It Brought Me To My Knees...

As I alluded to in the last post, infertility affected Lauren and I in such different ways as individuals.  I’ll try to walk you through what we were both went through, but to be honest, I'm not sure I will ever be able to firmly grasp exactly what Lauren was feeling or dealing with.  My goal in this post is to start to give you a little insight about how infertility affected me as a man, a husband, and a hopeful soon-to-be father. Please forgive me if this post seems a little disjointed, this is by far the hardest post I have written so far and I’m finding it hard to accurately put all of our feelings into words.

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There was never any disagreement, Lauren & I have always wanted kids.  Though it may seem weird to some, we started talking about having kids someday while we were still just dating. We talked about how many kids we wanted, about having biological kids, and about adopting (more on this in a later post).  For us, it wasn't ever a question of if, just a question of when.

Like a typical guy, it took me a little longer to be ready for the kind of responsibility, that kind of life changing commitment that is required when you have a kid, but it wasn't ever due to a wavering of my desire. Lauren always viewed having kids as a blessing that she just didn't want to wait for any longer, but I had some trouble getting past asking myself, "How are we going to pay for this thing?" I think that the majority of this was bred out of the distinct roles that God has designed us to play as parents; Lauren, as the mother and nurturer, and me as the father, provider, and protector.  No difference in value or importance, just a difference in the roles we were made to fulfill. 

For better or for worse, when I thought about having kids, one of the first things that crept into my mind was the checklist of things we would need to provide for this kid.  Daycare, health insurance, diapers, formula, a nursery, a college savings plan...it seemed like an endless list to me. I knew we could do it, but selfishly, I also knew that our lives would change drastically and I wasn't quite ready...but knowing what I know now, it's hard for me to not feel a little bit of guilt about this decision.

I don't feel guilty for wanting to be prepared before we brought a life into this world, but I feel guilty for the pain that I feel like I unknowingly helped contribute to Lauren.  While I know that there wasn't anything that I could have done to prevent the struggles we went through due to the infertility (Lord knows I tried to come up with every possible solution), I just can't help to think that if I hadn't have needed so long to "be ready", maybe Lauren wouldn't have experienced so much of the daily pain I saw her go through in the months leading up to our pregnancy.  Maybe if I hadn't made her wait so long the struggle wouldn't have taken the toll that it eventually did.

Those of you that know me well know that I am the epitome of a "doer" personality.  I get a huge sense of satisfaction by being able to identify a problem and fix it.  I've always been this way and my self-reliance, while often a positive, normally is the single biggest attribute that causes strife in my daily walk with God.  I am way too quick to say "Don't worry, I've got this" instead of "God, let me give this over to you."  God has to constantly remind me that if I were left up to my abilities, I would come up severely lacking, and in a nut shell, that's why our battle with infertility was so hard on me.  Not because I was having to wait for something that I really wanted, but because I was completely powerless in the situation that surrounded me.  My wife, the person that I love most in this world, was in spiritual and emotional warfare unlike anything I had ever seen and there wasn't a single thing that I could "do" to make it better.  No action I could take, no words I could speak, nothing seemed to have an impact of any significance.  Though we were going through this together, we often felt alone and alienated because neither one of us could understand just how the other one felt. 

Let me back up a bit and fill you in on how we progressed to this point because I believe that understanding the journey will help you to better understand the struggle.  When Lauren & I first got married, we did the birth control thing for a little while, but were really never able to find a drug/dosage combination that worked for us.  Most of the ones we tried either made Lauren feel bad or affected her moods and personality pretty severely, so we decided that it wasn't worth Lauren's happiness (or mine for that matter, because "Happy wife, happy life", right!?!) to continue.  We decided at that point that we would just go about our business and if we got pregnant, then that was God's timing and we would rejoice and start to prepare to become parents.  

This continued for a couple of years without as much as a false alarm.  As a guy, I never thought twice about it, ignorance is bliss, but as a woman and a medical professional, this was the beginning of what was going to be a very long almost 3 and 1/2 years for Lauren.  We didn't actively start trying to have a baby until after we moved to Houston which was about 2 years after Lauren coming off of her birth control.  At that point, we held our breath every month in anticipation of a positive test, only to be met with disappointment time and time again.  The disappointment was hard for me, but I had no idea just how hard it was on Lauren.

For me, the struggle to have a baby didn’t begin until we actively began trying to have a baby.  I would always jokingly tell Lauren that up to then we were just practicing and I had never enjoyed practicing more!  But for Lauren, the struggle had started 2 years before that and had been slowly escalating every day since.  It breaks my heart to think that my wife had been hurting for years and I never had a clue. 

