when you have no strength to hope 8

We started trying for children when I saw my 30th birthday approaching. We both felt it was the right time and so, although nervous about being parents, we embraced that decision whole-heartedly.

Yet despite our expectations, it didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen in a year. It didn’t happen for two years.

Then finally after two years of hopefully waiting and praying, we were pregnant. We celebrated, that was it.  The hard work was done, now just to enjoy the pregnancy, prepare for parenthood and our beautiful first-born.

We quietly treasured our news and went off to the 10 week scan, totally hopeful, totally expectant, in the wonderful naivety of a first pregnancy. There was no heart-beat.

I was shattered, and fell into a state of depression and grief. While it was a time where we still continued to try to fall pregnant, to say that I was hopeful during this time would be totally untrue. I was crushed. All hope was extinguished. I retreated into myself grieving, and hurt.

It took another year and a half to get pregnant again. Followed by another miscarriage at 6 weeks. I didn’t know what to think month after month when my pregnancy test was negative, year after year as my close friends and family members had their own happy healthy children. I couldn’t hope, I couldn’t pray, I couldn’t believe.

But we are blessed with an amazing community who did that for us. We had friends hope and believe on our behalf. We had friends pray promises over us, and claim them for us. We had family members who faithfully prayed day in day out for 5 years.  I knew at any time on any day, when it all threatened to overwhelm me, that I had someone I could text, someone I could talk to, someone who would not say “it’s going to be alright”, but would walk through the darkness with me. There was always someone who would hope on my behalf, when I had no strength left to hope. Honestly, without exaggerating, those people were our lifelines. They were our anchors in the storms of despair.

I have friends I can think of right now who are in the same situation. They no longer know how to hope. And it is my privilege to hope for them, to pray for them, to believe for them, to expect for them a change of their circumstances, to be the person at the end of the phone with a text or a listening ear.

If you are in a situation right now where you just cannot find it in yourself to hope, I understand and I grieve with you. But more than that I pray that you have a community around you who can do the hoping for you, and I pray that together you will make it through.