You exist because I yearned

I yearned for you.

I begged. 

I pleaded. 

I cried. 

I prayed. 

I sobbed. 

I grieved.

I met with any doctor who would listen. I gave myself shots. Your Daddy gave me shots. I was probed.  I was tested. I went to more appointments than I could count.

We did ultrasounds and blood draws and procedures and more ultrasounds.

We conferred and conferenced and discussed and researched and educated ourselves.

They said Clomid. We did that three times.

Three times it didn't work.

They said artificial insemination. We did that five times.

Five times it didn't work.

Then they said in vitro fertilization. We tried that four times.

Four times it didn't work.

If they said to try it, we found the money, and we tried it. We borrowed it. We scrimped for it. We gave up anything we could for it.

We did all this for you.

But still you didn't come.

We passed our fifth anniversary. Our seventh. Our ninth.

Still infertile.

Still childless.

I wanted you so badly that some days I felt like my heart could break from the desire -- form how much I yearned to hold someone I hadn't ever met.

I pictured you. 

I dreamed of you. 

I thought of you. 

I longed for you.

And so we kept pressing. Kept trying. Kept pushing. Kept hoping. Kept yearning for YOU.

Invitro? One more time?

Yes. One more.

The very last time we tried IVF, two tiny embryos were dropped into my womb. The ultrasound tech whispered, "Two little shooting stars," as the camera watched you and your sibling glide into my womb.

More waiting.

More dreaming.

More hoping.

More yearning.

And if we were honest, we would have said that we didn't believe we would ever meet you.

Today, you are here and you are 15 months old and you have long brown hair and big blue eyes and a personality that constantly tells us you will not let the world tell you who you are.

Today, you are climbing and putting fistfuls of food into your mouth and smearing spaghetti in your hair and saying new words every chance you can. You are giving huge hugs and saying, "Na!" when you plant a kiss on our cheek. You are starting to run and read books and ...

I love you.

I yearned for you.

I never gave up on you.

And because of that desire and a really cool God

I am your mom.

You exist because I yearned.

And I yearned because I loved you before I knew you.

And now I know you.

And I love you Hannah Joy.

It's a pleasure to meet you.

It's a pleasure to be your Mommy.

Better, not Bitter!

Click here to read this great article by Jessica Hiltz entitled "Better, no Bitter!" "It wasn't the road I had planned on taking," Jessica writes. "Nevertheless, it was the road that God had chosen, and I had two options: I could become bitter or better."

She encourages those traversing the road of infertility to become better by:

1. Searching for encouragement in God's Word
2. Singing hymns and spiritual songs
3. Surrounding yourself with Godly friends who lift you up

Click the link above to read the article in its entirety!

'Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus

There was a point in my life that I would sing this hymn ,and boom it with all my heart (or boom it quietly with all my heart as not to ruin it for those around me) Trust Jesus? Of course I trusted Jesus. Who wouldn’t?

And all my life, I thought I did trust in the Lord. The Lord was great! He had given me two loving parents, a loving spouse, a roof over my head, a Christian school to attend, athletic abilities that paid for college, fantastic friends, great churches, good health, every job I had applied for. Nothing bad had ever really happened to me.
Of course I trusted Him.

The fact is, trust is easy when your life is going as planned. But when life isn’t going the way you drew it up? How do you trust him then? Trust Him? Well, sort of. I mean, I want to trust Him, but why is He choosing to do things this way? Why doesn't He do them my way? Why did He allow that to happen? He defeated sin.

Infertility shook my trust to the core.

In my case, it was looking around me and questioning all the people God had given a child to instead of giving one to me. Recently it was a little Brazilian baby thrown in the river in a plastic bag. (She survived and people were soon lining up to adopt her.) Mothers having abortions. Teenage mothers. Abusive parents. "Wait!" I screamed at the TV or at the Lord. "Here I am! Give me those babies! Bless me with a pregnancy! I want those children!" Those were moments when I looked to the Lord and said, "Lord, I'm not sure I do trust You. Do you know what you are doing?"

