Replacing Resignation with Perseverance

 

        When you’re in the thick of infertility, when you have no way of knowing if or when you will finally achieve a successful pregnancy, it can feel easy and necessary to just resign yourself to the fact that nothing is going to change and that all your efforts are in vain.

When you’ve experienced loss, whether it’s one or many, when you have no way of knowing if or when you will finally achieve a successful pregnancy, it can feel easy and necessary to just resign yourself to the fact that it will never happen for you.

Let me be clear. In today’s piece, I am in no way suggesting that stopping or pausing fertility treatments or trying to conceive is the wrong choice for everyone. That is absolutely not true. Each woman, each couple, knows individually what they can and cannot endure. Only they know the conversations they’ve had with each other and God. Only they know the physical, emotional, and mental turmoil they’ve suffered. Only they know when it’s the right decision to say, “we are done striving, we accept this path for our life.”

Resignation is not acceptance. Acceptance is walking the journey with God and knowing He has told you it is time and being at peace with that. Resignation is settling for less than what God has for you and believing that He cannot and will not change anything in your current status quo. So if you have made a decision with God to end your journey with fertility treatments or trying to conceive, I am holding you up in prayer that God will continue to grant you peace in that decision. If, however, you have become resigned in your daily existence with infertility, loss, motherhood, anxiety or depression, then this message is for you.

There are things about mothering a toddler that I have accepted as normal and even necessary for this season of life, and there are other things that I have found myself resigned to before God gave me a nudge to persevere in them. Where these two things have converged the most recently is sleep.

Now before I go any further, I am in no way trying to debate how moms choose to put their kids to sleep and how moms choose to respond to night wakings. If you spend one second in the mom social media universe you know that sleep is a hot button issue. My only goal here is to share my experience with resignation so I can set us up to discuss persevering instead. And for me, that experience lately has been with my son’s sleep.

When he was little, my son was a fairly good sleeper. He could go down around 7pm and sleep until somewhere between 2am and 4am, wake for a quick night feed and then go back to sleep fairly easily. Things shifted when he started cutting teeth. I’ve told the story of the two week stretch when he was inconsolable at night cutting his first tooth. But he tended to sleep well outside of those stretches where a new tooth was coming in. When he turned a year and was weaned, we could count on him to sleep through the night unless a tooth was coming in, and even if he woke, he’d resettle quickly.

But last summer we started to see an increase in restlessness when falling asleep. It’d take him almost an hour- and sometimes more- to finally stop moving around enough to fall asleep. There were nights when he’d fussed aloud, which indicated to me that he wanted to go to sleep but couldn’t. So we sought a sleep medicine doctor and learned that he had low iron. We started a supplement soon after.

It has not been the perfect fix I’d imagined it would be. We have had two more checks on his iron levels and it has gone up and down like a yoyo, even on the supplement. There are nights when the restlessness not only impacts falling asleep, but staying asleep, and sometimes it feels like I have a newborn again. At the time of this writing, two nights ago I was up with him from 1am to 4am straight because he was wide awake and restless, having the fifth split night we’ve endured this month. This was the moment God nudged me out of my resignation.

You see, there are a lot of things about sleep and toddler sleep specifically that, as parents, it’s helpful if we accept. We don’t need to stress ourselves out, run ourselves ragged, or search high and low for solutions to them because they’re just normal for this age and season in our kids’ lives. I have found that this acceptance can be freeing, making those night wakes less triggering for me because I know this is temporary.

And that’s where I thought I was with how sleep has been going lately until two nights ago when I only got 3 hours of sleep before my 5am alarm. My mom rage reared its head for a second before I realized, “You haven’t been accepting this season- you’ve been resigned to the fact that things just aren’t going to get better when it comes to this. There’s more you can do- persevere.”

Part of that perseverance is sticking to my parenting philosophy and responding to my son at night like I have for his entire life, even when I’m at my wit’s end because he’s been awake for 3 hours. But the other part is to follow through with things that I need to do as my son’s mother to take care of his health, like scheduling another follow up with the sleep doctor and asking for answers and additional treatment for the low iron.

This wake up call to perseverance absolutely came from the Holy Spirit, because there’s no way I could have gone back into my son’s room again that night under my own strength. It took me a while to search out the first mention of this idea in Scripture, but I finally found it in 1 Chronicles 28.