As the weeks turned to months and the months into years, Satan continued to subtly attack Lauren.  So much so, that the last few months before we got pregnant, Lauren was battling a serious case of depression and was at the point that she was beginning to lose her desire for motherhood.  Watching her battle this is absolutely the single hardest thing that I have ever done.  The depression completely transformed the woman I loved into someone that I didn't even recognize.  It tore me apart on the inside to be absolutely helpless in comforting my wife.  I did absolutely everything that I could think of to try to lighten Lauren’s load, but nothing seemed to help.  I had been praying for Lauren and our future baby for years, but I had never been brought to my knees to beg God like I was while Lauren was battling her depression.  I begged God to provide Lauren with some relief, to either help us to get pregnant or to change the desires of our hearts.  I knew He heard me, but I just couldn’t see relief in sight.

This time in our lives was incredibly difficult, but God never ceased to provide for us.  When we moved to Houston our first priority was to find a new church home.  We visited several amazing churches, but ended up choosing to join Houston’s First Baptist because of the community we found in our Life Bible Study class (it’ll always be “Sunday School” to me).  God knew that we needed community after moving so far away from family, but little did we know, he hadn’t just given us community, but he gave us the exact group of individuals that we would need to help up almost 2 years later.

We immediately got very involved in our class and joined a small group Bible study that met on Monday nights.  We hadn’t been attending but maybe a month when we noticed a trend in the prayer requests.  Out of maybe 5 or 6 couples, 3 of them were currently dealing with infertility.  Lauren and I prayed and prayed for each of these couples and rejoiced with them when they each had their precious little babies.  Little did we know that it wouldn’t be long before the roles were reversed and it was us asking these same couples to petition God in prayer on our behalf.

More next time…

In Him,

Chad

You know what the news is -- in a minute, you're going to know the rest of the story...

Growing up, one of my favorite things to hear on the radio when I was riding around with my parents was Paul Harvey's, "The Rest of The Story".  I was always loved hearing the back story to famous events or how some common household item was actually invented by mistake.  I was always fascinated to learn the "why" behind the "what".  This post is going to attempt to start to tell our "Rest of the Story".

For more about the "Rest of the Story" including some audio of Paul Harvey's more famous segments, click here.

Over the last few days Lauren & I have used this blog to tell you about what has been going on in our lives recently, both the joys and some of the struggles.  We decided to do so in order to first and foremost, show God's faithfulness and provision, but also to hopefully provide some strength for others that are going through some of the same things we did and maybe tackle a couple topics that for some reason seem to be taboo in today's society. 

There's no way that I can tell the entire story today, so I'm going to try to start at what I believe to be the beginning, the real reason "why" 2015 has proven to be, in many ways, our toughest year of yet. 

When Lauren and I moved to Houston, one of our first priorities was to find a new church home. After visiting several great churches, we really felt called to join Houston's First Baptist Church.  We were a little worried at first about joining a church of that size, but we very quickly got involved in a Life Bible Study (it will always be "Sunday School" to me) and small group which helped make us feel at home.  We feel absolutely blessed to be apart of such an amazing church body, one that is incredibly externally focused (more than 60% of its' budget goes outside the walls of the church) and dedicated to living out the Gospel.  I could go own for days about how God is moving in that church, but let me move on to how it affects this part of our story. 

We were approached in late 2014 by the directors of our Life Bible Study and asked if we would be willing to step into a leadership positions and fill in for them while they were out after the birth of their first child.  Lauren and I excitedly agreed and began preparing to take on the new responsibilities. (Well, maybe I was a little more gung ho about it because part of the job required me to get in front of the entire class each week to speak and everyone knows how much I just HATE to be in front of a crowd!) 

We felt that God was calling us to serve and so we wanted to be faithful in answering that call.  Little did we know that this decision was going to have a much greater impact on our lives than we ever could have dreamed. Many may disagree, and that's OK, but I am a firm believer that when you make a decision to step out and lead, you are going to face challenges and attacks because of it.  This applies in every facet of life, but no more so than when you choose to lead others spiritually.  I believe with all of my heart that if you are working to see the advance of the Kingdom, Satan will actively work against you to prevent you from being successful.  This is not a blanket statement that covers the entirety of "bad things" that happen to people in an effort to relieve ourselves of blame or responsibility for our sin, but simply an observation made over time and one that I believe is Biblical. I can't say that everything that has happened to Lauren and I over the last two years is directly related to this decision, because in truth it is probably not, but I do believe that it had an impact.  

More on this and the other crazy events that we went through tomorrow...

In Him,

Chad