Two and a half years into my infertility journey, a new woman joined us one evening for our quarterly support group meeting. As we listened to her voice her trust issues out loud, another woman with twins from embryo adoption spoke up. "I know what God was thinking. If I wouldn't have travelled the road I traveled, I wouldn't have these two boys -- and these are my boys."

As I was driving home that night, I had the moment I had wanted since this battle had begun. I somehow, finally, trusted the Lord. Or at least understood what that meant. I have been trying so hard -- every step of this journey, but that night I could honestly sing this song and mean it. I realized that while the Lord didn't cause this pain, he was using it every day.

Romans 8:28-31 says: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to HIS purpose." (NIV) Wait a minute! If not for infertility, I wouldn't have met this woman that night. If my friend with the twins hadn't hadn’t struggled to conceive, she wouldn't have her twins. If not for infertility, what would my faith be?

I don't think, prior to infertility, I would be able to understand when a friend told me they were questioning their faith or grieving a disappointment -- whatever it may be. But now, because of infertility, I understand.
Wendi, trust Me. I've got your best interest in mind. I didn't cause this, but I will use this in your life. When you look back, you will understand, either on earth or in heaven, why things happened the way they did. Trust Me.

Two and a half more years would pass. Five years and more infertility treatments than one person should ever attempt. I am not saying that during that time I did not waver again in my faith or in my trust. I did. Often. But I was able to remember that no matter how my story played out, the Lord had my soul -- my future -- in the palm of my hand. And I could trust that.

What would I tell infertile me?

I got an email from a friend dealing with infertility today. She asked me a question.

"If you could go back in time and tell infertile Wendi one thing, what would it be?"

It's funny she asked that. It's a question I've thought about many times. And I've formulated many different answers.

But here's the one that resonates most within me.

I would tell myself to try my hardest to enjoy my life. To try to embrace where I am at currently instead of wishing the months and years to speed ahead until our next treatment or the next holiday that maybe I would be a mom. I would tell myself to sleep in as often as I could. I would tell myself to take more naps. Lie in bed and watch movies and don't get up just for the sheer relaxation of lying around Wendi! I would tell myself to go on as many dates with my husband as I could. Go for runs whenever you want Wendi. Take long walks in the park for no reason at all. Travel. Travel. Travel some more. Volunteer. Embrace your hobbies. Sit on the kitchen counter and drink a coke and stay up way too late talking with a girlfriend. Don't worry so much about becoming a mom. Try to remember that God doesn't promise us tomorrow. Children won't solve your fears of being alone Wendi. And then travel some more gosh darn it!

There's more. But you get the general idea.

I think we have this idea that if we "just get married" or if we "just have kids" or if we "just get this job" or if we "could just pay off this debt" or ... well, the list could go on and on, that then things will be perfect.

But they won't. We will never arrive. There will always be something we are seeking. There will always be sadness and disappointments. Only a relationship with our Heavenly Father can bring us the complete peace we think a certain thing will.

When we pulled away from the hospital with little two-day-old Isaac strapped into his car seat on May 9, 2008 ... with the lawyer and nurse waving at us and feeling like we had no idea what we were doing ... I realized that I was now, nearly officially, a mom. (His five month court hearing would solidify it.) But I didn't really feel different. Something could happen to Isaac the next day. Something could happen to all of us on the way home. Isaac was the child we always hoped to have. But he was not the answer to the hole in our life we often try to fill with things other than Christ.

I pray for those of you today praying for answer to your prayers. For many of you it is a child. For others of you it is something else. A spouse. A job. Reconciliation.

Whatever it is, I hope I can encourage you with three main tidbits of hope:

1. Embrace, as best you can, where you are today.
2. Believe that miracles are possible.
3. Remember that only Christ will bring you the peace you seek.

