Lord Jesus, we want a child.
Sometimes we want one so desperately that the longing seems to fill every part of our lives.
And when the desire becomes this strong, boundaries can begin to feel cruel.
We hear about another treatment.
Another procedure.
Another possibility.
Someone tells us, “If you really want a baby, why wouldn’t you try everything?”
And part of us wonders the same thing.
Lord, we live in a time when medicine can do extraordinary things. We are grateful for physicians, nurses, researchers, surgeons, medications, and treatments that diagnose disease, restore health, heal what can be healed, and help married couples overcome obstacles to conception.
Please bless that work.
Give our doctors wisdom.
Help them look for the causes of infertility rather than seeing us merely as a problem to work around.
Bring healing wherever healing is possible.
But Jesus, when medicine offers us something simply because it can be done, give us the courage to ask whether it should be done.
We do not want our desperation to become our moral compass.
We want You to be our compass.
We want to remain faithful to the truth You entrusted to Your Church, even when that truth asks something difficult of us.
And sometimes, Lord, it is difficult.
There may be moments when Catholic teaching feels like one more closed door.
We may look at other couples pursuing paths we believe we cannot morally choose and wonder why obedience seems to make an already painful road even narrower.
We may be tempted to say:
“But we would love this baby.”
And we would.
Our desire comes from love.
But teach us that a good and beautiful desire does not automatically make every means of achieving it good.
Help us never forget that a child is not a product to be obtained.
A child is a person to be received.
A gift.
A son or daughter whose dignity exists from the first moment of life and does not depend upon whether that tiny human being is wanted, healthy, strong, implanted, frozen, selected, genetically typical, or eventually born.
Protect our hearts from anything that would cause us to treat embryonic human life as material to create, select, preserve indefinitely, discard, experiment upon, or sacrifice so that another child might live.
Every human life is known and loved by You.
Lord, help us understand the Church rather than merely obeying rules we do not understand.
When we are confused, lead us to faithful priests, physicians, ethicists, and teachers who can explain the truth with both clarity and compassion.
Help us distinguish between medical treatment that heals or assists the marital act and interventions that replace what belongs within the marital union.
Give us patience to ask questions.
Give us humility to learn.
Give us courage to walk away from something if we discover that it conflicts with the dignity of marriage or human life, even if walking away breaks our hearts.
And please, Lord, do not let anyone speak Catholic truth to suffering couples without tenderness.
Infertility already hurts.
People carrying this cross do not need condemnation.
They need truth spoken with love.
If we have made decisions in the past without understanding the Church’s teaching, meet us with mercy.
If we acted from desperation, fear, incomplete information, or grief, lead us gently toward truth.
If something in our past weighs upon our conscience, give us courage to bring it to You in Confession and receive the mercy You are always waiting to give.
Do not let shame keep us away from You.
And Lord, protect us from judging other couples.
We do not know every circumstance.
We do not know what they were told.
We do not know what they understood.
We do not know the anguish behind their decisions.
We can remain faithful to truth without appointing ourselves judges of another person’s soul.
Teach us compassion.
Jesus, there may also come a point when medicine has nothing more to offer us.
Help us recognize that moment without believing that hope has died.
Medicine is powerful.
Medicine is a gift.
But medicine is not God.
Our lives are not meaningless when a treatment fails.
Our marriage is not barren simply because conception has not occurred.
Our bodies are not machines that must produce the outcome we desire.
Teach us to receive our bodies with reverence even when they carry wounds, disease, limitations, or infertility.
Help husband and wife continue seeing one another as gifts rather than problems to be solved.
Protect the marital embrace from becoming merely another medical procedure.
Let it remain what You designed it to be: a profound language of faithful, total, fruitful, self-giving love.
And if biological parenthood does not come, guide us carefully in discerning what You may be asking next.
Perhaps adoption.
Perhaps foster care.
Perhaps service to children and families.
Perhaps a form of spiritual parenthood we cannot yet imagine.
But never let us use another child merely to silence our grief.
If we adopt, let us receive that child for who he or she truly is, honoring the child’s birth family, history, dignity, and losses.
Lord, we still ask You for the miracle.
Faithfulness does not mean we stop asking.
So we ask boldly:
Heal what can be healed.
Restore what can be restored.
Open what has been closed.
Bring our bodies into healthy order.
And if it is Your will, let husband and wife conceive a child through the loving union by which You designed married love to remain open to life.
Let there be a moment when two become three.
Let there be a new human life whose existence no laboratory manufactured and no human being earned, but whom we receive with astonishment and gratitude as gift.
And if You answer differently, give us the grace to remain faithful without becoming bitter.
Mary, you answered God with your fiat:
“May it be done to me according to your word.”
Teach us that obedience is not passive resignation.
It is trust.
St. Joseph, when God’s plan for your family was completely different from anything you could have expected, you obeyed one step at a time.
Teach us that kind of courage.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of the living Christ within your womb, help us defend the dignity of every human life from its earliest beginning.
Blessed Fulton Sheen, who continually pointed souls toward Christ and His Church, intercede for us before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Help us remain faithful when fidelity costs us something.
And Jesus, when we are standing before a decision and desperately want someone to tell us that the easier road is acceptable, give us enough love for You to ask instead:
“Lord, what is true?”
Then give us enough courage to follow the answer.
Even when we cry.
Even when we do not understand.
Even when obedience closes a door we desperately wanted open.
Even when everyone around us thinks our decision makes no sense.
Let us never gain the thing we desire by abandoning the One we desire above everything else.
Because as desperately as we want a child, Lord,
we want You more.
And if someday You place a baby into our arms, let us be able to look into that child’s face with gratitude and say:
We waited for you.
We prayed for you.
We loved you before we knew you.
And while we waited, we tried to remain faithful to the God who created you.
Jesus, keep us faithful.
Keep us tender.
Keep us hopeful.
And keep our longing for a child always inside our greater longing for You.
Always remember Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
Holy Family! Help us to be a holy family and pray for us!
Amen.