If anything ever takes away that last .01% of synergism that I hang onto it will be this:
Throughout the 12.33 years of our marriage we’ve been struggling to have children. For a while after discovering our infertility we decided that medical intervention was not God’s ‘best will’ so we waited and prayed for him to either heal our ‘bodies’ or our ‘hearts’, i.e., to make a miracle in our ‘bodies’ or to make our ‘hearts’ ok for us to be without children. As we sought prayer and support within our local body we became accustomed to a certain amount of insensitivity from well-meaning and clueless people, i.e., “God has shown me a full quiver in your future”, “I know just how you feel, it took us seven months to get pregnant with our fifth child…”, “You need to claim healing and read _____, __:__ ___ number of times per day”, “I know this sounds crazy but what you need to do is adopt, then you’ll get pregnant”.
Great advice all of it (jn), but in reality their formulae don’t work. Likely this is a big factor in my resistance to modern formulaic evangelical christianity.
We are in a different place right now, and thoughout this last calendar year have pursued medical treatments and interventions meant to circumvent our infertility. We’ve not yet had a pregnancy, but we are hopeful and have committed ourselves to continue the effort for about four more attempts. We really wanted to trust in God to heal, but it wasn’t happening…
But recently we’ve both noticed in our conversations about this with our fellow members of the Body of Christ a particular and recurrent theme that plays out with frightening regularity and varying terminology sounding something like this:
“Yeah, I really believe that when God works some things out in your life He’s going to bless your desire to have children.”
Somebody in our past also made a statement:
“I’ve prayed and I think that Kent just needs to go through some healing and then God will give you children.”
I don’t know if anybody’s ever read Real Live Preacher’s story but he describes how I feel. Frankly, I don’t believe in the same capricious and manipulative God that many of my brothers and sisters in Jesus do, which of course brings up a the very good point of ‘why are you calling them brother and sisters’ then?
Well, ok, that’s a good point. But yesterday Laurie and I had a long discussion related to how abusive this false assertion has become. We know it’s false because we see tons of people who conceive children as easily as I pass gas and have not yet been ‘healed’ and have zero parental tendencies or skills.
In short, we have both come to realize that a pivotal aspect of the nature of the ‘relationship with God’ that we were both ’sold at the door’ so to speak of Christianity is, in reality, false. This realization has become a very big deal for my wife as it totally changes her understanding of God, His nature and how He manifests Himself in creation and the lives of His children. She truly believes that there is nowhere where she can fellowship where she can relate and participate with other believers on her new basis of understanding. She became a believer when she was 12 so to her this is a readjustment of everything she believes she’s known nearly her whole life.
Through it all what is most amazing is that we still believe in Jesus, the Son of God and man who takes away the sin of the world. The simple Gospel prevails…
