Standing on holy ground

I’m not a stranger to waiting. In February 1999 I was in a student bar with some friends, and I heard a voice inside my head saying, “That’s your husband. There. That one.” As I focused on the person, he and his fiancée started talking about their wedding plans. So I naturally assumed that I’d made a mistake, misheard or made it up inside my own head.

A few months later, the engagement ended and C and I became best friends. Actually, I fell head over heels in love, but although I kept hearing the same voice inside my head saying, “This is your husband. Hold on,” it wasn’t the right time and it soon became clear that my feelings weren’t reciprocated.

But I never met anyone else I liked as much. Over and over again I made a big effort to let go, to move on with my life, because I was clearly deluded. C had no desire to lose me as a friend, and also no desire for anything other than friendship.

Until he did. Eight years after I first heard a voice in my head naming him as my husband, and after seven and a half years of being in love with my best friend, he said that he loved me. We were married eighteen months later.

It all sounds very bald told in a few short paragraphs, but this is not actually the main story I want to tell today.

It’s very easy for me to say retrospectively that it was obviously the voice of God in my head telling me that this was my husband. But it wasn’t the first time I heard that voice inside my head, and it wasn’t the last time, either.

It’s become very common to talk in statistics these days. One in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage. One in eight couples live with some form of infertility. Of course, statistics like this make it clear how common these things are. It’s taboo to talk about baby loss and it’s taboo to talk about infertility, with the result that the many, many people who live with the consequences of one (or both) often feel alone and isolated, which only increases the pain and loneliness.

If you want to read my story in detail, you’ll find most of it in the other posts on this blog. Our daughter was conceived naturally after two years of unexplained infertility. When she was eight months old, we started trying for a sibling. In May 2016 I had my first miscarriage and almost died. In the next twenty months we lost five more babies.

I haven’t managed to write any blog posts for a year, because of quarantine and lockdown and everything else that’s been happening in the world. And so I haven’t written about our Hope.

In April 2020, after more than two years of secondary infertility, I suddenly and completely unexpectedly had a positive pregnancy test. For a few days we were full of joy and hope, and fear and trepidation. We were reminded that our God is a God of miracles and that nothing is impossible.

And then I went through my sixth consecutive miscarriage. Our brief burst of joy became the seventh baby in a row that we lost long before they were ready to meet us.

I said a few years ago, after losing six babies in twenty months, that I was only prepared to go through one more pregnancy. If I lost one more baby, that would be it. But to my surprise, when we lost this baby after only a few days, I didn’t feel like that any more.

After more than two years of secondary infertility, in the midst of a global pandemic, whilst we were in quarantine, I got pregnant.

Anything can happen. God can and does make miracles happen.

This particular baby didn’t get to be born. We aren’t struggling with sleepless nights and revelling in milky cuddles at the moment. But it is still a miracle that they lived at all.

Because our baby was a miracle, because all babies are miracles, we named our 2020 baby Hope.

And now, a year since our Hope came into being, we are still living with unexplained, secondary infertility. We have been in lockdown since Boxing Day, and this lockdown has been the hardest for most people I know.

People in general are not good at waiting these days. We’re used to ordering things online that arrive in a few days. When we want to find something out, we look it up instantly. We’re not good at patience. Everything is now, now, now. This is definitely one of the reasons why this last year has been so difficult for everyone. We are still waiting, and we don’t know when things will change.

There are definite signs of hope. I received my first vaccine dose three days ago. It’s easy to feel more hopeful when the days are longer, and when flowers start to come up in the garden.

Learning how to wait is not a bad thing in itself. There are excellent Biblical precedents for waiting for many, many years. Abraham was seventy-five and his wife Sarah was sixty-five when God promised that they would have a child, and they waited for twenty-five years until Isaac was born.

It’s five years since we started trying for a sibling. We never thought our little girl would still be an only child when she started school. Unless our miracle happens this month – which is always possible – we won’t have a child until 2022 at the earliest. These years have been full of doubts and questions and uncertainty, and grief, depression, anxiety and PTSD.

But what if waiting is the point? What if the act of waiting, praying and hoping means that we are standing on holy ground, listening to the voice of God, striving to believe, obediently standing by?

I find waiting difficult. You’d think I would be used to it, after waiting seven and a half years for the person I love to love me. This is harder, because there has been more loss and hurt and grief and because this time I’m not the only one. My husband and my living child are waiting too, and many of our friends and loved ones are waiting and praying with us. At least last time I had a lot of waiting to do, it was just me!

Waiting is lonely and miserable. It feels like being on an island or in a desert. I find it hard to pray or read the Bible. God feels distant and uncaring. It definitely doesn’t feel like standing on holy ground. It feels as though we have been abandoned.

When Sarah was eighty-nine, she laughed at the idea that she might give birth to a son. It was twenty-four years since God made his promise, and she was well past the usual child bearing age, so laughing seems human and reasonable. And a year later, her child was born.

I’ve spent a long time trying to work out whether I need to do anything different. But ultimately, all that comes back again and again, is… wait.

Wait.

Sometimes, waiting is doing God’s work.

Right now, the world is waiting… and we are waiting, too.