Thirteen Years and One Daughter Later

In the spring of 2018 I wrote about what was then our nine-going-on-ten-year unmet desire to have a child. There I wrote that you get the point where “you try to settle. Your life simply won’t include toy trains and tea parties, tiaras and T-ball. No little tears to wipe. No scuffed knees to bandage. You won’t get to teach your son to drive a stick shift. You won’t get to tell your daughter she looks beautiful regardless of what any boy thinks. You won’t ever send him off to college or walk her down the aisle. You’ve suffered no loss. Except for the loss of all the could have been’s.”

“Try” being the keyword. I wouldn’t say I was ever fully successful.

Hope emerges from her dungeon

We covered a lot of ground during the time it took for the earth to make nearly four more revolutions around the sun, from the spring of 2018 to January 2022. In February of 2019 we returned to the U.S., and Laura had surgery to remove a fibroid that doctors said might be contributing to our inability to have children. (Laura wrote about that here, and I wrote about it here and here.) We thought for sure that that would be it. In a few months we’d finally be able to announce that Laura was pregnant. Hope emerged from some deep dark dungeon down in the depths of my soul I’d forgotten even existed and dared show its face. Of course we knew that even post-surgery these things would take time. But then the months began to pass. And nothing happened.

Summer fried spring like an egg on a sunbaked sidewalk. Fall dropped summer like a bag of potatoes. Winter knocked fall off its horse like a jouster charging toward his opponent, and its cold chilled hope so thoroughly that she returned to her dungeon and redonned her chains.

No toy trains or tea parties after all

So by the end of 2019 it seemed that what I’d written back in early 2018 held sway. No toy trains, tea parties, tiaras, or T-ball lay in our future. It was Laura and me and the dogs we would rescue from the streets of Bishkek.

I had also written back in 2018 that “[t]he beauty of a life isn’t fully perceived until its end. The last page puts it all in perspective. That’s when the nagging questions you’ve pondered for the last 30 chapters finally become clear. We’ve not reached that page yet. We’re still trudging through the thick of it. We’re still trying to see if all our theology is strong enough to hold us up even here and even now. Ultimately we think it is. We admit sometimes we still wonder.”

It appeared God had written our story such that our lot was to keep trudging, keep trusting, and keep wondering.

God begins something new

Starting sometime during that spring-frying summer of 2019, God began to do a new thing in this ol’ heart of mine. By the time we started hearing reports in early 2020 of something called Coronavirus, he was hard at work tearing down old worldviews built on sand and constructing new ones build on solid rock, knocking over altars built to idols and setting up new ones in his honor alone, rewriting my deepest values, goals, and desires, and hydrating a parched soul in a lagoon of love and grace. His work was so transformational that by the end of the year that would forever be associated with COVID-19, I was looking into starting seminary.

In January 2021 I started my first course. Laura was on track to finish her master’s degree that summer. Armed with a head full of knowledge, her own internal fire, and a little piece of paper called a diploma, she hoped to get a job that summer or fall and begin a new career. I knew my seminary wouldn’t give me a fancy piece of paper for another several years, but Laura and I both felt like new wind had filled our tired sails. I had even dared write in my journal at the beginning of the year that I felt hope for the future.

There was not even the slightest hint of even the smallest notion of even the tiniest inkling of children in that refreshing, sail-filling breeze. That fact still hurt, of course. Instagram pictures kept getting posted. Friends kept making their announcements. A lump still formed in my throat nearly every time I saw little a little girl walking hand-in-hand with Mom or Dad down a Bishkek sidewalk.

But even so, God had begun to move us both in new, exciting directions. I felt like I had stumbled out of a desert and opened my eyes in a forest teeming with life and possibilities. I figured I would carry the unmet desire for children the rest of my days, and I would be forced to lay that desire on the altar of sacrifice every single one of those days. But there was life after hope had died. It was a somber, painful, humbling, strengthening, maturing, freeing, uplifting, joyful realization.

Desiring God’s will

One of the truths I came to grasp early on during the tidal wave called COVID-19 is a truth that has yet to dim in my mind’s eye. That truth can be summed up in the title of a book I read with a close friend and mentor called Desiring God’s Will. Meditating on the truths summed up by that phrase caused me to probe down to the bottom of this heart in search of an answer as to whether or not I actually do, indeed, desire that God’s will be done. No matter what. Even if his will contradicts my own.

