatic.
There are a couple of things going into the question – at least as I’ve worked through it in my heart. For one, in our culture, children are often seen as a hassle. This is amplified all the more if you’re moderately in the DINK category – children, you know, will just get in the way of all that fun you’ll have! Children cry a lot, they stink, they poop, they don’t make money, they drool, etc. (Of course, I do all these things, but as an adult I’ve managed social tricks to hide them… namely looking the other way and being as horrified at the smell as the one next to me.) So, in some ways, if a couple is unable to conceive children, they’re being given a divine hall pass to skip all of these things. God has different plans for them. Maybe they can travel more. Maybe they can go to Disney more often. (Ahem, ahem… I’ll be installing a donation button soon to make these dreams come true.)
However, there’s another angle of approach to the question. For those who’ve never faced infertility (either due to lack of marriage, or ease of fertility), the question comes from a desire to understand a foreign experience. There’s no physical trail to follow, no list of explanations as to why things got to be this way, and some times, just no real reason for why things are the way they are. And yet, there’s a loss, a sorrow, a deep anguish over missing someone you’ve never met that you can’t quiet explain. (The movie Facing the Giants perfectly displays this struggle.)
This is where my friend was coming. He’s a godly man who was asking an honest question; the sort I’ve probed my self with from time to time. This is how I’ve processed the question lately:
The Imago Dei
In the beginning chapters of Genesis, God lays out his creation by the simple utterance of his voice. To crown creation he creates man, but unique from the created order. God creates man in his image (Gen. 1:26). The image of God in man is one of analogy. We speak because God speaks; we think because God thinks; we love because God loves. (Animals, for all their personality, don’t do these things. Especially cats.) As the Psalmist says, “He who planted the ear, does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not see?” (Psalm 94:9). Our desires reflect God’sThis imago dei (the image of God) means that we have desires goverened and reflective of God’s desires.
God Loves Life
One thing we can note about God is that he loves life. God is life. The Apostle John tells us about Jesus that, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4). We see this love of life in God most intensely in the eternal fellowship of the Trinity. The trinity is God loving life. The Father loves the life of the Son; the Son loves the life of the Father; the Spirit expresses and embodies their love of life perfectly.
Therefore, We love life.
Thus, when God created man, he was formed to express this desire of God. Loving life is an expression of the image of God in man. Unlike God, we are not an eternal, self-contained being. When God loves life, he looks to himself for fullest expression and satisfaction of that desire. When we love life and desire to see more of it, the lights get dimmed and we get that little twinkle in our eye. The reason we desire children and families is because God loves life and loves to see life grow and expressed. We love life because God lives life. In this desire, God is glorified.
Thus, for couples who are infertile and barren, the sorrow comes as a sting of the Fall in refusing their inherent God-glorifying desires. Infertility says “No” to a core aspect of what it means for us to say “Yes!” to life. It is right to be sorrowful at this. The God-glorifying response to unmet God-glorifying desires is sorrow. Jesus wept at the effects of the fall at the grave of Lazarus, you should weep at the effects of the fall in a barren womb.
The Gospel
Here’s how the Gospel plays into this. In Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, he makes this statement:
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. (Romans 8:28-29)
This is Paul applying the massive truth of the Gospel to weak people’s lives. I’m weak. More weak than you know. Weaker than the last guy picked for dodge-ball. But Jesus is strong. So strong that he controls everything. The Gospel comes into our weak state and takes all those curses of the Fall (like barrenness) and flips it upside down. Note what Paul says, “all things”. What is the good God has in mind? Being “conformed to the image of his Son”. Not only are we created in God’s image (which we destroyed like a rock to a mirror), but we are now being conformed to the image of his Son. We are being conformed to be God-lovers. Infertility and a barren womb is just as much included in this “all things” as that nasty look I gave Michelle on the way out the door the other morning. All things, yes, even the painful things; especially the painful things. God takes up the tools of our every-day circumstances and widdles them on us to make us look like his Son.
