Dear friend,
“Sing, barren, you who didn’t give birth! Break out into singing, and cry aloud, you who didn’t travail with child! For more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife,” says the LORD.
Facing infertility puts a person in rooms full of language built for people whose stories are already moving forward, and I got something wrong once in exactly that kind of room. In the spring of 2001, a young woman I taught with years earlier told me she and her husband had been trying for three years without success. I told her to give it time, the way people say things when they want the conversation to end kindly. I meant it as comfort. It landed as a door closing. I did not understand until much later that what she needed was not my confidence in her future but permission for her present grief to be real.
Isaiah 54 opens with an instruction to a woman who has no children, told to sing anyway, told her descendants will outnumber the ones born to a woman who was never barren. I notice the text does not explain how her body will change. It does not promise the medical outcome she wants. It addresses her directly as someone worth speaking to before there is anything to show for it. That is a strange kind of honor, arriving before the evidence.
What has felt most unbearable to say out loud in the middle of this?
A prayer
God, You see the waiting that has no due date and no guarantee. Be near to her in the ordinary hours between appointments and hope, and let her feel addressed by You now, not only later.