David is coming to the end of his reign as the king of Israel and he has had it in his heart to build God a house. He does not think it is right that he lives in a splendid palace while the ark of the covenant is in a tent, so he prays to God about his desire. He’s surprised when God’s answer is no. God follows this up by telling David that his son Solomon has been chosen to be the next king and that he will be the one to build God’s house. Then God gives David all the plans and details for this temple.

In 1 Chronicles 28, David calls all of his officials to him and tells them all of this, saying that God told him, “I will establish his kingdom forever if he is unswerving in carrying out my commands and laws, as is being done at this time” (1 Chronicles 28:7 NIV). The phrase “is unswerving”  is translated as “perseveres” in the CSB and “he be constant” in the NASB. The Hebrew word used here includes definitions such as “be strong; be courageous; be firm; be resolute; be caught fast; to have, take, keep hold of; to fasten upon.” When we add in those ideas of being unswerving and constant, a picture emerges of what persevering really means.

When we are on a course with God, we shouldn’t swerve away from it even when it gets hard. We should be strong, courageous, firm, resolute to take and keep hold of the goal that God has in mind for us. We should be caught fast in God’s strength, fastening it on us like armor so that we can withstand those feelings that make us want to sway away from the mission. Whether it’s something as important and difficult as infertility and loss, or something as fleeting as a sleepless season with a toddler, we must lean into God in order to access this. I can tell you from experience that, in that moment two nights ago, I wasn’t digging into myself to find the Holy Spirit’s prompting to persevere in supporting my son’s sleep struggles; the Holy Spirit moved in me to calm my rage and bring those motives of perseverance to mind. This only happens when we are deeply plugged into God through His word and prayer.

From all the digging I did, God’s hope that Solomon would persevere in serving Him is the only instance of the word that I could find in the Old Testament. Strangely similar to last week’s discussion of “faith,” isn’t it? I think the reason for this is that perseverance is so closely connected to our faith, and everything about what faith means changed when Jesus came into the picture in the New Testament.

Paul wrote to the Romans that, “But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance” (Romans 8:25 NKJV). He wrote to the Thessalonians, “Therefore, we ourselves boast about you among God’s churches—about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and afflictions that you are enduring” (2 Thessalonians 1:4 CSB). James wrote, “you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything” (James 1:3-4 NIV) and “Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12 NIV).

The root of what these men are talking about is faith in Jesus and the establishment of the church in the wake of Jesus’s resurrection. The people of this time were believers in a brand new religion, following a Savior that had literally just ascended to heaven. They were enduring trials and persecution as they shared the Gospel throughout their area, and they eagerly awaited the return of His Kingdom. They had to persevere in this faith because their suffering for the Gospel was brutal.

And while these are things we need to persevere in as well, so much more of our faith is rooted in what we don’t see and what we haven’t yet received: believing God for our fertility, our babies, surviving motherhood and stresses in our marriages, illness, loss, fractured relationships… All of these trials come along with living as Christians in the 21st century, and we must persevere in our faith, believing that God will come through when all hope seems lost.

Remember all those Old Testament people who persevered in their faith despite overwhelming circumstances? Abraham and Sarah persevering even though they were too old to conceive? Noah persevering even though it had never rained where he lived and everyone thought he was nuts? Moses persevering even though Pharaoh had said NO so many times? All those people listed in Hebrews 11, the Hall of Faith?

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart” (Hebrews 12:1-3 NIV).

They are not just examples of faith being a credit to them; they are examples of perseverance in faith. They are examples of choosing to keep believing God when everything else says it’s necessary to give up. They ran the races God laid out for them, and that’s what we must do, too.

Even when the race includes infertility.

Even when the race includes loss.

Even when the race includes the hardest places in motherhood.

We run our race with endurance, focusing on Jesus, who is perfecting our faith every time we step on to the race track despite how hard we know it will be to run.

The Greek word used here means, “steadfastness, constancy, endurance, not swerving from purpose.” It means patiently waiting and having cheerful endurance, instead of that obligatory faith we talked about last week. When the race is brutal, these things can only come from God. So lean in. Plug in deeply with God. Allow the Holy Spirit to rise up and say to you, “Keep going.” God’s best is up ahead.