So what does the Gospel say about infertility? It says, “Look to the fertility that God is working in you in your barrenness. There’s fruit here that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.” It says that there is a purpose, a Gospel purpose, a Jesus purpose. In barrenness, as sons and daughters of a good God, we do “not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thes. 4:13). We grieve; but we grieve with Jesus.
No Fruit ∴ New Fruit
12 years ago
As I mentioned last time, Michelle and I have been trying for a while with no “fruit of the loins” (I can’t help but laugh on the inside when that phrase is used). Frustrating? Yes. Disappointing? Especially.
When Michelle and I started dating back in high school, she was an ultra-focused young women who hardly wanted to get married, and especially didn’t want any children. Me. Well, I played too much Tony Hawk, dreamed of “making it” in a punk-rock band, and was rather apathetic to most things. (I actually had a mohawk when we started dating – that should immediately spell “mercy” as a major attribute of Michelle’s character!) About half way through college, Michelle and I had a simultaneous “awakening” of sorts to a love for the Scriptures. I’ve talked about that elsewhere, so I’ll move ahead here. In that process, God began to teach us about biblical manhood and womanhood, and for Michelle this began to awaken a transforming desire to be a mother. Instead of “children five to ten years down the road”, we were looking on the earlier side of things.
So, when I say that barrenness was slightly frustrating, it’s on that background that I speak. Here God had raised up godly desires in a rebellious couple to desire the blessing of children and yet withheld that desires fruition. But we serve a God who, as the first commandment teaches, is God alone – not Jacob. Not only this, but in his grace, he is a God who promises to work all things for our good in his plan. What’s his plan? Big families? No. Satisfied stomachs? No. Safe bank-accounts? No. Conformity to Christ. Those other things may come, and indeed the Bible blesses those things, but they aren’t essential. God blesses and gives gifts for the sake of magnifying Christ in our lives. So, instead of the fruit we desired – children – God has worked this time for the fruit he desires – conformity to Christ.
When Michelle and I talked about this a few weeks ago, the first fruit that came to mind was: Satisfaction in Christ. As we haven’t gotten what we set out to get, God has drawn us to himself more and more through repentance. Repenting of the idolization of the blessing of children, repenting of the jealously of other pregnancies; repenting of not really being happy for other people’s joy of new children; repenting of making sex about making babies; repenting of not romancing each other; repenting of defining our season by barrenness rather than by what Christ is doing. As Michelle said to me, “This has been the kindness of God that he will not let me be satisfied with lesser things.”
Through this time, the scriptures that have been pivotal in teaching us joy in Christ amidst the sorrow of barrenness have been Psalms 16 and 84.
The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot.
The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.
The Lord alone is my portion, and because I have him – children or no children – I have a beautiful inheritance. The road with the Lord is a beautiful road only because it’s painted with grace and it rests in Jesus.
For a day in your courts is better
than a thousand elsewhere.
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than dwell in the tents of wickedness.
For the Lord God is a sun and shield;
the Lord bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does he withhold
from those who walk uprightly.
O Lord of hosts,
blessed is the one who trusts in you!
To be with the Lord – in prayer and in his Word – is better than all the trivial temptations in the world, and it is better than having children. I haven’t had children yet, but I know because of who God is that he’s better than all the perfect children in the world clumped into one perfect little family. Moreover, I do believe that God will give us children – one way or another – because “No good thing does he withhold”. But that giving of children isn’t the aim, it can’t or shouldn’t be. The aim is the Lord Jesus – to know him more deeply in the depths of the soul. The the object of our souls the ideal family, or the Lord Jesus himself, who incidentally gives and closes families? If Christ, he is the measure of our souls, and the only source to fill it.
