Replacing Brokenness with Restoration

 

        This week is Infertility Awareness Week.

It’s also my birthday week. I’m officially 38 years old.

My birthday is typically a time of reflection for me, not only on the last year of my life, but on where my life has led me to so far. In my 38 years, I have grown into the person I am right now; all the heartbreaks, failures, achievements, and successes has brought me to this point.

For the most part, this is truly something to celebrate.

But I have also become slightly jaded about my birthday since starting my journey with infertility and loss. Each birthday was a marker of what I didn’t yet have, and another tick on the clock to a time when I would never be able to achieve that thing again. In these years of desperately longing for a baby, each birthday that passed was inching me closer to a time when my body literally would not be able to give me that child. There were times where I genuinely thought I had already reached that place, that there was something broken in my body that would prevent us from having a biological child of our own.

The misconception for those outside of the infertility and loss community is that, if you eventually have a rainbow baby, the trauma and the hurt from that season just goes away. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

My angel baby will always be dead. I will always wonder who they would’ve been if I had been able to bring them earth side. My son does not replace them. 

I will always be infertile. I will likely always need medical assistance to have another baby, and there are exactly zero guarantees that my two snowflakes babies will ever come earth side with their brother. 

So the brokenness I felt in those years where we didn’t know if we’d have a biological child never fully went away. In fact, I’d argue that it’s just as strong now as it was then since we are now working towards growing our family.

I have had the unfortunate pleasure of also experiencing brokenness in motherhood outside of my pregnancy loss and infertility. I also suffered from low supply during my breastfeeding journey with my son. While this was something I navigated with a lot of positivity (after all I learned on my journey with infertility, having this happen didn’t seem tragic for me), it didn’t change the fact that it compounded my feelings of brokenness.

As a woman, it can be devastating to experience things like pregnancy loss, infertility, and low supply when it feels like that is what your body is supposed to be made for. We see this belief perpetuated by the people in the Bible- a woman’s sole value at that time was her ability to have a child, and many of our biblical heroines experienced seasons of barrenness that left them on the outskirts of society. And while many would argue that our culture has become much more feminist where that’s not the only thing we expect out of women anymore, the gender gap would say otherwise. It might not be the only thing we value from women in today’s culture, but it is still expected that a woman wants to and can have children. Not only does this leave women struggling with recurrent loss and infertility on the outskirts, but women who simply do not want kids as well. If this wasn’t true, we wouldn’t still be trying to convince people that the question, “When are you going to have kids?” is rude.

Regardless of these politics, women who desperately want to have children but struggle to or flat out can’t tend to walk through our world today feeling broken. We simultaneously call having a baby a miracle and see women all around us doing it with ease everyday. In truth, I think people who believe having a baby is easy to achieve are just wildly misinformed about biology- anyone who has been in the throws of trying to conceive, whether they get pregnant easily or not, knows that there are so many things that must line up perfectly for a child to be conceived and ultimately born into this world.

And yet, I have times where I feel broken. My body couldn’t keep my first baby alive for longer than a week. After that, it was so broken that it required months of unsuccessful treatments, thousands of dollars, and immense physical and emotional toil for our IVF pregnancy to succeed. And when I finally brought my Rainbow into the world? My body couldn’t even be bothered to produce enough milk to feed him.

Broken, broken, broken.

Anxiety can cause us to feel broken- physically, emotionally, mentally- believing that there is something wrong with us if we can’t do or achieve something we think we should do. I haven’t even mentioned that mental brokenness I felt during this season- and sometimes still today- because of the anxiety all of this causes me and the medications I have to take to manage that.

Some people might think that, for a body this broken, I am in need of a physical healing from God so that my brain can control my anxieties, my body can make and carry babies, and then make milk to feed them.

But even in the trenches of these battles, I never really longed for a physical healing.

What I wanted more than anything was a mental restoration.

The first mention of “restoration” in Scripture is in Genesis 20 with a character very familiar to us: Abraham. This story takes place before the birth of Isaac, during Abraham and Sarah’s battle with infertility and waiting for God to fulfill His promise. Does that comfort anyone like it does me?

After God first told Abraham to “go,” Abraham journeyed from his hometown to what would eventually be the Promised Land, staying in many places along the way. At one point, he stopped in Gerar, and while living there, he told the people that Sarah was his sister instead of his wife (turns out this isn’t technically a lie- Abraham later reveals that Sarah is in fact his half sister). This leads to the king sending for Sarah and taking her for himself since he found her appealing.

