I was watching Oprah the other day and she had on a couple that has been dealing with some pretty serious infertility issues. They were younger and have been trying to have kids for years with no luck. They cried together and both talked about the disappointment they were dealing with and how they wanted a baby more than anything in the world. Unfortunately, Jerret and I know these issues all too well. The wife was so upset and kept crying and saying how she felt as though she was letting everyone down. She felt as though it was her fault she wasn’t able to conceive and she couldn’t handle the fact that she was not living the life that she had planned for herself, and more importantly (to her), not at a place in her life that others thought she should be (you know the stereotype – wonderful husband, 2.7 kids, SUV, white picket fence and a dog named Rover).
Oprah tried to ask why she felt this way. Why did she need to live in the “idea” of a perfect family? Why could she not take the cards that God has given her and let her own life play out? Why live in someone else’s dream? She told the couple to “Let it Go.” The wife cried and cried and said she couldn’t and didn’t know how, and Oprah continued with her advice saying that the life this couple was supposed to be living was passing them by because they could not let go of their unsuccessful attempts at getting pregnant. She told them to “Let Go and Let God.”
I thought about Oprah’s advice and tried to understand what exactly she was saying. She was telling this couple that if they could not get over this one setback in life and take what God was giving them (or not giving them), they would forever be stuck – mourning the baby they would never have. The world would pass them by and they would never know what had been there waiting for them all along because they were too wrapped-up in their own sorrows. Perhaps the couple were meant to be missionaries, traveling throughout the world doing “God’s work”, and the reason they were not given children of their own was because they couldn’t be tied down to one place when they needed to be out and traveling all the time. Maybe both husband and wife carry some rare genetic disorder that would result in the untimely deaths of the mother, child, or both. Or perhaps the couple could not conceive on their own because they were meant to take one of the many children in this world who have no one to care for them.
In retrospect, I am not sure how Jerret and I finally decided to move past the lives we were living into the life we were meant to live. We too were living in the infertility fog. For over three years we injected hormones, sat through ultrasounds, bought ovulation predictor kits, took at-home pregnancy tests, and lived with the disappointment that seemed to follow month after month. It was not until our second ectopic pregnancy that I realized we couldn’t live the way we had been for so long. It was time for a change. This was our time when we needed to Let Go and Let God. So we did.
Offering up our lives and letting go of the control is not an easy thing to do. We had to put aside all of our preconceived notions about what our life was supposed to be and deal with what our life was. We knew that God had a different plan for us; the challenge was in accepting the plan. Whatever he had in store for us was going to be big, we were sure. And it was (is).
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