Part 1: Aspirations
I was born in a hospital just a few miles away from my
Grandma's house, but in reality, Grandma’s house was where so much of me was birthed.
I plant zinnias each spring because of the ones that always bordered her
vegetable garden. I became a teacher in great measure because of my
fascination with her years in the one-room schoolhouse. I'm driven to
create because of her love of all kinds of crafts, especially ones requiring
thread. Crocheting, embroidering and
always the sewing...I particularly remember sundresses for my dolls and a bright red vest for me to
wear on Christmas morning. One of my last conversations with her involved
her frustration over not getting around to hemming a pair of pants she had
recently bought.
In her 80th year, Grandma left us, the unhemmed pants
still by her sewing machine. And despite the many years of picking
through the floss bucket, it, too, was left in a tangle on the day she died,
just as impossibly knotted as the first time I had tried to sort it all out.
I think now about my aspirations for that bucket, how I hoped that one
day I could actually unpick each thread and neatly wind it unto itself, finding
the end for each beginning.
For a long season, I lived life that way, too.
Picking through my walk with God in frustrated attempts to match the end
to each beginning…wondering if maybe one day He'd answer that fervent prayer…thinking
perhaps if I just tried harder or spent more time working at it, I'd get to
enjoy that blessing I saw delivered into the lives of others…believing the cynical
voice that told me if only I hadn't committed so many sins then I would have a
bucket of neatly sorted floss instead of a messy, unfulfilled life that I was
beginning to scorn.
I didn’t understand it then, but there are two ways to live in hope. Soap opera actors and game show contestants are good examples of the world’s approach… characters searching for fulfillment but partnering with maybe...perhaps...if only... or contestants spinning for security while hedging with if I’m lucky…touch wood…fingers crossed. It’s a posture that collapses us toward slow death. Every time we’re brave enough to hold out a hand in worldy hope and yet come home with the same emptiness we left with, we die a little more and lose a little more of the courage needed to hope again. We ache as the blessings arrive in other lives and the lack-conditioning of our minds leads us to believe that time and supply are running out. Eventually, we find ourselves like the walking dead, shuffling through life, eyes downcast with no strength left to even cross our fingers one more time. Worldly hope is a cruel master, ultimately forcing us to concede that the bucket of tangled floss is a lost cause. At that point of reckoning, many people stumble over the precipice into dark depression. I teetered at this edge, bent low by the crush of unanswered worldly hope, on the day our second baby died.
Part 2: Easing Into Darkness
I can still see the kiwi slices in the fruit
salad. Bob and I were on an anniversary
trip to New York City and we had stopped for lunch just a block off Times
Square. I wasn’t feeling great so I
ordered fruit instead of the pizza.
While we were eating, my phone rang.
It was the doctor’s office, calling with news that both shocked me and
confirmed what I already suspected. I
was pregnant, but the hormone levels were too low and I should expect to lose
the baby within a couple of days. After
a few moments of trying to unknot the words in my mouth, they quietly sighed
loose as I thanked the nurse for calling and asked her to tell my doctor that I
was sorry for another disappointing cycle.
For some reason, I always felt the need to apologize as if my failure to
carry a baby was a terrible burden for those who were trying to get me to the
fertility finish line. When we lost our
first baby one year earlier, I still had enough hope to experience the loss
without losing sight of the promise. Never will I leave you; never will I forsake
you… But after my empty arms had
endured another barren turn of the sun, the cruel taunting of a doomed
pregnancy was more than my soul could abide.
While the first miscarriage pummeled me with gut punches in quick
succession...physical pain that dragged into emotional distress that bled into
spiritual anguish…the loss of this baby split me numb. I insisted on going to the Broadway show we
had bought tickets for. We did the
walking tour of lower Manhattan. I
shopped for souvenirs. Monday morning I
taught my Senior English students about the masks of Greek theater as I wore
one of my own, disguising trembling lips while the baby and remnant hope came
unwoven from my life.
