Replacing Bewilderment with Surrender

    As a teacher, I don’t typically like to admit if I don’t have the answer to a kid’s question. I’m supposed to be the expert, the authority they look to for answers to their questions. So if they ask me something and I don’t know the answer, I usually feel it physically: my body wants to reject the idea that I don’t have the answer.

In reality, I know it’s totally unreasonable that I should have all the answers for my students. I also know that it’s helpful for them to see me grapple with things or not always have an answer- it gives them confidence to do the same in their own learning. And over the years, I have learned how to lean into this and get more comfortable with saying, “I don’t know! Let’s find out together!” when I don’t have answers. But it is by no means natural for me to do so.

This is true in my personal life as well, and it reared its ugly head when my husband and I started walking the path of infertility.

I was 32 when we started trying for a baby, and due to my “advanced” age, I was already worried we would struggle before we even started. After about 6 months with no success, my mom mentioned to her own doctor that we were trying, and because of my age, she agreed to see me right away to start a fertility work up. We had blood work done, ultrasounds and other medical tests completed, and on paper, everything looked great. Everything came back indicating that we should have no issues eventually conceiving a child. But through the months of tests and appointments, we still had no luck.

If you’ve been following my story for a while, you know that right before we were set to start fertility treatments, I got pregnant and subsequently miscarried a week later. At our appointment before this happened, which occurred in September of 2018, our fertility doctor felt confident he would have me pregnant by the end of the calendar year. When we finally returned to him in the spring of 2019, he was still confident that it would not take many cycles of treatment for us to have a baby. We started with an ovulation drug and timed intercourse. Three rounds of that were unsuccessful, so we switched to IUI coupled with the ovulation drug. We tried this twice, still without success. At this point, our doctor suggested we pursue IVF.

If you’re keeping track, at our initial consult, our doctor thought we’d get pregnant within three months of treatments. Now, at five months in, we had no success and were recommended for intense and expensive treatment. I was bewildered. Everything on paper said there was nothing wrong. It seemed like we should have no trouble getting pregnant, even at our age. People who end up in IVF have serious fertility diagnoses, right? Closed Fallopian tubes. Aggressive PCOS. Low sperm motility. Inhospitable environment. We didn’t have any of that. But the longer we walked the path, the longer we failed, the more apparent it became that we were dealing with unexplained infertility.

Fifteen percent of couples who seek fertility treatments have unexplained infertility. This was not a club I wanted to be a part of (which seems to be a trend in the journey God has me on with motherhood). When we started the workup and consultations, I thought, “It will be hard to hear, but at least we’ll know why we are struggling so much. And then we’ll have a plan to move forward.” But every appointment, we only heard good stuff. “Your numbers are great!” “Your tubes are open!” “You’re responding well to treatment!” And yet we still had no baby.

Now here we were, trying to make decisions about finances and schedules to start IVF. I didn’t understand how we ended up in this position.

I revisited this place of bewilderment when we finished up the retrieval portion of our IVF cycle. It seemed a bit like deja vu. After the retrieval, I heard, “We got 23 eggs!” The next day we found out, “Twenty eggs fertilized!” After three days, we got the call that we had quite a few highly graded embryos developing- more good news. But by day 5, “We have one embryo to freeze.” One. After the two additional days, we only had two more. 

Out of 20 starter embryos, we had lost 17. How? Everything looked great on paper. I had responded well to the treatment, had lots of eggs to work with, and had lots of healthy eggs that took to fertilization. My husband’s numbers for the sperm sample that was used were also the best he had achieved in all of our tests. What in the world was wrong?

When we consulted with our doctor, he did not have a lot of answers. He told us that, without further testing (which would be physically, emotionally, and financially challenging), they wouldn’t be able to tell us why we had such a low success rate with our embryos.

It was the last thing I wanted to hear. I thought he’d finally be able to tell us why we had struggled to get pregnant for two and a half years. Instead, it was more question marks. My anxiety over the possibility of something being wrong with those three little embryos skyrocketed.

Anxiety can cause us to feel bewildered about the things that are happening to us. We wonder why God is allowing, or worse, why He is causing things to turn out the way they are. All we want are answers so we can understand why something is happening. We beg. We plead. And when we are met with silence- no answers to our questions- our anxiety grows, creating a vicious cycle that can eat us alive if we don’t surrender the need to know to God.

