Discernment, calling, and waiting on the Lord

I don't know how people live in Alaska and cope with the long, dark days of winter. We've had an awfully cold and rainy (and sometimes snowy) April here and I am struggling. Today we experienced the first truly beautiful spring day of the year and while I spend every minute I could outside, I know the rest of the week is going to be cold and wet and I've felt that fact breathing in my ear like an annoying coworker reading over my shoulder. With coffee breath on top.

Ugh.

If any of my readers like in a warm, sunny location I would like to come visit for a while to escape the eternal winter that seems to have my state captive. Pleaseandthankyou.

While we've been stuck inside and struggling to find things to do with ourselves, our minds have at least been busy. John and I are entering a season of discernment for many areas of life, not the least of which is asking God what's next in terms of growing our family. I hate that it's not easy for us. Today I spend a long time wondering what it must be like for couples to decide they want another baby and then just get pregnant. I imagine it must give you an incredible rush. I mean you decide to add a life to your family and then... you do. That is about the most powerful thing a person can do: bring a life into the world. What a thing to control. I know of course that no one is really in control, but the experience of fertility must at least give an initial feeling of control, whether that be right or wrong.

If I could snap my fingers and be fertile you bet I would- in a heartbeat- but I will say that one blessing that comes with infertility is that the steps toward building a family are- for us- absolutely covered in prayer. Long prayer, angry prayers, joyful prayers, listening prayers, talking prayers, breath prayers, questioning prayers. Every kind of prayer you can imagine. Whether the steps are toward fertility treatments or toward adoption- they are painstakingly intentional. Entirely deliberate.

All the intentionality and deliberation involved comes down to the question of calling. How is God calling us to build our family?

We're swimming in that question right now.

It's a question of choosing between two very good choices. A choice between medicine and doctors who, as a good friend once said, work at the God-pleasing task of making life and the choice to nurture and bless a life, already made. Even if the answer is both, there is still that pesky question of timing.

Of one thing I am certain: God will make his will clear to us in his timing. Dealing with the ebb and flow of faith and doubt in the meantime is the hard part. But then again- its also the part that drives us to prayer.

I share these thoughts very simply because I know I'm not alone and I want someone out there to know that (s)he's not alone either.

The coming months and years will reveal our path and I know I will one day look back on this post and smile with the same sort of of course that I now feel when I look back at our journey to our son.

Be still my soul / thy God doth undertake / to guide the future as he has the past. 

To those who are facing big questions about the future: let's agree to let the questions drive us to prayer. Let's be thankful for the way they make us live intentionally. Let's rejoice in the fact that we serve a God who guides our lives by calling us forward into his will- never aimlessly, always with purpose and direction. And let's look to his faithfulness in the past and rest in the truth that in that same way, he will guide our feet forward.

xo