Finding Joy in the Waiting

Early Easter morning, Seth and I stood at 11,000 feet, gazing over the Wasatch Range as the sun began to climb up over the tops of the peaks that surrounded us. Slowly, we watched as the shadows of the eastern faces were peeled back, making way for a new day. I have always loved the mountains – something about them has always drawn me in.  They are beautiful and majestic and scary and challenging and sharp and inspiring. They are both my favorite playground and spiritual retreat. So, attending an Easter Sunrise service at the top of Snowbird (a ski resort here) is an especially meaningful experience.

As I watched morning reveal itself, I kept reflecting on the Easter narrative and how it applied in our situation. In our faith tradition, we believe that Jesus was murdered but then three days later was resurrected, defying death and the evil that sought to snuff out his flame. I love the Easter story, because to me it means that death and destruction and pain and evil and suffering have not had the last word. It means that when I feel loss or longing or a sense of incompleteness, it isn’t the end of the story. It means that the deepest longings of my soul are not in vain, and someday all will be made right again.

I often think of what Jesus’s disciples were going through during the time in between his death and resurrection. I can’t imagine the pain and sorrow. They had left everything to follow Jesus and had clung to his promises. They had watched him heal the sick, raise the dead, break bread with society’s outcasts, speak for the disenfranchised, and turn the contemporary power structure on its head. They had thought, at last, our Messiah has come. But then – he was gone.  What were they thinking and feeling? Was all their hope gone? Did they feel duped? Betrayed? Did they regret trusting as they did?  They mourned the death of someone they loved intensely and waited, hoping against hope that the promise of a resurrection would be fulfilled. They had been assured of heaven, but I have to imagine those hours felt a lot like hell.

I have heard many Easter sermons refer to this time of waiting the disciples experienced and apply it to our lives. In periods of uncertainty, it can feel like nighttime lasts forever as you wait for dawn.  Though I won’t pretend to understand what the disciples felt like, or compare our journey to the suffering I see in those around me, in this season of our life I identify with this feeling of waiting. As I stood in the early morning twilight, watching the horizon for the sun to appear over the mountains, I thought about how life felt a little like twilight right now. While there is still much beauty and joy around us, we are also waiting. Waiting to see if our efforts to get pregnant are successful.  Waiting to find out how we should move forward.  Waiting to discover how our family would be built.

And through it all, we’re encouraged to just relax, which is perfectly easy to do when you are looking forward having a catheter shoved into your uterus. While I know that stressing doesn’t help and could hinder our chances, it’s easy to want to wrestle our future as a family within our control. And the thing is – thanks to medical interventions, there is a LOT you can control. I can control the meds that I take and the shots that I give myself. I can control exactly when I ovulate and exactly when I go in for an insemination.  I can control the supplements and prenatal vitamins I diligently ingest every day.

But yet – it is not enough. I have done everything I’ve been told and checked the boxes, And so, slowly, I have learned to let go.

This doesn’t mean that my desire for a family has lessened. That feeling is still there, strong, coloring my vision and influencing every major decision.  But I have learned to let go on how and when it will happen. I have loosened my grip on how exactly our family will be knit together through biological children and adoption. I have spent less time attending to all the questions – how long do we keep trying biologically and when do we pursue adoption and it would be nice to have a maternity leave over some vacation days and what if as soon as we stop “trying” and go the adoption route and adopt a sibling set of three and then get pregnant with triplets and then WHERE DO WE PUT THEM ALL DO WE HAVE TO BUY A NEW HOUSE?

Being held captive by anxiety can be exhausting, and there is something incredibly freeing about letting go. And yet – it is also hard.  It can feel like letting go of what you can’t control is, in a sense, admitting defeat. It can feel like a loss, because as much as those worries bring pain and stress, they are also a perverse sort of comfort.  It can feel incredibly scary, because letting go means acknowledging that this thing that you desire so badly is actually not yours to snatch with entitlement but to wait to receive with gratitude… and being open to the idea that what you receive could be entirely different than you had imagined.

Through all of this, I have begun to realize that, even if we continue with medical interventions, I needed to change the way I viewed our situation. I needed to shift my mindset from a narrow, impatient, tapping-my-foot waiting to an open-armed acceptance of the many ways our family could be formed. This shift started deep in my belly where words cannot reach and slowly bubbled up to the surface where I began to articulate it verbally. I found myself beginning to say to friends – I want to be open to being surprised at how God fulfills this desire.

The first time I said it, the words surprised me. Did I really mean that? But I quickly latched on to them with confidence: Yes! Yes. I want to be open to being surprised at how God fulfills this desire. Open, surprised, and joyful in the waiting. I want to slowly pry from my sweaty palm my detailed plan of how our family should be built. I want to open the doors and windows of my expectations, because squinting narrowly at the future can cause you to miss so much beauty in the periphery.

Waiting is hard. It creates space where fear and anxiety and uncertainty can quickly slip in. But Seth and I – we do have a choice. We can let Worry and Doubt stay and set up camp and rule our thoughts, emotions, and decisions. We can let them affect our relationship and steal our passion. Or we can look at them and say, Look, we get that you guys might be here for a bit. And that’s okay. But you’re going to need to move over, because we’ve invited some friends over. And then we open the door and let Joy and Hope in, and the air begins to smell a little less musty. We learn to let them all coexist and repeatedly remind Worry and Doubt to sit down because they’re not the boss. And in the early morning twilight, we wait, hand in hand, for the sun to rise – confident that it will, open to it defying and exceeding our expectations.