In the weeks that followed, I went through the motions
of living, but mentally and spiritually, decay had set in. At the edge of depression’s abyss, I sat down
and quietly eased over, giving myself to the slope and into the growing
darkness. Busy days of teaching kept me anesthetized but
functional. I managed to hide my darkening mood from all but those most
familiar with my struggle. Sending
regrets to a colleague’s baby shower was really my way of saying, “It’s too
painful to see your growing belly.” Late
night grocery store trips were planned so that the fewest number of people
would see the mascara cutting jagged paths down my face as I had hurried past
the baby food aisle. Even church became
an unsafe place to venture after I made the mistake of attending on Mother’s
Day. Seeing all the parents beaming at
the front of the sanctuary with their infants, knowing that I should have been
holding a newborn that month as well, left me in a heaving pile of anguish in
the middle of the pew. Eventually, the
only place I could hide was in sleep.
Every chance I got, I found a bed or couch to tuck into and detached
myself from the pain. The morning alarm
became unbearable and many nights I half-prayed that I simply wouldn’t wake
up.
That’s the funny thing about my grief. I still prayed. Still wrestled with God. Still demanded answers from Him and railed
against His perceived abandonment of me at my lowest point. I never stopped believing in Him, though I no
longer trusted Him with my life. In
place of a loving, kind Shepherd I imagined a cruel, indifferent bully with the
sovereign right to treat me any way He wanted.
Harsh words, yes. But a mind
feeding on despair has great power to warp one’s vision. Mercifully, as the unraveling continued,
there was just enough light reaching me as I slid down the slope to keep breath
in my body. Having seen others spiral into
depression, I knew where I was heading and had enough clarity to admit that I
needed help. Taking my life never
entered my mind; I just wanted to somehow live it, with or without a baby,
absent the searing pain that each day brought.
Knowing that I couldn’t maintain the pretense of peace for much longer,
I made one of the wisest decisions of my life and reached out to a counselor at
our church.
Part 3: The Second Way
Hazel was so kind and generous with me during our
first visit. Her invitation, “Tell me
why you’re here,” was like a pin prick to a water balloon. I vaguely remember sobbing the greater part of
the time and perhaps sputtering out a few sensical words that gave her a clue
as to why I was in need of counseling. I
spent the rest of that first session leaking into a puddle while she mopped me
up with Kleenex upon Kleenex. In the
weeks that followed, we began to talk about the deep issues that were hardest
for me to grasp, particularly those involving the promises of God and the subject
of hope. Having been raised in the
church and making many of my life decisions – which college to attend and which
man to marry – based on my understanding of faith in Jesus and God’s plan for
my future, I couldn’t comprehend now how to process the agony of this very
significant aspect of life. Was I asking
for something outside of God’s will? In
Genesis, He told man from the very start to go
forth and multiply. Was I being
punished for some grave sin that I still treasured in my heart? In Hebrews I read that He forgives our wickedness and remembers our
sins no more. How was I supposed to
joyfully declare, Jesus is my hope! or
heed Zechariah’s charge to return to the
stronghold, prisoner of hope, when I understood hope as nothing more than a
game of roulette that sends us bouncing through life like a marble going round a
wheel? In my rawest whisper, I begged
to know why surrendering my shattered heart to Jesus was any better than living
like those in the world who cut a path through without Him. Everything I thought I understood about
God’s love was unraveling and I feared I would come to the end of my days like Grandma’s
bucket of tangled threads.
What I didn’t know at the time was that God had begun
a new journey for me, one that eventually took me into the revelation of the
second way to hope and the rebuilding of life with a sure Cornerstone. When the world
speaks, I hope means perhaps,
maybe, if I’m lucky. When God
speaks to us, hope means you can confidently expect goodness from me.
It’s a dramatically different outlook
that stands firm in spite of expert statistics, past experiences or the
comparison to someone else’s outcome. And as I continued to counsel with Hazel, I
realized it was an aspect of my relationship with God I didn’t have. Looking back, I could see that my hopes about
having a baby had been worldly from the beginning, primarily dictated by health
problems that started in my teens.
