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.”

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