Lessons Learned While Trying to Have a Baby: Waiting for the Promised Blessings of Obedience

{Just because the Lord tells you to do something doesn’t mean you’re going to do it right then}

“If I be righteous…I am full of confusion; therefore see thou mine affliction (Job 10:15).”

After David and I had been married for six months we began to discuss starting a family. I still had another semester of graduate school and David had two more years of college until he received his bachelor’s degree. We were living in a one bedroom apartment and were struggling to make ends meet. Growing up I had promised myself that I would never bring a baby into a situation like this. I wanted to have my schooling finished and start a career before having children.

Interestingly, these concerns seemed inconsequential after talking together and praying about having a child. David and I received multiple witnesses that we were meant to start a family and it seemed like the logical next step in our lives. In January 2009 we began to try to have a baby with a feeling of peace knowing this was what the Lord wanted us to do.

As usual, I went into this new step in our lives with a plan according to what I wanted and the timing I thought was best. We would have a baby in the fall of 2009. They would be the oldest in their class when they went to school. I would get a job after graduating and we would be able to move to a larger apartment with room for the baby. My plan seemed perfect and, with the witnesses that we had from the Lord assuring us that starting a family was what we were supposed to do, I was sure we would get pregnant almost immediately.

No one in my family had ever had any real problems getting pregnant. In fact, three of my nieces and nephews had been conceived on birth control. I laugh now remembering that when David and I first got married my mother begged us to get maternity insurance immediately since my family tended to be “extremely fertile.” It NEVER occurred to me to think we would have problems trying to have a baby. That happens to older women, right? Infertility is something that happens to someone else and not to me.

But it ended up that we couldn’t get pregnant. My well-laid plans of how our life would go crumbled with every passing month and every negative pregnancy test. I didn’t understand why the Lord would tell us to have a baby and then not give us one. Hadn’t we been following the Lord’s direction? Hadn’t we done what he had asked of us? Why then was I not pregnant?

It took me years to personally accept that the Lord sometimes gives us direction long before providing us with the promised blessing of our obedience. Note that I use the term “accept.” Acceptance is so much different than understanding. It took me longer to understand why this was happening than to accept that it was happening. I accepted it because I read about others who, having been faithful, still had to wait for the promised blessings.

Moses was given the direction to lead the Israelites to the Promised Land but they wandered in the wilderness for forty years before receiving this blessing and even then Moses didn’t live to see it. Lehi and his family were told to go to the Americas but they still lived in the desert in hardship for many years before obtaining their inheritance. Abraham and Sarah were told they would be the progenitors of nations but they had to wait until their old age before having Isaac. It was examples like these that ultimately helped me accept our situation and later to understand it.