Around the age of 14, my body began to rebel against
its fertile design. The monthly rhythm
and hum of hormonal gears working in concert began to jam then slip, causing
domino effects throughout my body. The
common advice for dealing with a reproductive problem in the late 1980s was to
eat better, exercise and if all else failed, try some fertility drugs. At one consultation, the same obstetrician
who had delivered my brother a decade earlier told me that if he could bottle
my disease, he’d make millions because every woman would trade her first born for
a life without monthly cycles. Never a
thought that whatever was eating away at my endocrine system might be a hazard
later in life. No offer to consult with
others in the field to search for solutions. Just a shrug that casually dismissed it as
‘one of those things.’ To a teenager, his nonchalance seemed quite reasonable and I wore my disorder like a badge of honor as if I had a special pass to get
out of taking a mandatory test that all my friends were suffering through. Teens aren’t known for having remarkable
foresight and the thought of telling a potential mate that marrying me included
the baggage of a barren womb never really gave me pause. As a Sophomore in college, I met that
potential mate and by my Junior year, Bob and I were serious enough to have
that discussion. We talked about
adoption and joked about running a shelter for dogs and cats if we decided
having children wasn’t for us. I laughed
nervously about the unknown, for the first time with a nuace of unease, as I
wondered if the one I loved could really accept that my body might be too
knotted to ever bring forth new life. 
But then came the first loss, so crushing and
bewildering. All my years of building
the defensive mindset proved useless. My
heart, wrapped in layers of steely presumption, still bled with anguish when
the doctor confirmed that the tiny heartbeat I had been sheltering in my womb
was now still. Days later as I
whispered my love and goodbyes, I solidified my resolve to never be caught in
wanton hope again. 4 more times that
year, we fastened our faith and hands together to no avail and then came the
call in the pizza shop at Times Square.
After that, I was in a free-fall through my days with only the night
offering any respite from the turmoil. As
I was in no shape to manage the rigors of work, grief and the consuming demands
of going through fertility treatments, we decided it would be best to set aside
our efforts to conceive and enter a season of pause while we processed the
events of the last year.
As I was paused, paralyzed really, Hazel came with her
soft smile and boxes of Kleenex, patiently listening, encouraging introspection
and pointing me back to the real meaning of hope found in the Word. I suddenly felt like a novice in my faith, in
need of the proverbial milk though I had been clamoring for meat. I discovered that essentially, I was an
unbelieving believer with so many seams in need of repair…faith, God’s goodness,
trust, love, rest. It was frustrating
and overwhelming to consider the work at hand, but comforting as well because
each repair made was hope-mending.
Part 4: The Valley of Achor
As an English teacher, the history of the word “unravel”
is intriguing to me. Its mate, “ravel,” dates
back to the 1500s when Dutch weavers used rafelen to describe the process of unweaving
something they had already woven. So a
tapestry can both unravel or ravel and end up the same: a dangle of threads
once wrapped around each other, now hanging loose and separated from the body
of the design. But the intrigue
continues because “ravel” also means to make something tangled or confused. How? The
longer the unwoven strands grow, the more likely they are to twist and become knotted. So the same threads that raveled loose can
ravel bound. And the same thing can
happen to us whenever we have need of hope.
God’s
design for my body had always been masterfully planned, even before He set
about the weaving of it in my mother’s womb.
And 31 years later, awe-hushed while He knit triple restoration into my
emptiness, I slowly came to understand that there never had been an unfruitful
thread planned for the fiber of my body. The collapse
of my reproductive system was not a matter of divine punishment or Almighty
dereliction. For years, I wrongly
assigned it as such when, in fact, it was the rafelen of the enemy who has connived
for the destruction of God’s goodness since he first slithered into Eden. Had I been hunting for truth in the Word from
the onset of trouble, I would’ve found it in the gospel of John where the plumb
line of God’s love for life drops hard and fast: the thief comes only to steal
and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it
abundantly (John 10:10). 
