How to Let God Write Your Story

“I want your life,” she said. “I’m jealous of what you have.”

We were standing in my kitchen, looking out over the farm I have lived on for just under a year. Our husbands were out with the hens, moving them into a newly built egg mobile. My four kids were scattered around—two helping catch the chickens, one holding tightly to my leg, another practicing the piano.

My dear friend and her husband had just been dealt a shattering blow: another failed infertility treatment, this one most likely their last attempt. The odds were stacked against them. The doctors were telling them that trying again was almost useless. Miracles can always happen, though, and the potential for biological children had just moved into that category.

“You can have my life,” I said as we made our way to my kitchen table, her hand curled around a cup of tea. “But if you want it, you have to do exactly what you are doing right now.”

If she had only known me when I stood in the exact spot where she stands right now. Eight years earlier I was where she was. Childless. Broken. Begging. Dreaming.

In order to get where I am, I had to go through the same fire she is walking through.

She is grieving, just like I was eight years earlier. So sad. So painful. So unbearable. As much as the pain I  lived through defines me, I can’t imagine having to walk through it again.

My husband and I are entering our forties, and it is just now that we have the farm we have been saving and planning for since we got married almost two decades ago. It is just now that we have children to fill our lives. It is just now that we are done moving around the country and the world with the military. It is just now that the pain we lived with has dissipated.

We look at others and think we want what they have. Their lives look like the life of our dreams. But chances are, the roads they traveled were not free of pain.

Mine definitely wasn’t.

My husband and I endured five failed attempts at IUI and four failed attempts at IVF before turning to adoption. We nearly lost one of our sons in the delivery room. I had an appendicitis while pregnant and living in Turkey and had to have emergency stomach surgery while wide awake. I was flown to Germany in early labor and spent four months in a foreign country waiting for a baby to arrive. I spent a year debilitated by sickness and depression during my last pregnancy.

My journey to here has not been without trials. And there is no guarantee that tomorrow, a new trial won’t emerge. Nothing I have now–my husband, my children, our land–is promised to be here when I wake up in the morning.

[Tweet “The only way to see our stories written is to walk through the words on the page.”]Sometimes we can’t even walk through them. We must crawl. Drag ourselves. Hang on for dear life.

I look at my friend. I grieve with her. But I am also excited for her. I am so excited to see the words of her story dancing across the page. I cannot wait to read the next chapter.

Wendi Kitsteiner is a former city girl now living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee with her husband and four young children. She is passionate about the causes of infertility, adoption, and keeping it real as a mom. You can follow her at flakymn.blogspot.com or becauseofisaac.org.