I always seem to have a group of about 5-10 women in my life that are in my "infertility group" of the moment. Women that I am watching walk the walk I walked just a few years ago. Please know that you are at the forefront of my mind all the time. Really. I am thinking of you by name while I write this. When I see you. When I email you. When I talk to you. I am thinking of you. I am wanting to fix it. And I am praying for the answer to your prayer.

Growing thru Grief

Whenever I have a free (rare) moment, I continue to work on making my blog into a book that I can get a hard copy of. This means reading a lot of past entries. I am still back on the first years of my blog: 2005-2006.

How ironic is it that on that day, November 26, 2010, I stumbled upon an entry from November 26, 2006? Four years to the day.

We had just suffered another failed IVF. I don't even remember which number that one was. And I had just been forced, emotionally, to leave a church service that was especially painful. After sobbing in a Target parking lot with my husband who was helpless to stop my pain or his, I went home and read this passage from a tiny little book I had that comforted me during those days: Good Grief.

Back then, four years ago to the day, I was inspired by the preface of the book. Now I look back and compare what I read then to what I feel now, on the "other side" of that valley.

• We come out of our grief experience at a slightly higher level of maturity than before. Me? More mature! Absolutely. I am a better parent. I am a better wife. I am a more compassionate individual. I grew in leaps and bounds during that long and dark five years of my life. I wouldn't use the word "slightly." I grew incredibly. I will never look at life the same. I will never assume there is not someone hurting. I don't take my kids for granted. I understand the miracle that life is.
• We come out of our grief as deeper persons because we have been down in the depths of despair and know what it is like. Prior to dealing with infertility, I never understood why people questioned their faith. I struggled to recognize why someone could be mad at God. I didn't understand pain. I had a "just-world" mentality. Today I have a mentality that understands that sometimes life doesn't follow the path we thought it would. The question is: what do we plan to do with the course our life takes?
• We come out of it stronger, for we have had to learn how to use our spiritual muscles to climb the rugged mountain trails. You can't live through grief and not come out of it stronger. Not getting what you want forces you to truly rely on the Lord. I often say that while on our 2007 mission trip to Nigeria I became inspired to see how these people lived their faith. I realized that they lived their faith because faith was all they had to live. We, in America, take so much for granted. We have so much and we demand so much. When all you have is God by having what you want pulled out from under you, you became a stronger person. Spiritually e
• We come out of it better able to help others. We have walked through the valley of the shadow of grief. We can understand. In the midst of our infertility journey, I stood by a close friend during her divorce and realized that I could relate to her pain because I had experienced my own loss. I knew what the depths felt like and knew how to be in the depths with someone else.

As always, I have about a half dozen women in my life right now that I am watching travel the infertile road. I am so sorry you are on this road. I pray that in the midst of this grief, you see the goodness. You see the growth. You see what I couldn't see until now, four years later. Bless you friends.

And thank you those of you who stood along side me during those days of grief. For those of you who have been with me for the entirety of my journey, would you mind sharing what you learned watching me go through this journey in the comments? Or maybe just a memory from my journey? I'm sure it would minister to me and the people who read this entry with grief present at this moment.

How Comforters are Created

Sunday evening, my friend Becky (two failed IVF's before moving onto adoption) joined our family and Isaac's birth grandmother, Joni, for dinner. As dinner concluded, the three of us gals found ourselves sitting around the dinner table talking about infertility and pregnancy loss. Both Joan, Becky, and I have each travelled (and are travelling) a lengthy and hard road to parenthood. It was wonderful to be able to talk with two kindred spirits about a topic so close to my heart.

Joan had shared a devotional passage with me from one of Charles Stanley's publications early on in her visit to Eglin. I have found many scriptures that have brought me comfort in the course of our journey to parenthood, but I don't remember ever having read this scripture:

2 Cor 1:3-4 "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God."

How have I missed these verses for all these years?!