One of the greatest insights I gained during my time
with Hazel was realizing that the most crushing days of depression unfolded as
I worked hardest to accept destruction, believing that God was the thief and He
had no plans to lift the weight of cystic ovaries from my body. It wasn’t the latest failed pregnancy test or
news that yet another friend was expecting that darkened me most. It was always the suspicion that God, who
said He loved me and would provide for all my needs, was hearing my prayers and
then callously severing life from life, as one might trim a thread off the cuff
of a shirt. I could tough out the
physical pain, endure a season of emotional upheaval. But the fear that life hung at the whim of a
heartless Pharaoh and not secure in the hands of a loving Savior pulled me
apart the most.
Truthfully, I began to unweave myself from God’s protection
and provision long before I raveled into depression. Little things like choosing to believe that a
doctor’s report was more authoritative than God’s Word or boasting to friends
about my body’s convenient dysfunction rather than boasting in the Lord’s
faithfulness were all little inchings away from the place where restoration
would eventually be found. Deciding to
follow the world’s path of hope with its wishing and hedging and hang-wringing
led me into my own Valley of Achor where trouble chaperoned each dusty step. I squandered years there, defensively pulling
away from trusting God’s plan, all the while making myself available to the
true thief who was seeking to devour my life.
***
The book of Joshua tells the story of Achan, a man who
veered from the path of trusting God as he tried to hide riches taken during the
Israelites’ defeat of the city of Jericho, something that had been expressly
forbidden. With sin in the camp, God’s
protection was blocked and the army suffered great loss at their next
battle. Once it was discovered that he
had been secreting the gold and silver in his tent, Achan and his whole family
were put to death in a valley that was then named Achor, or Valley of Trouble. 
These Old Testament stories are hard to read and
harder to grasp and I shudder with thanks at the gift of being born into the
age of grace rather than the era of law.
Yet I still think about Achan and wonder if he wasn’t doing what I
did…hedging his bets and taking matters into his own hands. I think of his years spent wandering the
desert, hoping for the long-awaited arrival at the Promised Land and how it
must have been hard to wake up day after day to scorpions and blistering sand
underfoot. Perhaps he worried that Plan
A might not pan out and so it seemed prudent to start working on Plan B. Maybe the Babylonian gold in hand seemed more
dependable than the honey of the promise.
In any case, he followed the pull of the thief and raveled himself away
from the Master’s design. Right into the
hands of death and a life cut off before its time. 
Some 650 years later, the Scriptures speak again of Achor,
this time in a book known for its story of redemption. There I will give her back her vineyards, and
will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came
up out of Egypt. (Hosea 2:15) In contrast to the misery of its first
mention, the Valley was now become a place of redemption and life
reinstated. Where dry bones once lay
piled, verdant fruit now grew. And where
the wailing of grief once named the valley Trouble, songs of praise now echoed
up the slopes. The beloved of God had
been freed from the tangle of her bondage and she was rewoven according to the
design of her youth. 
My years in the Valley of Trouble numbered fifteen,
half my life by the time I reached the door of hope. At one of my final counseling sessions, I was
able to show Hazel proof that the vineyards were indeed fruited again, this
time with the promise of exceedingly abundant life. An ultrasound picture outlining a cluster of three
tiny hearts, just a few weeks old, brought out the Kleenex box again, this time
for the mopping up of jubilation. It was a season of commencement in my life, of
being raveled from the barren and rejoined to the fertile. As the babies grew in my righted womb, I held
the Father’s sure hand and took wobbly first steps, now guided by true hope and
confident expectations about His good plan for this pregnancy. And how needed was that firm hope! Perhaps at another time I’ll recount the days
of breathless waiting we faced when cramps and bleeding threatened the vineyard
or when doctors insisted that to preserve two hearts, one should be stilled. The pins-and-needles journey over the rocky
terrain of high-risk pregnancy ended seven months later with the indescribably
joyous birth of three tiny babies: two fair brothers and a wisp of a sister. All together they weighed a mere nine pounds,
but our arms and hearts were suddenly loaded with more life than we had ever
dared to dream they might be.
