Before the Pink Lines Appeared: A Season of Waiting (again)

I love to journal but rarely find the time to do it these days...I also want to put down these words as stones to look back on and remember. Remember the chaos and the joy of parenting two toddlers, moving across states and being pregnant, but mostly remember the pruning and the pursuing that the Father did/does in this life... So, before I get to all the details around finding out about our pregnancy, I thought I'd share what the Lord was doing in my heart a year prior. These first few new posts will be a few journal entries I wrote a while back. Thanks for joining me as I look back over the way the Lord was/is always at work!

I wrote this about a year ago, not sure if or when I'd share these words, but now here they are!

10.9.18

There are spontaneous moments the hurt just resurfaces.

Lately, I’ve been in Lamentations and pouring over words from Sara Hagerty in Unseen. I have been digging into the Psalms and seeing references to water in the valleys, God’s provision in time of barrenness.

I’ve been reading scripture and words from others on waiting.

I want to think that I’ve had my season of waiting as we waited for children through infertility, through ivf, through miscarriage, through adoption.

I honestly thought I had moved past the desire for pregnancy and to grow our family through my womb. I felt God do a work in me through the summer, when faced with the possibility of early menopause (not knowing yet, because we have not seen doctors to confirm, and not sure if I will), and having Brett ask me, what do I want to do…

I replied, “I do not want to do IVF. I feel that it would be disobedient and showing a lack of trust in God.” Don’t get me wrong, I know that it is the right way for some, and as a believer that God creates life, he uses that to do so. I just feel for us, it isn’t the way He will continue growing our family.

May I cling to truth that though my body may fail, YOU, O GOD, will not!

And for the first time, I felt and still feel at peace in that statement.

It is a weird position to be in, having miscarried and now an adoptive mother to two…I can never put this accurately into words, but I am so incredibly grateful (beyond words as words don’t seem to do them justice) to be Zac and Connor’s mom. To call them my sons and to love them all of my days, is such a gift.

I used to think, and truthfully only because I read it somewhere, that I wish I would have been able to carry and birth them myself, to feel them from within. But, that’s not even true as I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the relationship we have we Kristen. To desire to birth them, makes it about me, when it’s the story God has written for all of us, about HIMSELF.

I wouldn’t change a thing about our family and this story. I never want them to feel as though they aren’t enough, because ultimately CHRIST is enough and HIS STORY for my life is enough!

There are times when still, a pregnancy announcement or pictures from someone’s labor and delivery of their child, causes me to stop. Causes that desire to well inside me yet again. To give them a sibling without the grief that is adoption. I struggle with feeling so selfish for this, and again, not wanting to take away anything from them as THEY are my first and second born SONS!

And if our next child or children come via adoption or foster or by whatever means, we rejoice in the Lord’s work of building our family.

But how do you balance that place with the holding on of hope in pregnancy, as to not declare something impossible for our God. So, although with hesitancy on what is the right way to feel, I hold onto hope that God can give us another child through my womb.

And so back to the waiting…

I am not sure what this waiting means, but I can’t shake it…so I’m leaning in even when I don’t understand…That there is a season of waiting coming for me, or for someone else, and I need to cling tight to His truth while sharing it with others. In this unknown, I am praying the words of Sara Hagerty in Unseen:

“that my prayer becomes less about relating to You Lord as I’m certain you must be and more about seeing Your bigness in light of how small and limited I am. I want to leave more room for You to overturn my understanding-to exchange familiarity with You for the unknowns and surprises. May my life be found in connecting to You, not in following what I think I already know about You”

So, in a season that I am not sure what I’m waiting on, may I wait WITH YOU, Father!