God has with held one thing so that he might form a deeper, better thing. What a joy it has been to walk next to my wife in this – feeling the truly godly sorrow about this season of barrenness – and at the same time see her grow so as to kiss the rod of our affliction and bless it as having been good for us. This is what Paul means at the end of Romans 8 – the power of the fall, Satan, sin, and death have all been subverted by the power of Jesus’ Gospel to be for our good now. Barrenness exposes sin, which invites grace, which produces conformity.
More to come. If you think of it, please pray for us, there are still very difficult times to walk through. Also, we will be in Disney World this coming week, so it’s highly unlikely that I’ll post anything for another week and a half, though I might get an itch that will need scratching.
(PS – Yes, that’s a logical sign in the tittle. It means, Therefore)
Barrenness and God’s Story
02 years ago
It is something strange to note that one of the ominous features of the first book of the Bible is barrenness. Or, to be more precise: Is it not a strangely divine script to see a story begin about a God who promises lots of offspring and makes a big deal about children all the while leading his first three main characters through barrenness? In the past I have heard the emphasis laid on Abraham and Sarah’s barrenness (and rightly so – he is the father of the children of grace, and gets specific mention on this issue in Romans 4). But if we look broadly, Abraham and Sarah struggle with barrenness until the ripe age of 100, Isaac prays for his wife’s barrenness for 20 years (until he’s 60 years old) until she conceives, and Jacob’s favorite wife Rachel is barren for a number of years before she contributes to his posterity.
It strikes me as strange, and yet, divinely written so as to underline one of God’s basic story lines in the Bible: I, God, do this fulfilling the promise thing – not you. And moreover, amidst the rest of the Jerry-Springer-like fiascos filling the pages of Genesis, this presence of barrenness makes the Bible all too much like real life to discredit it as fanciful stories.
Barrenness is something I’ve thought a lot about over the last several months. My wife and I have been “trying” for a while now, with no fulfillments of our desires. While we haven’t been trying for years, it has still produced a struggle for us, especially for my wife Michelle.
And yet one of the peculiar things we have learned in this season is that it’s ok, or better yet, it is a godly reaction to be sorrowful about barrenness. Now there could be a few qualifications put in here, but it should be plainly noted that it is ok to morn the effects of sin in the common world order. Couples should naturally just get pregnant – by the original design, it shouldn’t be delayed fulfillment to desire (queue “The Birds and the Bees” lesson here). It is a general curse from the fall for couples to wait a long time to get pregnant (or never get pregnant at all!), and in many ways morning over this reality is only the God-centered response to have.
This is how Jesus responds to death. Take a look at John 11. Here you have the story of Jesus saying, on one hand “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him” (v. 12) and then upon arriving “he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled” (v. 33). What we have here is a situation where Jesus says two things: 1) Sin is deeply disturbing, and 2) This is still my story. You see, God’s sovereignty doesn’t gut the moral sorrow from those things that he writes into his story that are sin and pain. In the death of Lazarus, we have to remember that it was Jesus who ordained his death, and at the same time it is Jesus who is deeply disturbed in his spirit by the effects of sin in the world. If this isn’t a category in our heads, I think we should just close up shop on being Christians.
God writes difficult things into his story, but we have to remember and enjoy this great truth: This is God’s story. For us, God has written a season of barrenness into our lives, yet through this time we have begun to learn some of what Paul meant when he said that we are “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10). Why do we rejoice? We have a hope that the Patriarchs only hoped for: Jesus Christ has overcome the world (John 16:33). He has turned the sting of death and sin into our tutors for godliness. Therefore, these struggles about barrenness have produced a reaping of godly fruit in our lives that we simply would not have otherwise.
So at this point I leave the post hanging. I will be posting in the days ahead about the lessons we have learned (and are learning!) through this time, and the fruit we have seen because of God’s story for our lives. But here, we start with God because God start’s with God. In the end, God is what matters, and the enjoyment of his glory most central. This is why, very aptly, the chief end of man is not to have lots of babies and change diapers forever, but to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.
