Welcome to Day Eight of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s Theme is “The Painful Struggle of Infertility.”

The quote for today reads this way:

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten— the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm— my great army that I sent among you..”

• Joel 2:25

What many people are desperate to have are the very things that others recklessly throw away. What is cherished, intimately longed for, and desperately sought after by so many is discarded by others without so much as a fleeting thought.

Such is the agonizing dilemma of those facing the pain of infertility. Having squarely set decades of dreams on the immense privilege of having a child, couples find their dreams brought to a jarring and often unexpected halt. Facing the brutal possibility of being childless, these couples expend massive amounts of time, emotional energy, and personal resources to salvage a dream that seems to slip further away with every attempt to save it.

Wildly gyrating emotions spin off sporadic thoughts of physical or personal inadequacy. We wonder if this is punishment for some perceived offense that is only now being executed on our passion to hold a child. Thoughts of injustice as held against the reality that life is unjust. An uninvited jealousy of other couples who were able to bear children that runs head-long against the very real joy that we have for them. And then, the brutal thought of those who recklessly abort the very thing that we would give the entirety our lives to hold. The turmoil is unspeakable. The pain unfathomable.

Life robs us in many ways. But God enriches us in every way. What the world takes, God will restore. We will never lose anything that God cannot and will not give back to us many times over. The shape and form of what He gives may not resemble what we lost, but it will provide the healing that we need. The truth of these statements will never and can never be offset by the depth, intensity, size, or pain of any loss…ever.

Prayer

Dear God:

I know that life is full of loss. It’s all around me and it’s everywhere within me. In this world, we can’t get away from it. I know that because I’ve done my level best to do exactly that. And despite those efforts, it seems like some sort of loss is always lying in wait just around the corner of every dream that I’ve ever had.

But Lord, sometimes the losses are so big, so deep, so life-altering, so unjust, so seemingly impossible to live with…so everything that they should not be that I have a hard time accepting them. The inability to conceive a child is one of those. I’m way too human and way too fragile to take the really brutal losses and somehow find a safe or reasonable place for them despite how much I want to do that.

You know life can be brutal. You’re no stranger to any of that. You lived it. You endured it. You knew it was coming for You from the beginning of creation. You stepped into this world knowing that it was staring You in the face.

But knowing that kind of brutality, You said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Dear God, fill the hole left by the hope of a child. I don’t want to play the victim; I want to be the victor. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life pouting; I want to live my days prevailing. I want to rest on the fact that nothing can be taken from me that You cannot replace many times over in whatever way You decide to do that. I desperately want to live with that reality, with that hope, and with that peace.

I pray all of this in Jesus’s Name. Amen.

A Thought to Carry With Me Today

“If I have never had, or worse yet, I have lost the conviction that life (despite all of the blows it wields and the savagery that it spawns) is nonetheless an incalculable privilege, I will have in that single loss forfeited the whole of my life and effectively wiped out any hope that I can or will do anything other than exist.”

Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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Have a great day!