Tag: church

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Struggling with Faith: How Infertility Permanently Affected What I Believe (pt. 4)

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Right in the middle of trying to process all of my feelings and the overwhelming sense of doubt, I was helping my church plan a women’s retreat, scheduled to take place in April.

I was asked if I might consider being a speaker at the retreat, sharing a story about how God had worked in my life. Initially I said I wasn’t sure, and I briefly mentioned that I was going through a difficult time, and I didn’t think God would resolve it by the time the retreat came about. “It doesn’t need to be resolved,” the other women assured me.

I told them that I was having a bit of a struggle with my faith, and that I didn’t want to be a downer at the retreat. But again, I was encouraged that being honest and openly sharing my faith struggle could be a really powerful thing for people to hear.

So I agreed to share my story. That April, in front of many of the women at my church, I shared what had taken place over the past few months – how I was angry at God, and how it didn’t feel like He cared or even noticed me.

Usually when I hear a story or testimony at a church event, it wraps up nicely with something like, “and God worked it all out in the end” or “it took a long time, but God had a plan for me the whole time…” I had rarely heard testimonies where people ended it with, “I still don’t really know why this happened, and I’m not sure anything good is coming from it.” But that’s how I ended mine.

It ended up truly being a blessing for me to be able to share my story, because I had multiple women come up to me afterwards to share how they had also struggled with infertility. Some of them had suffered pregnancy losses, some had eventually given up on their dream of having children… for many of them, their stories, likewise, did not wrap up nicely in a tidy bow. Some were still dealing with grief years later.

It’s interesting to ponder why God seems to answer some prayers and not others. There are so many stories in the Bible of God having compassion on barren women, and eventually granting them a child: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Hannah – but I wonder how many godly women were never granted a child? And why aren’t their stories told in the Bible?

I’ve heard a similar pondering about Jesus – in the stories told about him, he is often seen healing someone – but he doesn’t literally heal every person in every situation. So how do those overlooked people feel? They watch Jesus miraculously bless someone else’s life, and then are left to continue to deal with their own suffering. Can you imagine what that would feel like?

Maybe you can… maybe you know exactly what that feels like.

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Struggling with Faith: How Infertility Permanently Affected What I Believe (pt. 1)

EricaLeave a comment

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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cross with flowers at church entrance

40 Days of Lent and My Own Personal Season of Disappointment

Erica2 Comments

It has been a rough couple of weeks for me. There have been numerous disappointments over the past month. Things that I took for granted would happen, and then they didn’t.

Things that were a pretty big hit to my confidence and self-esteem. Things that were a hit to my faith.

I’m not talking about your casual, run-of-the-mill disappointment. I’m talking about the devastating feeling of being punched in the gut when you learned the news. I’m talking about the kind of disappointment that requires a mental health day (or two) off of work. The kind of disappointment that makes you think, “what’s the point!?”

Why would God let this happen? Why did he keep ignoring my prayers? Did he just forget about me, or did he not care about me anymore?

It’s been interesting because this season of disappointment and doubt has corresponded amazingly well with the season of Lent, which began on March 2 this year: Ash Wednesday.

I went to my first Ash Wednesday service this year. In the faith tradition I grew up in, we just didn’t observe Lent. I had never even heard of it until I went to college, when suddenly people were talking about giving up caffeine or chocolate for the 40 days before Easter.

I think some people feel very uncomfortable stepping outside of their own faith traditions, but I have found it beneficial to keep an open mind, and see if there is a potential spiritual benefit in partaking in other faith traditions. Lent is not even that far of a stretch for me, it’s still a Christian tradition, just not the brand of Christianity I was used to.

Church auditorium with words "Ash Wednesday" on screen
family with ash crosses on foreheads
My family and I at our Ash Wednesday service (2022)

At our Ash Wednesday service, we sang hymns together and had a time of private and public confession of sin. It was a time to focus on our mortality, and our thankfulness that Jesus died for our sins. It was a time to be grateful for the grace of God.

I thought about giving up something for Lent, but nothing seemed right. I started out the season of Lent with a lot of hope, but found myself unfortunately collecting disappointment after disappointment. Our church had created a podcast especially for Lent, where members of our church shared prayers and Scripture and recited the Lord’s Prayer together. Many people talked about how much they loved the podcast, and how uplifting and meaningful it was for them to listen to it each morning.

But I found myself less and less able to listen to it as the weeks went by. I felt like my faith was failing as I watched and waited (and waited some more) for my prayers to be answered. And then they weren’t.

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