I can vividly remember walking out of a public restroom stall during an especially painful time of our infertility journey. I don't remember exactly where I was or exactly which bad news we had just received. But I do remember shutting that bathroom stall door, putting my face in my hands, and sobbing. I remember telling the Lord, "That's it! That's enough pain! I now feel like I have experienced enough pain to understand it and provide understanding to others."

Looking back, I can now see that I didn't possibly have enough understanding to relate to the plight of others on this journey. God needed me to have more. He needed me to really go into the valley so that I could truly understand the hurt people feel when they are there. Being in the valley is horrible. It hurts so badly. But he needed me to be there so I could understand what it felt like.

That pain has allowed me not only to be there for new friends like Becky as they travel the road we just travelled. It is a pain that transcends infertility and moves into many other realms. I remember the divorce of another dear friend. As I sat in my living room crying with her, I remember feeling like I understood exactly what it felt like to have a dream ripped out from underneath you. She had so many thoughts and plans and hopes for her life. What did she do with those dreams that would never come true? I didn't understand what divorce felt like. But I did understand what the loss of a dream and the grief that accompanies that loss feels like. That I understood.

Here is the devotional in its entirety. I pray it ministers to you as it has to me.

Job asked a challenging question in his time of suffering: "Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?" (Job 2:10). Even hardship has a place in the Lord's plan.

During a particularly painful time in my life, I decided that I ought to glean something from my distress. That decision allowed the Lord to open up a well of compassion in my heart that I often dip from to comfort those facing similar trials.

I found great solace in Paul's words about God, who "comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction" (2 Cor 1:4). Think about the kind of people you seek out when you feel hurt. You want someone who has felt your pain, right? A person who's walked the path we find ourselves on can understand our suffering and provide wise counsel. According to the apostle, passing through a "valley experience" prepares us to be a blessing and encouragement to those who must go through something similar later. What's required is that we accept the adversity He has placed in our way and choose to learn from the situation.

God is the Lord and Master of our life, and He therefore has the right to use us as comforters and encouragers to those in our sphere of influence. As His servants, we must be willing to receive whatever training is necessary to complete His will, even when it hurts. Do not waste your suffering! Instead, use it to bring glory to the Lord.

'Tis So Sweet To Trust in the Lord

This post was originally written on January 31, 2006. I don't think I can attribute it to purely coincidence that our first biological son, Elijah, was born on January 31, 2009. Three years to the day that I wrote about learning to trust God in the midst of infertility. And somehow, I find myself ready to post this on January 31, 2012. God is in even the small things!

’TIS SO SWEET TO TRUST IN JESUS

’Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus,

And to take Him at His Word;

Just to rest upon His promise,

And to know, “Thus says the Lord!”

Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him!

How I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er

Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus!

O for grace to trust Him more!

O how sweet to trust in Jesus,

Just to trust His cleansing blood;

And in simple faith to plunge me

’Neath the healing, cleansing flood!

Yes, ’tis sweet to trust in Jesus,

Just from sin and self to cease;

Just from Jesus simply taking

Life and rest, and joy and peace.

I’m so glad I learned to trust Thee,

Precious Jesus, Savior, Friend;

And I know that Thou art with me,

Wilt be with me to the end.

How many times I have sung this hymn? How many times have we sung this hymn? As I write this now, this song is playing in the background on the website where I copied the lyrics from.

I must admit that all my life, I would sing this hymn, or something like it, and boom it with all my heart (or boom it quietly with all my heart as not to ruin it for those around me who sing much better than I.)

And all my life, I thought I did trust in the Lord. The Lord was great! He had given me two loving parents, a loving spouse, a roof over my head, a Christian school to attend, athletic abilities that paid for college, fantastic friends, great churches, health. Nothing bad had happened to me. Of course I trusted Him.