While I didn’t find the word “surrender” used a lot in any translation of Scripture, I did find a synonym, “release,” that is used quite a bit. In the KJV, it’s used three times, all in association with laws around releasing people from debt or work.

The first mention is in Deuteronomy 15 when the Israelites are given instructions for the Year of Canceling Debt, or the Year of Jubilee: “At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release” (Genesis 15:1 KJV). The NIV translates this as canceling debt; essentially, anyone who loaned money to someone else would cancel these loans so that the other person would no longer owe them money.

The law gives a very simple reason for why these debts should be released: “However, there need be no poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today” (Deuteronomy 15:4-5 NIV).

When we get wrapped up in bewilderment, demanding answers from God, we’re like creditors seeking repayment of a debt. We think God owes us this, so we pound at the heavens with our prayers of “why?!” But God’s response to us? There’s no debt here. You are not poor for I have provided for you and blessed you richly and I will continue to do so if you are obedient to my will. Release it. Release it to Me. Release Me. We need to release God from giving us all the answers. First of all, if we’re not meant to have them, He won’t give them no matter how much we beg. But second, when we release Him, we release ourselves from this need to know as well, and this allows us to lean more into trust, which is something we’ve already discussed in these blogs as being necessary for this journey.

The Hebrew word here confirms these ideas: “letting drop of exactions, demand, obtaining something from someone; remitting (canceling) exactions, inflicting punishment.” We have to drop the demands for answers. We have to cancel the punishment we think we’re inflicting on God until He tells us why. Continuing down the path of searching will only lead us to more bewilderment and anxiety if God doesn’t intend for us to know.

The second show of release is in Esther 2:18, in which King Xerxes throws a banquet to celebrate the installment of Esther as the new queen, when he releases the people from work to celebrate the holiday. The Hebrew word here includes the definition “permission to rest, quiet.” This is a call to let our bewilderment take a holiday. We have permission to let it rest, let it be quiet. We don’t have to search anymore because it’s not going to make us feel any better if we finally know why. It’s not going to change the journey to a solution.

The third release is associated with a feast- in particular, the Passover. It was a custom of this feast to release a prisoner that the people chose, so in Matthew 27:17 (and several other gospels), when Pontas Pilate went to the crowds to see who they wanted released, he offered them Jesus. Since just the week before, the people had been literally singing praise to Him, Pilate expected them to want His release. But instead, the crowds shouted for Jesus to be crucified, and asked for a murderer named Barabbas to be released instead.

The Greek used in this story holds similar definitions to the Hebrew words we’ve looked at: “set free, let go, release a debtor, free fully, relieve, release one to one.” The thing I love about the fact that this story is a part of this word study is that, while God wants us, the prisoner, to be released from our bewilderment, Jesus will not be released from it. He has the answers. He knows the truth about what is happening within all those situations that we are confused by. And because He went to the cross for us, He knows how those situations will be played out for our God because we have been obedient to believe in Him and trust in His salvation. When we release our bewilderment to God, Jesus takes it on Himself and carries it for us so that our situations can be worked out according to His good plan.

That’s what Jesus came to do! “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners” (Isaiah 61:1 NIV). He’s come to release us from the darkness of this prison we find ourselves in! He even quotes Isaiah when he goes into the synagogue at Nazareth and reads from the scrolls. His reading includes, “He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18b NIV). Because not only does He want to release us from this prison, but He wants us to recover our sight: sight of His promise, sight of His path for us, sight of our trust in Him.

When we replace bewilderment with surrender, we’re able to accept the fact that we won’t always understand why things work out the way they do this side of heaven. And that’s okay. We don’t need the answers in order to move forward in the plan God has to redeem our stories. Releasing this need is how we experience the joy of this again.

If God had given me the answers I had so desperately wanted during our struggling with infertility, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that we didn’t have a baby. It wouldn’t have changed the fact that we were going to have to struggle to achieve parenthood. What it would have changed was my need to rely one hundred percent on Him. Yes, God blessed us with the medicine we needed to bring our Rainbow Baby into this world, but that bewilderment forced me to put the need for a miracle on Him instead of that medicine.

God knows what He’s doing. Even when we’re bewildered. Even when there are no answers. Even when things remain unexplained until we go home to Him. Release it to Him. Let it go. Free Him from that debt. Trust that it is for your good to not know. Trust that He will work it out without those answers. Trust Him for the miracle.