The Loudest Cry Discovered

I realized something important, this week.

My self-torturing agony over not being able to birth a baby had less to do with the empty hole in my heart and more to do with the abandonment I felt from God. I did want a baby. More than anything in this world, but even more I wanted God to answer my cries.

For a year straight I pounded on the doors of heaven, laid open my heart on the threshing floor, and all but tore my garments at his alter, asking for answers. My efforts, however, were always met with silence.

It wasn't that God was not present. Occassionally I would hear a whispered word to my heart - grace or an encouraging phrase - keep pushing through. But never did I get an answer. It didn't even have to be my answer of a promised child. Just an answer would have done - motherhood isn't for you...I have other plans...your desires will be fulfilled. Anything would have been better than nothing.

Exactly 12 months ago, I was at my worst. I was a shell of a person. There was no fight left. All hope was gone. I had finally admitted defeat.

And for the first time in my left, felt abandoned by God.

Earlier this week, I spoke with a friend and as I listened to her words my heart was warped into past stages of remembering. Her situation was a completely different shade, but I still found myself in her words. She spoke with brokeness, as she desperately grasped for any sliver of hope to hold on to. I cried with her and offered the most encouraging words I could muster and then wept my entire way home.

I hope to never return to that state of hollowness, but for the sake of my friend, I allowed the memories to flood back. Ben and I sat face to face, on the couch, as I reviewed the earlier conversation. Tears were streaming from my face as I said. Do you remember that silence? When the cry for family was deafening and the voice of God was absent? It was complete abandonment.

Ben didn't have to answer, his matched tears did the talking. We both remember.

We did not go into infertility with a just-on-Sunday relationship with God. We were his. We were captives to his love and served him faithfully in everything we did. We were the holy-roll'n, tongue-speaking, passionately-exuberant type. And then he stopped speaking.

I don't know why. I have ideas and guesses and theories, but there's no definitive answer. Our faith was literally stripped down to nothing, as our exposed hearts walked out the last few months before Rebekah's call, faithless.

Naturally, it's easy to look back now and see that God did have a plan and never stopped being faithful, but the wreckage that our hearts took was massive. I believe that our hearts are healed and that God's grace washed us for months leading up to Ty's birth.

Last year was a whirlwind of emotion and today, I find myself asking, "Lord, where does all of this leave us, now (as in you and me)?"

Everything looks different as a mother and now that things have settled, I find myself yearning to reconnect to my Savior, in pre-infertility ways.

After our little abandonment cry-fest, it was clear to me that the winning culprit of my heart's loudest cry was not that of a baby, it was the absence of the God I claimed to know so well. The Bible-thumpers would tell me he was never absent, but that's not what I mean. His silence was absence and I'm not sure I've been ready to dive back into that investigation.

Until now.

I don't need to know why I can't have babies (it doesn't matter), but I do need to know why I never heard God answer. I've been admittedly too pre-occupied to revisit the issue and ashamedly haven't read my Bible in months, but I'm ready now.

The next time I weep with a friend I want to be able to share the full spectrum of revolution my heart took, so that others might be encouraged.