You can read Part 1 of the story
here.
"Again I saw something meaningless under the sun:
There was a man all alone;
he had neither son nor brother.
There was no end to his toil,
yet his eyes were not content with his wealth.
“For whom am I toiling,” he asked,
“and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?”
This too is meaningless—
a miserable business!
Two are better than one,
because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down,
one can help the other up.
But pity anyone who falls
and has no one to help them up. "
Ecclesiastes 3:7-10
"Let's take a walk," He says, pushing Himself off the mossy rock with His hands and then turning to me to gently guide me from sitting to standing.
"I thought we were going to add to our monument." I said, confused, as I brushed myself off.
"We are....but there is a particular stone that comes next, and it will require a little treasure hunt to find it. I thought we could talk together as we walk." He says. I can tell He is just as excited about our journey together as He is about reaching our destination. He has things He wants to say, and things He needs me to hear.
"Back into the woods?" I whine once I realize the direction He is taking me. "I want to be done with dark places."
He smiles at my lack of patience. "It won't be so dark when I'm with you this time," He assures me.
As we walk, He is a step ahead of me, holding tree branches back and showing me the clearest path to take. "I want to talk about that summer. The summer after your third child came to live with Me."
"Uggh.."I moan as I avoid tripping over a stump after He points it out to me. "Ok. What do you want to hear?"
"I just want you to tell me about it. Just what happened...what you were feeling, thinking, and all of the things that you did...."
"I thought You were there." I say, trying to make an excuse to skip over that part of my dark history.
"I was. But you weren't exactly speaking to Me then. I want to hear you talk about it now."
"Ok." I take a deep breath. "After the second miscarriage in May, I was angry with You. I thought you were ruining my life, like I had trusted You with everything, and you took everything away again. So I thought I could just go on ahead without You and figure things out on my own. So I tried getting pregnant again. I just wanted to fix things myself. And then you took that one away too."
"Were you angry with Me then?" He asks, with no tone of judgement in His voice.
I feel my cheeks get flushed in embarrassment. It all seems so silly and child-like now. "No, I wasn't mad. I was too numb to feel much of anything. I was just curious as to why my body had rebelled against me. I wanted to know why everyone else seemed to have no trouble starting a family and Justin and I did. We deserved children more than anyone else." I can't believe the honest words that I let escape my lips. When the words were merely a monologue I let my brain mull over, they made perfect sense. Now I feel so ashamed of how I let myself feel.
He senses my inhibition, and turns around to look at me. "I'm glad you can tell me the truth. I would rather hear you speak from your heart than words you think I want to hear. I
made your heart. I
love your heart. I want to
hear your heart."
I nod, as thankful tears stream down my cheeks. "Alright." I continue walking, looking down, watching closely where His feet step so I can follow closely. "So that's when I decided that I wanted to find out what may be wrong with me. We went to the fertility specialist. My older sister, Amy, had struggled with infertility and she encouraged me to go. She told me all about the tests they would take."
"Were you nervous?" He asks, as if He didn't already know the answer.
"Nervous about the tests....no. The results...yes. I think because Amy had gone through it before me, it didn't seem so daunting.... I remember being frustrated because it took forever to schedule the tests. They had to go in a certain order, and one day we scheduled two tests, and then they told us we couldn't do both in the same day. I was so frustrated. I just wanted to get them over with."
"But the timing was everything..." He let the words escape His lips in a whisper. "Sorry...we'll get to that later...go on, please. We're almost there."
"So the third test was the worst when they had to inject me with this radioactive dye and watch it go through my body. I felt so alone because Justin couldn't go with me into the room." I let my mind go back to that dark room and imagined the look on the doctor's face when he saw what was wrong and was hesitant to tell me. "Unicornuate uterus was the diagnosis- a genetic malformation that left me with only half of a normal-sized womb. I remember nodding and accepting the news with an understanding that seemed strange to him.
'Have you heard of this condition before? It's fairly rare.' he said.
'Yes, my older sister has it.' I told him. I remember him looking intrigued.
'That's unheard of.' he said. 'Usually you don't even find two women who have the condition who know each other, let alone two siblings that share it. I'm going to have to tell my colleagues about this one. They're not going to believe it.'