If I am to desire God’s will, first I must think that his will is good. If I’m to believe that his will is good, I must be convinced that he himself is good. Not only that, I must also be convinced that his wisdom and power are equal to his goodness (therefore, his good plans run no risk of turning out to be either short-sighted because they’re good but not wise or merely wishful thinking because he doesn’t have the power to bring them to fruition), and I must actually believe that his plans are better than whatever I might plan for myself. And that’s so even if he’s written our story without including any children as principal characters. In other words, I was forced to confront this haunting question: If it was God’s will for whatever reason that we not have children, would I still want God’s will in place of my own to be done?

There was not a single ah-ha! moment at which that line of thinking crystalized in my mind. It was a process. More like a sunrise than a light bulb turning on, as my older brother once said. And there was definitely not a single moment at which I came to embrace a heart-felt Yes! to that haunting question. That was an even longer process. Such life-altering changes in the fundamental convictions of a person’s life take time. Actually coming to think that God is a much better author of your story than you are is certainly one of those slow-to-be-experienced changes.

Two pink lines and still no happily ever after

By the time May of 2021 came around, as I was enjoying immersing myself in church history and an overview of the Old Testament and as Laura was putting the final touches on her master’s thesis, at breakfast one morning Laura put a thin strip of white plastic in my hands that contained two bright pink lines at one end. The impossible had happened, and those two pink lines were the proof.

If this were a movie, we would have hugged, cried, (if it were a Christian movie we would have prayed to thank God), and then you would have gotten to listen to a happy, upbeat soundtrack while the credits rolled.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Since this is most certainly not a movie but is, in fact, real life, after Laura’s earth-shattering announcement over breakfast, things have unfolded a little differently. You see, quite apart from having difficulty conceiving, there was a cloud that hung over all our thoughts about Laura’s getting pregnant. A blood test years ago concluded that Laura’s Rh-negative blood was already immunized against positive blood, meaning her body was going to react to Baby’s positive blood as if it were an infection and go to work accordingly. That could mean anything from mild to serious birth defects and/or intra-uterine blood transfusions to keep Baby alive till delivery. And we were living in a third-world country, in a place in which appendectomies with only local anesthesia were a thing.

Then Laura was nauseous for three months. Then she got carpal tunnel and was barely able to sleep. Then when we got to the US, Laura got sick on top of jet lag on top of not sleeping well. Then she was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. Then she got sick again. Then she lost her hearing completely in her left ear and developed debilitating vertigo, nausea, and vomiting, landing her in the ER.

On a positive note, doctors were able to confidently conclude that our blood incompatibility issues were not actually going to be problematic. Advances in blood testing over the last decade revealed that the previous test we were relying on was a false positive.

Still, by week 37 Laura was barely hanging on. We had already been counting on a C-section since Baby had been breech for most of the third trimester up to that point, but the OBGYN was adamant that they wouldn’t do an early C-section without a clear medical reason for doing so. Being pushed to one’s limits from pain and exhaustion was not a clear medical reason. So we scheduled a C-section for 39 weeks and zero days, Friday, Jan. 21. And we kept waiting.

An early surprise

Monday night, January 17, regular-but-not-too-regular contractions started. Tuesday night around 10:30 Laura’s water broke, so we threw our bags into the car and headed for the hospital. Because Baby was still breech, it was into the OR that very night to deliver this little girl by C-section.

Laura most wanted to be awake during the operation. She and general anesthesia were not friends. Plus she hadn’t come this far to be asleep when they finally pulled Baby out. As things would go, it turned out the spinal block they gave her didn’t work well, so they had to supplement with other high-caliber pain medication. She wasn’t asleep, but she wasn’t exactly with it, even when they dropped the blue sheet down for us to be able to see Baby through the remaining clear plastic sheet at 1:14 AM, January 19, 2022. The first thing she remembers is hearing a baby cry from the far side of the room where the doctors were doing whatever it is that doctors do to newborn babies. Then they brought our baby girl around and laid her on Laura’s chest, and the doctors went to work putting back together everything they had just cut and pulled apart.

And that’s how Gabriela Grace was born.

