I had been so focused on writing about and processing my infertility journey, that I realized I haven’t written much about my faith in a while. But my faith was directly impacted by infertility, and that was just one more reason that infertility was so hard. I didn’t expect a faith crisis in the middle of trying to get pregnant for three years – it hadn’t happened to me before, and it was a surprising and scary thing to also be dealing with in addition to the grief of not being able to have another child.

You’ll notice I said infertility permanently affected my faith – it did not completely destroy it. But more on that later…

There’s so much to say, I am not even sure where to start as I want to describe my journey of faith over the last few years… Part of me thinks I should start at the beginning (a “very good place to start” as Julie Andrews might say.)

I will try not to bore you with the details, but I do think some background information on how faith came into my life will be helpful as a comparison for where I am now. (Obviously you, the reader, have the ability to skip over parts you’re not interested in!)

My Faith Background

The first time I went to church, I was only a week old (so my mother tells me). And I’ve pretty much gone to church regularly ever since then. I grew up in a conservative church, a small *Church of Christ that in it’s heyday had about 300 members. I went to church on Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, and also Wednesday nights.

I didn’t realize how conservative my church was, because it was just normal to me. I loved going to church. Most of my friends were from church, most of my social activities revolved around church, and also my personality as a Type-A-rule-follower meant that I kind of thrived in an environment where obeying rules made me feel like a good person.

I got through high school still being a “good Christian.” I never tried drugs or alcohol, I didn’t go to parties because I didn’t want to be faced with “peer pressure” (also I just don’t think I was popular enough to get invited to many parties), and I wasn’t having sex – I did have a long-term boyfriend that I met at church and I assumed we would one day get married, but I was still determined to be a virgin on my wedding day, because that’s what “good Christians” did.

My faith was so black and white back then. It’s changed a lot over the years, and I have had to unlearn some of the damaging things I was either explicitly or implicitly taught in my youth. Despite going through some periods of deconstruction, I never felt that I totally lost my faith or gave up on God. At least until January of 2023 – that was when I experienced a true crisis of faith.

The Faith Crisis Moment

I am not going to rehash my entire experience of infertility – if you are interested, you can go back and read some of my previous posts… To summarize them, we had been trying to have a second child for a year and a half, and it was awful and horrible and I was obsessed and depressed over it, and I finally decided at the end of 2021 that I had had enough. It wasn’t worth it to go through this torture. I needed to move on and try to begin the process of emotional healing.

In January of 2022, I went through our house and found all of the baby items I had saved – toys, clothes, play mats, etc – and I moved them all to the garage because I wanted them gone. I needed closure.

The very next day, the fertility specialist we had been going to called and said our test results had changed, and that now, inexplicably, things looked good. If we wanted to get pregnant, “now was the time to try!”

I was so pissed.

I had a heart-to-heart with God and I told him, “look, don’t mess with me. I was ready to move on from this, but now it seems like we’ve got a sign that we should keep trying. I am going to be so mad at you if we give this another go and it ends up being all for nothing. Please don’t put me through that.”

February. March. April…

September. October. November…

2022 was almost over, and God had not answered my prayer. I was not pregnant. I was getting desperate and scared. I never forgot that heart-to-heart I had had earlier in the year. I didn’t want it to be true that I had gone through all of this suffering for nothing.

I desperately prayed like I had never prayed before. I begged him for reassurance, for a sign that I was pregnant. I specifically requested that God give me a sign in my dreams that night.

And guess what? That night, I dreamed that I had a positive pregnancy test. I didn’t see how it could be any clearer. It was practically crystal. I was elated. I knew I was pregnant. It was too early to actually test, but I thanked God for the sign he had given me, and began to plan out the rest of my life, knowing I was going to finally have a second child.

About a week later, I started noticing signs that my period was about to start. But I ignored them, because I was so confident that I was pregnant… I wasn’t. My period started, and my faith shattered.

The hardest part for me wasn’t even the idea of never having another child. But I felt like God had tricked me. He had given me a dream, or at the very least, had not stopped me from having a sign in my dream, and I could not understand how a God with unlimited love could be so cruel. If He was really all-powerful, couldn’t He have prevented me from having that dream? Couldn’t He have at least spared me a little bit of pain?

Then in January of 2023, our journey towards pregnancy ended very abruptly. **We had one last intervention we were wanting to try, but when it came time to do it, we ended up not being eligible anymore.

It suddenly hit me that the last two and a half years had all been for nothing. I had prayed, I had begged God for a child, I had specifically asked him to not play games with me, to not continue to let me suffer if it was for no reason… and yet, in the end it made no difference.

And that was the moment where my faith seemed to not make sense anymore.

Part II – read the next post here!

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*if you are not familiar with Churches of Christ, you can do some Googling, but it’s based on the Stone-Campbell movement, and is maybe best known for having a cappella worship (no instruments) and for taking a lot of the Bible literally… That being said, each church with “Church of Christ” in their name can look different, because there is no overarching governing body – each individual church ultimately decides how to function and govern (which means that now there are Churches of Christ that use instruments and have women in leadership, although traditionally this would have been unheard of).

**you can read more about this in my other posts – we had been hoping to try a few cycles of IUI, but then were told it was pointless (due to our updated test results) and our only option would now be IVF