His Plans My Hope

Then God answered. By the morning of my pointless deadline, God said, “Not yet.” I was beyond devastated. How can this possibly be? How could God have let me believe for five whole days that all of our dreams were coming true? How could He let me believe that all those years of waiting to get married, all the early infertility treatments, cancer, body-mutilating surgeries, charting and injections were going to be worth it? What kind of God would do that? No God could be “loving” and let us suffer and hope and trust and believe so much in His providential timing just to, in the end, tell us we weren’t fit or good enough or prepared enough to be parents! That was it. All those years of faith and hope and trust were completely wiped out in a single moment of truth—the truth that I wasn’t going to have a baby. I wrote in my journal: “Where are you?!! Jesus was in the desert for forty days. We’ve been here for thirteen years, waiting for a baby. I understand the cross. Was I not already embracing the cross of infertility? Was I not already pouring my heart into your Church and into my job? I accepted the cross ten years ago. Why wait all this time to literally nail me to it? I would have carried it into eternity for you. I would have. I was prepared. Is there still—now, in this unbearable pain and desperation of being stripped of all faith and goodness that I had in me—a possibility that there could be a resurrection for me—me and my George? How much can my George possibly bear Lord? He watched me die once already through cancer, surgery and chemo. He’s carried the weight of my cross of infertility over and over and over again. How will he ever surrender and trust in you? I’m tired of praying. I’m tired of hoping. I’m tired of waiting. What is left for us? Do you really not see us? Do you really not love us?? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why have you forsaken me and my George?” I couldn’t pray. I couldn’t look at Jesus or Mary and say one word—just cry and bitterly walk away. I couldn’t journal or go to Mass and I had a terrible time going to work. This was the last straw. I couldn’t trust a God who could be so cruel. Why couldn’t He just tell me a couple days sooner! I couldn’t understand that. What’s two days to the Creator of Time? Would it not have been worth it to Him to protect my faith in Him by giving me those two days? I was lost. More lost than I had ever been in my life. I had nowhere to go from there. No hope, no faith, no trust, no purpose, and not even a Father or Brother or Mother to talk to about it. I was beyond bitter and beyond despair. Jesus did not let me stay in that state long. I soon realized that He said he would be with me until the end of time. He felt abandoned too, so if nothing else, I still had that connection to Him. But I questioned how I could talk to Jesus if I had no belief that the Father loved me. Jesus is one with the Father. Hell is the absence of God and that was exactly where I was. I kept hearing the Apostle Peter’s voice in my head, “Where else can we go?” There was nowhere else to go. There is no life without God. I wondered, if God would still allow us to have a baby the next month or the month after that, would I be able to forget how rejected and abandoned He made me feel in that moment? Would I ever be able to trust Him again? I just couldn’t see how abandoning me and shattering my heart and faith could glorify God in the end. Isn’t that the whole point to our existence—to love and glorify Him? I was already there! Why even tell me about the fibroid and endometriosis? I had already surrendered. I had already accepted my cross. I couldn’t understand. At one point I asked George if he still believed God loved us. Much to my surprise, he said, “Yes.” I asked why he believed it and he said, “Because we still have so much. We still have each other and our health and the ability to try again.” I was still angry and hurt, but I knew I had to make a conscious choice between believing that either God loved me or He didn’t. I thought it through and realized there was no purpose to life, no hope in a future to believe that God didn’t love me. By sheer process of elimination that meant He simply had to love me. I couldn’t make sense of the way He was proving that to me, but I had to believe in the deepest foundation of my soul that He had to love me. I wouldn’t even exist if He didn’t.