I want to connect with you today as you prepare your heart for Easter. I’m sure there are many questions you’re coming to the cross with, as you reflect upon Christ’s gift of life to you.
Let me first remind you that this life you’re living is all about the Lord. Your life is a gift from Him, for Him. It is a treasure to be valued. Your choice to have a relationship with Jesus is a gift back to Him in thanks for His great work. Everything you do and who you are becoming should be in pursuit towards the Lord and an eternal life with Him. Everything else in life flows from this. What a blessing and honour it is to serve God and live a life with Him. The more you allow that to become more present in your mind, the more you’ll find healing and peace in your circumstances.
Jesus’ love for you is so beautiful that He meets you at the cross with an overflowing measure of grace, waiting to receive your broken pieces before Him. As you’re discovering in our faith posts on the Paradoxical Kingdom, the Lord uses every suffering, rejection, grief, and discipline for your good and His glory. Absolutely nothing in life is wasted to Him.
So, you may feel broken because you currently cannot have children. Your hope may be waning and the candle of human possibility is burning out in regards to your fertility. Take heart my friend! The Lord is not done with you. There is still hope.
Hope can come in the form of various things. It may be that the Lord gifts you with biological children. This could happen soon or twenty years from now. Yahweh doesn’t work within the limitations of human timing and boundaries. He can supersede both because He is not human. He created them for us to help us, but is not governed by them. So, if he chooses for you to have them at 25 or 95, He has the right to. Children are a gift from the God for you to steward well. You don’t own them. You are responsible for them, and no one on earth will be able to love them as much as you do, but they are ultimately given by the Lord, for Him, just like your life is.
Hope can come in other children – a form of adoption, fostering, or spiritual children. The Lord can use you to impact the hearts and lives of many children around you. It can be in the way of a temporary shelter/safe space that the children can come to for refuge or encouragement. Other people’s children can be challenged and taught by you, seeking counsel for their times of need.
Parents need help raising their children. It’s not their sole responsibility because we were meant to live in community, working together towards the same mission. Your input into children’s lives is extremely important as well. And, sometimes, an outside perspective is even better than a parents’, because they are so close to the situation and so emotionally invested, that it’s hard to know what to do. This is where having an open home for children/parents to come to is a gift.
Ultimately, as you’ll find out in, Sustaining Hope, I’ve learned that hope doesn’t reside in earthly treasures at all. The forms of hope written above are temporary. They are assignments potentially given to you for your life on this earth. They may be short, intermittent, or could be for the rest of your adult life. They are helping towards your eternal investment and should be governed with great honour and responsibility. But they will end.
Those earthly hopes will never fully satisfy. You’ll potentially get your “rainbow baby,” and realize the immense work it takes. Your selfishness will come to the surface. Old wounds may revisit themselves. Fear of not knowing what to do or how to raise these kids can well up, and you’ll have moments of wondering whether it was worth it. These are natural human emotions. You’ll also have precious times when you look at the child and are in awe of God’s awesome work. How marvellous He is to form a little life from you and your husband. You may even be gifted with a deeper understanding of God’s adopting you into His family by the adopted little one in your own arms. Either way, these feelings will ebb and flow with life, but never fully offering the satisfaction you crave.
This will only ultimately be fulfilled in God’s eternal hope that He alone offers. By seeing children as gifts/assignments to you, over an absolute necessity for life, you’ll have the space and freedom to look to Christ for your satisfaction and peace. You’ll realize that the more you give room for Him in your life, the more your character will develop and your thirst for Jesus will overwhelm your desire for children. Then, if and when the time comes for Him to bless you with a little one, you’ll be more open-handed and responsive to the Lord’s leading in how to raise the child, because your dependency and hope is in Him alone to satisfy, not in this child before you. You won’t have to worry about holding onto false hope, because you’ll be anchored in the real and lasting hope always offered by the One, True God.
