Deep Wells of Grace Created By the Weight of The Wait

Jul 13

Jul 13 Deep Wells of Grace Created By the Weight of The Wait

It took what felt forever to grow our family.

First, it was coming to grips with the endometriosis and blood clotting disorders plaguing my body, making biological children—at best—difficult to conceive and carry.

We knew adoption would be a part of our path, but we were waiting for our bank account to be bigger. As we waited for the funds to grow, little by little, we were sure becoming parents—one way or another—might take a decade.

But as we waited, we prepared what we could: we took classes and certified our home; we picked out paint and spent hours perfecting our future baby's dresser; I purchased, peed on, and pitched pregnancy tests; we collected shoes and clothes and keepsakes, dreaming of a little one; we got on our knees and cried into carpet fibers for Him to fill our hearts. We ached to be a family but I ached to know Him fully.

I was sure that everything I did to prepare for a baby was a way of sowing seeds of faith. It was trusting and hoping He was bigger than impossibilities.

While in the infant adoption process and awaiting our match, I battled urgency on the daily.

I felt urgency to be matched with an expectant mama making an adoption plan, but was simultaneously fearful we didn't have even half the funds to be due. Urgent to raise money, to apply to grants, to be seen by as many expectant mamas as possible.

There existed in me a void, a void only created by the wait.

The wait is weighty on many levels, it carves out parts of you.

Somehow we now stand with two miracles, but only after so much pain and loss. Loss from waiting. Loss from miscarriage. Loss from church trauma and career transitions and a move.

I can tell you what they all told me: it is worth the wait. These little lives? Becoming mama and watching him become daddy? One hundred percent worth those long, aching, tear filled years.

I in no way throw "your baby will be worth the wait" to shut you up and try to tell you to stop feeling the weight of the wait. I won't be one to put you in your place, where the world says you should be. I'm not diminishing your wait.

When we were waiting, I decided to explore the weightiness of our wait. I noticed it. I felt it. I claimed it. The weight was hidden and unseen.

Never would I tell someone to stop feeling the weight of the wait, because it was in the weighty wait where deep wells were created to fill up with grace. It was in those weighty waiting years I met Him in my most intimate ways.

It was amidst the lonely nights, the unseen weeping, the hungering that I found Him to be more real than ever before.

When the weight of waiting to grow our family was lifted, where the weight once was, I found a depth ready to fill up with more gratitude and grace than I could have dreamed.

Deep wells of grace were created by the weight of the wait.

Day by day, month by month, into years, the wait dug into me. Like a scalpel, it made space in my soul for more of Him and more of grace.

The wait created in me a hunger for His presence and a longing to be mama.

And because I allowed myself to feel the weight, I am so much more free to feel the grace and thanks on the other side.

I often pray for you. You who are feeling the void of your child-to-be. I pray you embrace the weight the wait embeds into you, embrace it and claim it and run further into His grace.

There is only grace for the hungry and barren; when the barrenness being handed to us is far too much to handle, He hands us Himself.

There is joy waiting for you, if you look real closely.