Waiting isn’t my strong point. I can get impatient standing in a line of just four people at a grocery store. And waiting for the pot to boil for my morning cup of tea can seem like an eternity.
But waiting for the big things in life? That’s been even harder, but probably the methods that God has used to teach me the biggest lessons.
I waited, too long I thought, to get married. In my mid-twenties, I didn’t know if I’d ever meet someone. But I did (at church, no less), and at 28 got married.
First comes marriage, then comes children, right? Walking the road of infertility doesn’t usually come to mind. But that’s the path God had for me. Each month became a rollercoaster of emotions. My hopes would rise that this month be the month, only to then plummet when the answer was no yet again. I became more emotional and sometimes angry. I so related to the words of Rachel to Jacob, “Give me children, or I’ll die!” (Gen. 30:1).
Over time, God spoke to my heart through His Word, my pastor, and other means. I realized I had been acting like a spoiled child—demanding that God give me what I want when I wanted it. I knew the Lord was asking me to take this desire for children and surrender it to Him, to lay it down at His feet, to let go, and be willing to receive whatever He had for me whether that included children or not.
After a lot of praying and searching, my husband and I decided to pursue adoption. Again, we learned the lessons of waiting and surrender. Months passed. One year. Then two. Then a glimmer of hope ended in a failed adoption. I began to wonder if this was God’s answer—if the answer to the question of having children, even through adoption, was also no. And through many tears, I surrendered again. If we were never to have children, then that was OK. It just meant that God had a different plan for our lives and He would satisfy my desires with “good things (Ps. 103:5), even if it wasn’t with exactly what I wanted.
Finally one day we got a call from a friend. The daughter of a family in their church had just had a baby boy, and they were considering adoption. Were we interested?
Were we ever! Two days later, that little boy, whom we named Jeremiah after Jeremiah 1:5, came home from the hospital with us. We had to wait five more weeks for some legal issues to be taken care of before we knew he would stay with us—again a time of surrendering our desires and asking God to do what was best for this little boy. But the answer was yes. Jeremiah was to be our son.
Fast forward a few years later. We still wanted to grow our family and, after many months of praying, we made an appointment for the next step in what we hoped would be the adoption of a second child.
But God had different plans. I had been feeling strange for a few weeks, and the night before our appointment, finally decided to take a pregnancy test. I could hardly believe it when the positive answer appeared. I ran to tell my husband. We laughed. We cried. We laughed some more. (Now I understand why Abraham and Sarah chose the name “Isaac,” which means laughter, for their long-awaited son.) What we thought would never happen was happening!
When we finally started to share our news, I had someone ask if I was fearful of this pregnancy ending in miscarriage. But I had already decided that if I focused too much on what could happen, I would miss out on the joy of just being pregnant. If the Lord chose to take our baby home before we got to meet him or her, I would be deeply grieved. But I would still choose to praise Him for the gift of being pregnant—a gift I never thought I would get to experience.
On April 9, we received the gift of our daughter, Sarah Elisabeth, born healthy and weighing a whopping 9 lbs. 13 oz. As I look at my son and my daughter, both with their own special, miraculous stories, I think of the verse in Genesis, “Is anything too hard for the LORD?” (Gen. 18:14).
After years of surrendering the desire to want to be a mom, now that I am one, God is teaching me different lessons of surrender. As I deal with the needs of small children, I have to surrender my time, my money, and my physical body, among other things. But most importantly, I have to surrender these children themselves, entrusting their lives and their future to God.
The thing is whether we’re married or single, with children or without, we all have to surrender. What issues of surrender are you dealing with? How can you put this principle of surrendering to God into practice on a daily basis?
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