God then comes to the king in a dream to tell him that Sarah’s a married woman. The king is appalled! He argues with God that he didn’t know she was married, and therefore he should not be blamed for this situation. God agrees and tells the king that this is why He made sure Sarah was not touched or violated. Then He commands, “Now return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all who belong to you will die” (Genesis 20:7 NIV). The KJV uses “restore” in this verse; the Hebrew definition for this word is “turn back, come back, refresh, repair, lead away, show turning, brought back.” Abraham needed his wife to be brought back to him physically, yes, but I would imagine the trauma they both experienced in this separation required God to repair and refresh their hope and peace.

Indeed, the king recognizes what this experience may have caused, so when he returns Sarah to Abraham, he gives them sheep, cattle, slaves, land, and money to cover the offense that was done to her- even though he never physically violated her. As a result, Abraham prays to God and God heals the barrenness He inflicted on all the women in Gerar, including the queen, because of what the king had done with Sarah.

Depending on the circumstances of our loss and infertility, we may need physical healing to solve our problems. But we also know that that sort of healing does not always happen this side of heaven. God created humans to procreate, but we see Him promise the struggles of childbirth to Eve as punishment for the sin she helped bring into the world. From that moment, our human flesh started to break down towards death, and this- the entrance of sin into the world and NOT your personal sin- is what has led to the struggles of loss and infertility.

 What we can guarantee that God will provide us for our feelings of brokenness is a repairing of our thoughts, a turning back of our view of ourselves. While God created humankind to procreate, He created each of us in His image, as His child, and He loves each of us dearly. He wants to restore our view of our brokenness to see ourselves in this image, and to trust that even the way our body is breaking down because of the Fall will be used for His good. “Be fruitful and multiply” doesn’t mean having babies; it means spreading the word of God and growing His kingdom, and we all have the ability to do this if we allow God to turn us away from our brokenness back to Him.

If you’re like me, you may already be thinking, “I know that my personal sin caused this physical brokenness in my body.” And for you, it might even be true. I don’t know your journey. But I do know that God absolutely will not leave you in this brokenness because of this sin. Isaiah 57:18 says, “I have seen their ways, but I will heal them; I will guide them and restore comfort to Israel’s mourners” (NIV). This verse is from a section of Isaiah titled, “Comfort for Israel.” It specifically lays out all the ways Israel turned their backs on God- He saw their sin and still promised to heal AND restore them. Your physical healing may not come until heaven, but your mental restoration can come today!

The Hebrew word used in this passage means, “be at peace; make peace with; cause to be at peace; be complete, sound; make safe; make whole.” God wants us to be at peace with the journey He has laid out for us that includes loss and infertility. He wants us to be of sound mind, to feel complete in the goodness He has and/or will bring out of it all. He wants us to feel safe and whole- including loss and infertility- because this is who He created us to be! He wants us to clearly see the beauty despite the brokenness.

Speaking of seeing clearly, a lot of Jesus’s miracles use the word “restore.” The one I find to be the most symbolic of this journey is from Mark 8. By this point, Jesus has a reputation for healing, so some people bring a blind man to Him. Jesus proceeds to spit on this man’s eyes and place His hands over them, and then asks the man if he can see anything. What the man describes indicates that his sight is coming back but he can’t see clearly. So Jesus repeats the process: spits on his eyes, places His hands over them, and “Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly” (Mark 8:25b NIV). 

I love that Scripture doesn’t say, “His eyes were healed.” This would only indicate a physical healing. But because this man’s “sight was restored,” this can be physical and mental. Not only could this man clearly see the objects around him, but he could clearly see the Man in front of him. He knew that Jesus was who He claimed to be because of this miracle that He had done for him.

I also find it interesting that it takes Jesus twice to heal this man. Is it because His powers are not strong enough to do it in one try? Definitely not. I think it’s because Jesus wants us to know that the restoration He provides takes time. It’s not going to be an immediate turn around that we no longer feel the brokenness of our bodies because of infertility and loss. It probably won’t even be permanent in our human hearts. God granted me this restoration over my infertility and loss so that, when I faced low supply, I was able to make peace with it pretty easily. But I still had days when I felt that brokenness weighing heavily in my heart and I had to seek His restoration again. We can go back to Jesus again and again, and He will continue to repeat the process to help us see clearly as many times as we need it.

Replacing brokenness with restoration allows God to heal us- physically, emotionally, mentally- in His way so that we can joyfully see ourselves as whole, even if and when these things are not perfect in our lives. Our physical healing may not come “until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21 NIV), but Jesus can restore our view of ourselves to wholeness today. We just need to turn towards Him and ask.