I didn't feel honored to be an anomaly. I felt like a freak."
He turns around to look at me, apologizing for interrupting. "We're here." He says and points to a stone that looks oddly out of place for being in the woods. "Please, keep talking."
I kneel down and try to lift the stone, but it is partially buried. He kneels down beside me and helps me unearth the rock from it's resting place. "So that I think was the darkest time for me, a time when I felt You were the furthest away. Having a child seemed like such an impossibility for me then. Not only had I lost three, they told me that there was only a forty percent chance that I could even carry a child to a viable term. It all depended on how the egg was implanted. I felt so crushed."
With a one-two-three heave, we lift the stone together, and I examine its unusual shape. It looks as though it is two identical stones that are fused together, mirroring each other. "This is the one You wanted us to find, right?" I ask, uncertain why we couldn't have just found one that was equally interesting by the river.
"Yes. That's the one." He encourages. "When you continue your story, you'll learn why it needed to be this rock. I'm sorry I can not help you carry this one. I need to walk ahead of you and show you the way back."
I find that the stone is not so much heavy as it is cumbersome. He shows me how I can use my hip to leverage the weight. He is patient with me as he points out every stump and every tree root, and lifts every low-hanging branch that is in my way. "Please, go on. I just love to hear your side of the story."
I smile. "So it was mid-October. I decided to get proactive about things. I knew I had an empty home, and an amazing husband who You made to be someone's dad, and an open, bleeding wounded heart that was just aching for a child to love. And I knew that there were children who needed a family to love them. When the doctors had discovered Amy's condition, she felt the same way, and she and her husband decided to become foster parents with the hopes of adopting. So, it seemed logical since I was in the same season of my life that she had been in, that I would reach the same conclusion. She encouraged to start the process of getting licensed to be a fost-adopt mother."
The stone all of a sudden seems lighter, like the burden of its weight was somehow lifted from it. He bends down and removes a briar from my path, and turns to look at me. "Sometimes your story will be told along side of someone else's. And that someone needs to be a step ahead of you, removing the obstacles, to show you where I want you to go."
I feel a sense of guilt. "Was it my fault my sister had to go through everything she did- having a genetic defect? years of infertility? adopting from the foster system? Was it just so I would know what to do and that I wouldn't be so timid to walk where You wanted me to go?"
"That wasn't the
only reason." He explains as He stops and turns to me. "But it was a part of it." He looks at the stone in my hand, rubbing each side tenderly. "She learned lessons about Me going through her trials, just as you did. And she ended up with the exact family I designed for her, as will you."
"Oh." That was all I can think to say. Suddenly my words don't seem that important anymore. And then I let my thoughts escape into a verbal deluge, "But if I had just waited another three months, I would have been pregnant with Molly, and I wouldn't have even had to share her path anymore. Why couldn't I have just trusted and waited? Why did I need to even become a foster parent when You
knew how much pain would result from it? Why did you even have to show me I even had this genetic abnormality when I was about to have a healthy pregnancy?"
He is so patient. "Because you fell down, and you needed someone to pick you up. You weren't letting Me do that for you. I had to send someone else. Also, Amy wasn't always the one I called to lead as you shared parts of your journey. When I opened Amy's womb to bear a child, she knew that you had walked the path of having this condition and it had still resulted in a healthy pregnancy. You needed each other."
I can see the clearing ahead, the river bank, the foundation where I can lay this stone down. We walk, side by side. "Plus, it was all about timing." He continues to explain. "I needed you to decide to become a foster parent in October, because at that moment I was preparing a very special life that I designed for you to love. And I needed you to start your foster classes in December...but that story is for another stone."
I lift the stone onto the foundation, eager to examine it in the light where the dark shadows of the forest can obscure it no longer. It looks heart shaped now, almost an abstracted form of a womb, with the two mirrored sides attached at the base.
I look at Him, shaking my head, lips pursed, eyes squinted..."Two sides of a complete uterus, huh? That's not funny." I say sarcastically.
He laughs. "I thought you would get a kick out of that."