***
Today as I was cleaning up the Legos from the toy-strewn
playroom, I came across a pile of pants that I have been meaning to hem. Somehow they got mixed in with the stuffed
animals and I had forgotten about my plans to tackle them before the cold
weather arrived. It snowed last night,
so I’m clearly behind schedule. As I refolded
each pair, I smiled at the remembrance of Grandma’s unhemmed pants, relieved to
be in a long line of women with unfinished to-do lists. Although she would have been delighted to sew
sundresses for a new generation of dolls, Grandma never got to meet the
triplets, or any of the other ten great-grandchildren who have been added to
the family since her death. But I have
great peace in knowing that she has been busy with the babies who left us too
soon, perhaps rocking them to sleep, maybe telling them funny stories about
their mother or bouncing them on her knee while singing Ride a Cock Horse. Most assuredly, she is eagerly waiting with
them for the day when all the threads in the bucket of this woe-filled,
unraveled world will be wound right.
I couldn’t write that with conviction some years ago,
when I depended on worldly hope as the tether for my soul. But today I am confident that the second way
of hope is the place where I want to be bound.
It’s the shelter of Proverbs 18 and the rest of Matthew 11. It’s the healing of Isaiah 53 and the freedom
of John 8. It’s everything I was
searching for, but couldn’t believe would be found in Jesus because it’s a
message that a broken world rejects as too good to be true. But now that I see with eyes that are not my
own, I understand the fullness of what happened at the cross. Love took not only my sin, but also my broken
frame upon Himself and paid the awful ransom demanded by the curse of Eden. Long before I ever knew my body would need
repair, He secured my wholeness by laying down His own. With that doubt-shattering revelation in mind,
it now seems so foolish to pull away from God and ravel out on the whims of
chance. I tried it and found nothing but
despair. So these days you’ll find me as a prisoner in
Zechariah’s stronghold…excited and expectant that God has even more goodness
planned for this life unfolding. Is your
heart in need of that shelter? Does your
mind need rest from the endless picking through knotted thoughts? Do you need a reason to believe that healing and
restoration are still part of God’s plan?
I invite you to join me in the prison of hope where all of these
freedoms are found. Room for us all has
been readied because the goodness of God has no end. Selah.
Post Script: for
the waiting and the wounded
It’s been over seven years now since we brought our
bundles home. Life is abundant, intense,
messy and there isn’t much time to pause and remember the ache of a quiet
kitchen or a spare room waiting to be painted pink or blue. Most days, that season of life seems so far
away, and yet in a blink I can be back in the waiting room smelling the
antiseptic and coffee, hearing the nurse call a would-be mother with test
results that would crush her day, seeing the women like me lining the walls,
heads bowed low as we waited to be summoned back to an office where our hopes
clung to the words of a doctor doing his best. I remember my last appointment in that room. At 10 weeks-pregnant, I was ready to transfer
to a perinatologist who would oversee the rest of the triplet pregnancy. We had arrived at such a joyous milestone and
yet I felt such overwhelming guilt. Not
wanting to upset the other women in the waiting room, I asked to say goodbye to
my doctor and nurses who were like family to us in a back room where no one
would hear the words of encouragement and congratulations. Ironic, isn’t it? The very people most in need of hope were the
ones I was hiding from because I thought that my answered prayer would wound
them deeper. As I slipped out, I
remember meeting one woman’s gaze and I realized she knew. I offered a weak smile, wanting to give her
so much more, but still hindered by the remnant fear feeding on the lie that
addition in one womb meant subtraction in another. Fear kept me from sharing hope with her then
and I have battled it again in the sharing of my story now. But I won’t be cowed this time. I
can’t finish this post until I spend a deliberate moment with those women who
are still struggling through the aches of infertility and those women who still
have tender wounds left from their days on the battlefield.