More vomiting after the surgery from the anesthesia. Pain from the incision. Wondering if Laura’s hearing would return and if vertigo would remain. Plus all the other things that go along with those first few days at a hospital with a newborn.

Why us? or Why not us?

It is easy to look back and ask, “Why us?” Why couldn’t the credits have rolled after the pregnancy test, and why couldn’t “happily ever after” have started right then and there? And once you start, the questions have no end: Why the wait in the first place? Why the long road through pregnancy? Why the carpal tunnel and the gestational diabetes and the hearing loss and the vertigo? What if Laura’s hearing never returns, and what if she develops lifelong vertigo?

Literally during the last seven seconds we spent in the hospital—right after we’d paid for parking and were about to push open the door to the parking garage—new light cast all those questions in radically different hues. The couple who paid for parking right after us were the ones holding the metaphorical flash light. Next to them, hunched over in a wheelchair, having just had a checkup on one of the other hospital floors no doubt, was a little boy, perhaps eight or nine, with a severe disability.

It takes bright light a single moment to pierce even the thickest darkness and so illuminate otherwise enshrouded perspective. That’s what happened to me looking at that boy, then at his parents, and then down at my little girl in her car seat.

In those seven seconds it dawned on me that a much better question than “Why us?” was “Why not us?” I should not ask, “Why has this been so hard?” but “Why has this not been so much harder?” What separated us from the couple who paid their parking right after us? Why were we able to take home a perfectly healthy little girl from the hospital instead of one with lifelong difficulties? Were we special? Did we think that just because we bore the name of children of the living God, we were entitled to a get-out-of-suffering-free card? Were we somehow more deserving? Had we somehow earned God’s favor?

At times my arrogant absurdity is about as boundless as a cloudless night beneath a new moon a hundred miles from civilization.

Gabriela’s middle name

The closest thing we can come to an answer is found in Gabriela’s middle name: Grace. It is all grace. Each of her perfectly formed fingers and toes: grace. Every last breath in and out and in and out as she breastfeeds: grace. Every day—whether they number a great many or a precious few—that we get to hold this little girl here and watch her grow: grace. The fact that this little girl wasn’t born a hundred years ago, at which time I very easily could have lost both her and Laura during childbirth: grace.

And if you ask what God saw in us that prompted him to extend this grace to us, then you don’t understand the meaning of grace. Likewise, if you ask what God sees in us that causes him at times to withhold his amazing grace from us, then you also don’t understand the meaning of grace. God’s disposes his unmerited favor as he sees fit, when he sees fit, and to whom he sees fit. He extends his kindness to those who know him as Father and to those who do not know him as Father for no other reason than because he is good. And when he chooses to withhold his good grace according to his inscrutable purposes, he has slighted no one, for God owes human beings nothing at all.

So we are boats cast on the unpredictable seas of God’s whims, then, is that it? Hardly. We will one day get the happily-ever-after ending that every last one of us instinctually longs for just as Gabriela instinctually longs for her mother’s milk. But the credits haven’t rolled on this age yet. There is coming a day on which God will finish up this chapter of the history of creation, the day on which “he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed” (Acts 17:31), the man Jesus Christ.

Then he will, by grace, fulfill every last promise he’s made to those who love him. He’ll heal every wheelchair-bound little boy and girl. No one will ever experience carpal tunnel or lose his or her hearing. Every last tear will be wiped away. Every last unmet longing will be filled by an infinitely superior joy. Just as the storehouses of the wrath of God are being filled up right now for those who refuse to bow the knee to him, so, too, are the storehouses of the grace of God being filled up right now for those who have been undone by God’s extravagant, unending love.

For that day we wait by faith, no matter how strong or faint the foretastes of God’s coming grace may be here and now. All the beautiful notes there are to sing in this song called life notwithstanding, the fact remains that we’re singing in a minor key. One day we’ll hear the resolution our ears are intently listening for. We’ve experienced a drop of God’s goodness in the face of this little girl. An eternity in the ocean of his goodness awaits us. But we’re not home yet. Our hope does not hang on a girl named Gabriela. Our hope hangs on the God who’s will for us is better than our own will for ourselves. One day the credits will roll, our song will change to a major key, and the happily ever after that we so long for will truly begin. Until then, we wait with hope in the good author of the story of this world. We invite you to wait with us.