I was in the laundry room talking to a dear friend a few days ago. As we spoke, we both, in our own way, had come to realize that trust is easy when your life is going as planned. While my trust issue is infertility, your trust issue and her trust issue was something different, but it actually all boiled down to the same thing -- wondering what the heck the Lord was thinking?! Where are you Lord? What are you doing?

Recently I have seemed to face this with many people I know -- great Christian people I know who have lost a parent, lost a child, not achieved the career goals they had in mind, been unable to conceive a child, been hurt by something or someone in the church. Suddenly the words of the hymnal become painful to sing. Trust Him? Well, sort of. I mean, I want to trust Him, but why the heck is He doing things this way? Why doesn't He do them my way? Why did He allow that to happen? He defeated sin.

In my case, it is looking around me and listing all the people that God should give me a child to before they give it to them. Yesterday it was a little Brazilian baby thrown in the river in a plastic bag. (She survived and people are now lining up to adopt her.) It's the people who have abortions (126,000 each day and 55 million each year). It's the teenage mothers or those who don't seem to have the money to afford kids having kids. It's the men and women who allow their children to be emotionally or physically or sexually abused. "Wait!" I scream at the TV or at the Lord. "Here I am and here are all the women in my support group. Give us those babies! Bless us with their pregnancy! We want those children!" It's a moment when I look to the Lord and say, "Lord, I'm not sure I do trust You. Do you know what the heck you are doing?"

If you are reading this, I don't expect you to relate to the infertility part, but as a dear cousin told me, "I can't relate to the infertility part, but I can relate to never being given the job I want." Or maybe you lost a parent who didn't deserve to die. Or maybe your marriage ended despite everything you tried to do. Have you wondered what God is thinking?

I am reminded from a scene in Return to Me (the greatest movie EVER!) I don't want to ruin it for you if you haven't seen it. But if you have, I am sure you remember when Grace (Minnie Driver) is sitting in Bonnie Hunt's living room sobbing due to the events that just transpired and admist her tears she says, "What was God thinking?" I can so relate to that moment even though I can't relate to what happened.

Some of you know that I am in am in an infertility Support Group at my church. It's a group that I helped start with two other women. We now have about 15-20 women involved off and on. (It's not a group that I want to be a life-long member of by the way.) The group is called Hearts Like Hannah. Last night we held our quarterly "Caribou Coffee" meeting and a new woman joined us who had tons of questions -- tons of things that she wanted to know if "anyone else felt." We talked to her and answered her questions and completely understood every bit of where she was coming from. Another woman there has twins from embryo adoption. She looked at me last night and basically said, "I know what God was thinking. If I wouldn't have travelled the road I travelled, I wouldn't have these two boys -- and these are my boys."

As I was driving home, I had the moment I had wanted since this journey started shortly after my 26th birthday. I somehow, finally, trusted the Lord. I have been trying so hard -- every step of this journey, but last night I could honestly sing this song and mean it. I realized that while the Lord didn't cause this disorder I have, he is using it every day. Romans 8:28-31 says, "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to HIS purpose." Wait a minute! If I wouldn't have gone through this, I wouldn't have met this woman last night. If my friend with the twins hadn't have gone through this, she wouldn't have the twins she had. If I wouldn't have gone through this I wouldn't have reconnected with old friends. I wouldn't have the faith I have.

More than anything, I don't think I would be able to understand when a friend told me they were questioning their faith or grieving a dissapointment -- whatever it may be. But somehow, now, because of this, I understand. And somehow (and not to say I won't have days where I struggle with this whole trust thing all over again), somehow, I realize that the Lord has the greater picture in His view.

Wendi, trust Me. I've got your best interest in mind. I didn't cause this, but I will use this in your life. When you look back, you will understand, either on earth or in heaven, why things happened the way they did. Trust Me.

I am not saying I won't have doubts in the future, but for today, I am okay. I know that even if I don't have a biological child of my own, the Lord is real, and He has got my soul in the palm of my hand. I trust that.

-- Wendi Kitsteiner