A Victory in spite of Adversity

Over the last month, I have laid low.  I have been very careful about my blogging.  Prior to my trip to Europe, I found fertility consuming my everything thought, my waking breath, my entire world.  It left me feeling drained and depleted.  Only in slumber could I escape its devouring grip on my life.  I knew something needed to change.  For months, I have longed to figure out how I could transform the pattern of my thoughts and the dwelling place of my heart.  As we departed for France, our burdens momentarily eased, the rains cleared for the first time in months and I realized that the answer for me was simple.  If I hoped to change the environment of my being, then I had to change those things that both stimulate and nurture (for better or worse) these fertile (or perhaps infertile more like it) soils of mine.  What is that answer?  Scripture memorization!  For me it was as simple as that.  God says it works.  I have heard countless testimonies of the power of scripture to transforms lives.  I have heard these truths for years.  Yet, I have been reluctant to do it myself.  It started in Europe.  My husband and I picked out a few verses from our reading of the Bible.

“For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance that we should do.” Ephesians 2:10

It has slowly evolved from there.  Over the past month, I have walked in VICTORY!  For the first time in the last year and a half, I am not holding the reigns.  Let me clarify, I have released the reigns of this journey to my Maker.  He has a plan for this.  There is beauty in the ashes.

Somehow over the last few months, I began to allow my blogging world to have a little too much control over me.  I began taking on others stories and projecting them into my own life.  Their miscarriages, their misfortunes, their failed IVF cycles, their complications of pregnancy became future ones of my own.  A month prior to even starting our first IVF cycle, I had already disqualified our upcoming cycle certain of miscarriage or a canceled cycle due to a cyst or SOMETHING.  I weep with those who weep.  I am quick to carry the burdens of friends and family and care deeply for them.  But owning their troubles as my own is a whole different story.  I am called to love others, to pray for others…and yes, to even carry their burdens.  But their burdens are not for me to own, they are not for me to give over power to. There are lessons to be learned from others, but their lessons cannot own our own.  I realized that I had yet again failed to confront my own journey, failed to look it square in the face and embrace it for what it was…MY STORY!  The redemptive story of God moving in my life for His glory.  I have been careful to write, careful to read.  Instead, I am learning to dwell on my Jesus.  Dwell on the fact that he has a plan for me through all of this.  I don’t want to miss what he is up to and what he is doing because I am so busy looking all around me that I forget to look up.

I offer him my life.  I am thankful for what infertility has accomplished through me.  I am thankful for its testimony in my life.  I am thankful for the hardships and the heartache along the way.  I am thankful for the woman it is making me.  I am thankful to have the opportunity to learn such rich life lessons.  AND and I am SO thankful for all of those that I have met along the way.  There will be more challenges ahead and much more adversity in my life.  Hardships that will break me, journeys that will further define me and test my spirit.  My only prayer is that He will help me to live with reckless abandonment for HIM alone.