It was difficult to write this post, not because of
embarrassment about talking about very personal issues or wincing at the
thought of digging up grief again. I
almost didn’t write this post because I knew that women like you, still trying to conceive or still
troubled by time in the valley, would read this. And the thought of injuring your hurting heart, even with a
testimony that contained so much healing, nearly stopped me.
When I was in your shoes, I didn’t want to hear about
success stories or how to trust God more in the waiting season. I just wanted to know the most direct route
to having a baby or to finding peace about remaining barren. So
often, my prayer was “God, show me the things I need to do to get to the other side of this.” Sometimes it was an impatient prayer, but
often it was just because I was so weary of walking. I’m sure I would’ve scoffed at the idea of
learning to rightly believe as an
area in need of attention. It wasn’t
something I could check off a list or research on medical websites. If you’re like me in that regard and thrive
on being organized and in control, please know that learning to hope isn’t part
of a magical formula. Getting into the
right mindset about God’s goodness doesn’t flip a switch that sets all things immediately
right. Part of His love for us is that
we aren’t circuit boards, but rather companions. And like any relationship, hoping in the Lord
is a journey that unfolds with twists and turns along the way. But starting on that journey is essential to
being led into the blessings and restoration that He has prepared for us. I cheer you on to that new endeavor, and
reach out an arm of support because I know how weary the journey has made you
already.
Another important thought that I feel pressed to share
about is that while this post hinges mostly on the subject of hope, I know that
I’ve really only touched on one factor of the infertility struggle. There are so many more aches that you carry
each day: relationship fractures with family members and friends who have never
walked this path and can’t empathize with the depth of your pain; the strain of
finances and the endless trail of insurance and billing forms that make the
process even more sterile and detached than it already is; marital conflict
between you and your spouse when decisions about treatments have to be made; days
troubled by moral considerations about how far to go and when to stop. Bob and I grappled with these and many other
issues during our journey and I could write a book about the multitude of crises
birthed by an infertile womb. What I’ve
written about is a broken bone, when, in fact, the expanse of trauma caused by
infertility is more like a gunshot wound. My heart knows how your heart bleeds and how on many days, you wonder if
you’ve lost too much blood to survive. I
didn’t write about all those other issues, but I know they are real and also
require consideration and sensitivity when dealing with your wounds.
It’s important to know that just as my change of heart
didn’t happen overnight or even in weeks or months, the collateral damage of
infertility took time to heal as well. Reading
this post might make it seem like I moved quickly from despair into confident
hope and a life renewed in every way. But
the truth is, what took me a month to write about actually took me over ten
years to live. I’ve only really come
into a full embrace of Biblical hope in the last few years. And there are areas yet in my life still
shaded by the events of those empty days.
The seed of hope was planted just before the triplets were born, but I
struggled to grasp that mindset for a long time. Renewed thinking is a spiritual battle and
the old thought patterns and hurts creep in so easily as the enemy seeks to
turn us back toward doubt and fear. My
journey from wishful thinking into confidence in God’s Word was neither quick
nor easy, but I praise Him that it was His battle and He was faithful to bring
me to victory as promised. And the good
news is that as we grow in confident hope, all areas of life that have
been ravished by the thief respond to restoration and healing.
My prayer is that as you read this story of my journey
through the Valley of Achor, you’ll find there a well of living water to rest
by and be refreshed by. My prayer is
that as you read about my raveling out and weaving in, you’ll be able to talk with
God a bit about where you’ve been constructing hope and whether there needs to
be a reworking of the threads that bind you to Him. My prayer is that as you read this
perspective on the two ways to hope, you’ll have that moment of revelation
about God’s unalterable love for you and from this day forward, you will have
every reason to believe that healing and restoration are part of His plan for
you as well.
 |
| Jeremiah 29:11 |
I recommend these resources to help
you continue learning
about God’s plan for healing and restoration. Each one
has been tremendously helpful to me over the last
several years.
about God’s plan for healing and restoration. Each one
has been tremendously helpful to me over the last
several years.
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