Prayers

Lord Jesus, sometimes infertility feels like punishment. I know that suffering is not proof that You are angry with me. I know that a child is not a reward given to the worthy and withheld from the unworthy. I know that fertility is not a measure of holiness, and infertility is not evidence of failure. I know these things in my mind. But sometimes my heart still asks, “What did I do wrong?” When month after month passes without a…

Lord Jesus, I surrender this longing to You. I say those words, but You know how tightly I am still holding it. I surrender my desire for a child, and then I take it back. I place it in Your hands in prayer, and an hour later I am worrying again. I tell You that I trust Your will, and then I begin imagining every possible outcome, searching for answers, calculating timelines, and trying to find some way to make…

Lord God, grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference—but please, Lord, meet me in the place where those words are so much harder to live than they are to say. There are things about infertility I desperately want to change. I want my body to do what I thought it would naturally do. I want the treatments to work. I want the tests…

Lord Jesus, today we are waiting for a telephone to ring. Such a small thing—a sound we hear countless times in ordinary life—and yet now every ring can make our hearts stop for a moment. Every unfamiliar number carries a possibility. Every notification makes us wonder, “Could this be it? Could today be the day our lives change?” You know how strange this kind of waiting is, Lord. We have prepared as much as we can. We have completed paperwork,…

Lord Jesus, there is a child we do not know, but You do. We do not know this child’s name. We do not know the color of those eyes, the sound of that laugh, the shape of those tiny hands, or the personality that will someday fill a room. We do not know whether this child has already been conceived, whether a tiny heart is beating somewhere tonight, or whether this precious life exists only in Your eternal knowledge and…

Lord Jesus, we are living an Advent without a calendar. In the Advent before Christmas, we know what we are waiting for. We know that Christmas morning will come. We light one candle, then another, and another. We can count the days. A mother carrying her child can count weeks and watch her body change. She has a due date toward which she can look. But the waiting of adoption is different. There is no due date. There is no…

Lord Jesus, with confidence in Your goodness and surrender to Your perfect will, we place Ashley and Tommy before You. You know the depth of their love for one another and the years they have longed to share that love with a child. You have seen every appointment, every treatment undertaken in faithfulness to You, every surgery, every disappointment, every hopeful beginning, every tear no one else saw, and now these long years of waiting for an adoption match. Nothing…

Father, I am watching my child hurt, and I cannot fix it. When my child was little, I could pick them up. I could kiss the scraped knee. I could stay beside the bed when they were sick. But I cannot fix this. I watch another month pass. I watch hope rise and fall. I watch pregnancy announcements bring genuine happiness for someone else and private heartbreak at the same time. And I ache for my child. Lord, I want…

Lord, Parents are not supposed to bury their children. Everything in me cries out against this. There were supposed to be more birthdays. More photographs. More ordinary Tuesdays. More conversations. More chances to say, “I love you.” I would give almost anything for one more ordinary day. God, I cannot change what happened. I cannot go backward. I cannot reach across the distance between this life and eternity. But You can. You are already there. So go where I cannot…

God, This is not how it was supposed to be. I was supposed to watch this baby grow. I was supposed to count first smiles, first words, first steps—not days since my child died. There should be crying in the night. Bottles and blankets. Diapers and exhaustion. Tiny fingers wrapped around mine. I would give anything for the exhaustion now. Lord, how can arms physically ache for someone they cannot hold? How can a house feel this quiet? I cannot…