Father, we come, I come, today, with a heavy heart and a burdened soul for the women waiting for you to grow their family. I come longing for complete healing and restoration for their heavy hearts and burdened souls and the weight of the emptiness of their arms.
Lord, we know this: You are good. You are the vibrant sunrise on a cool, crisp morning, the intoxicating smell of a summer rain, the sweet of a ripe peach from the farmer’s market, the breeze thick with salt on the shore. Every warm hug, every authentic encouragement, every ping of glasses in celebration, every soft kiss, every single moment in our lives that is good and filled with love and honest, that is you. Because apart from you, the absence of your presence, is empty and void.
Lord, we know you are the Creator. All things are held together in you. We are grateful you hold us together. Grateful our lungs have breath today. Grateful our ears hear the sounds of life around us. Grateful to see a new day begin. And even though we feel like our bodies are broken and wounded and worthless, we know you delicately knit each atom and molecule together exactly so and we are choosing to be grateful for them. Grateful because we can never know how much worse our bodies could suffer without your tender grip. Grateful the enemy has no authority over our bodies because they are holy, living sacrifices we laid down at the foot of your Son’s cross. Satan does not rule here in Your temple. You do.
Savior, we have prayed so often for a small touch of your robe. We have reached out, completely faithful, knowing one tiny brush of our finger on your garment would heal our hearts of the agonizing, ostracizing, bleeding of emptiness and longing.
But today, Lord, we no longer want to reach for your robe. Instead, we come reaching for your Heart. We want to know you, know your love and your grace and your mercy, in new and fresh ways. We no longer want to sneak through the crowd, coming from behind, in the hopes we might glean a tiny bit of power from you. Instead, we stand tall, face towards you, seeking your Kindness and Joy and Peace so we may live right out in the open for you and through you. We are done hiding our need for healing, done trying to stay out of everyone’s way, done pretending you don’t already know we are there behind you. Lord, today, we come, hands open, arms lifted high, grateful to be in your presence fully known and fully seen. Lord, heal us so we may be reflections of You.
And that healing, Lord? We don’t know what that will look like. We don’t. I wish we did sometimes. Wish you would send down a map with backroads and highways and even public transportation routes clearly marked. We wish we could see each turn we will take but we know we can’t. And we even know that’s for our best, although, admittedly, we don’t care much for that truth. We know you give us one next step at a time. One sentence, simple and clear, to take in faith. Lord, we believe but help us in our unbelief. Our way, the vision we’ve had for how our family would grow, how we would tell our families, how many kids and how far apart in ages and how easy, clean, and perfect the entire journey to parenthood would be, that is all lost. Instead, we surrender all the remaining hopes and dreams and lay them at your feet. Our path to motherhood is yours and for your glory alone.
But what we will not lay down is the calling we know you placed on our lives to mother. Your word tells us your calling cannot be rescinded. You cannot void it or retract it. And we believe that. We hold on to that. We believe you are faithful and good and what you have called us to, you will deliver to us. Thank you for your word, thank you for how you show us your heart, your will, your purpose for our lives. Thank you for calling us to motherhood and thank you for the way you will fulfill that calling.
Father, we are grateful for every hard, disappointing, painful day on this journey. Because we know through suffering we develop patience and with patience, endurance and with endurance, character. And goodness, we are so very grateful for the Godly character this will produce in us.
We are grateful for every infertile sister. Those who walked this path before us, women you used to teach doctors and nurses and embryologists more about the miracle of microscopic life.
Grateful for the women we are walking with now, right in the middle of this messy, hard path, and how you weaved our lives together for such a time as this to love and support and lift each other up.
And Lord, we are grateful for the women you will send our way after our journey is done because we know you make the most beautiful ministries from our messes. Lives upon lives upon lives you are transforming and refining and pruning through infertility and we are grateful for each and every life.
Lord, wherever our children are, we lift them to you now. Our biological children, our godchildren, our nephews, our adopted children, our foster children, our students, our spiritual children, our nieces, and every child you have placed and will place in our life, Lord we pray right here and now for their lives. May they see you through us. May we find the strength in you to love them as you would. May we lay down our expectations and assumptions and truly hear them, guide them, and see them exactly as you gift them to us. May we meet greet them as the completely whole, fully known image-bearers of I AM and honor them in that beauty and miracle.
Today, Lord, we proclaim the end of our striving, the end of our research, the end of our hand-wringing, the end of our defeated living. Today, we say we believe that as we stand still, patient and victorious, you will fight this battle for us. And we can do that because we already know the outcome. You win. You won. You willingly defeated death on that cross, a cross made from a tree you grew just for that purpose, and you declared, It is Finished. We stand free and grateful in that Finished work. We are victorious in you. And we will walk out that freedom in every doctor’s appointment, in every procedure, in every meeting, in every line of paperwork, in every home study, in every baby shower, in every single situation in which you place us.
Oh Jesus, thank you. Because of you, we can face this emptiness and replace it with the fullness of you. Grateful, Father, we are grateful.