Have you ever felt like God is silent when you pray to him? Maybe you’ve gone years praying and never seeming to get an answer. What about the possibility that God is answering your prayer, just not the way you want? Sometimes what seems like God’s silence is actually him telling you to wait, or maybe even a firm no.
After celebrating our first wedding anniversary, I was more than ready. I planned it over and over in my head. How I would find out. How I would tell Andrew. How he would react. But God’s answer was, “Not yet.”
I simply wanted a baby. Was that so much to ask? Women had been bearing children for thousands of years! Here I was married to the love of my life and I was still waiting for a baby. Having grown up with two siblings, and my husband being one of five, I thought we would at least have two children. I was 28 when I got married and I wasn’t getting any younger. God, please give me a baby!
Seeing pregnant moms and young children tore at my heart. Pregnancy announcements brought tears of anguish to my eyes. As I cried out to God, it was clear that his answer was, “Wait,” because the timing never seemed right and my husband just wasn’t ready.
Four years went by and it took everything I had to convince my husband that there was never going to be a perfect time to have a baby, so why not now? Finally, he was ready. In the spring of 2016, on the way home from Easter church service, Andrew said we could start trying.
It only took a couple of months and we were pregnant! I was over the moon excited, though swimming in a sea of nausea and just as worn out for the majority of my pregnancy. I even had to stop driving two weeks before my due-date because I was having such severe Braxton Hicks contractions.
Finally, on February 8, 2017, my sweet son, Arthur William, was born. Exhausted, but elated, we brought him home from the birthing center that night. I had a check up about 36 hours later at the birthing center and, though I felt like I had been hit by a semi truck, Arthur and I checked out fine. However, by February 12th I was being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance with postpartum complications. After two emergency surgeries and nineteen days in the ICU, I was finally home with my baby boy.
This was not how I imagined my life as a new mom. Going to follow up doctor’s appointments, physical therapy appointments, and reconstructive surgery and recovery filled the next two years.
Andrew and I talked about the risks of my getting pregnant again and decided against another pregnancy. We talked about adopting, so I started to pray for the right time.
The right time to adopt never came about.
Again, I was torn up with envy when I saw pregnant women and moms with more than one young child. I had a hard time being happy when I found out that my friends were having their second or third baby. I would smile and say, “congratulations” but my smile wasn’t genuine and I couldn’t lie and tell them that I was happy for them. Because I wasn’t.
A certain bitterness took residence in my heart that I fought against on a regular basis. Finally, I decided to surrender my desire for a second child to God, as I wrote about in this blog post. One of the hardest posts I’ve ever written, this blog post caused me to take the hardest steps of surrender I’ve ever taken. I sold all of my baby stuff. I kept a few small things of Arthur’s for momentos, but everything else was sold. Clothes. Furniture. Toys. Everything.
I have to be honest, a small part of me told myself that if God’s will was for me to have another child, he would provide all of the supplies I would need to raise that child.
I grieved the sale of Arthur’s baby things. I still had a hard time seeing babies, announcements, and large families. Why, God, if I surrendered this dream to you, do I still grieve?
Earlier this year I finally got my answer to my prayer for more children. It was a firm, “No.” Two things confirmed this for me.
First, I took an online business growth bootcamp to help me grow my writing platform. Part of the class required my praying about and writing out a five, ten, and fifteen year plan for my life. In none of those goals did I see room for another child.
Second, I started watching a five-year-old child of a friend who was going through a hard time. He even stayed with us for a couple of nights. Since he was around so much, there were a couple of times when I had to take him to the store with us. Let me tell you how surprised I was to see how my son fed off of this other child’s energy in the store! Seriously, how do parents of multiple children get any shopping done with their sanity intact?
Suddenly, within the course of just a few months, I didn’t have the desire for a second child for the first time in my life.
When I finally gave it all up to him, even though it was a step at a time, my desires and my plans became what God desired and had planned for me.
Delight yourself in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord;
trust in him, and he will act.
Psalm 37:4-5 (ESV)
God is not a magic genie. This passage does not mean that whatever we want, we will get. Rather, if our main delight is God, then our heart will desire that which God desires for us. As soon as I started leaning into what God wanted for me rather than what I wanted from God, my desires were more in line with him and his plan for my life.
The plans of the heart belong to man,
but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord.
Commit your work to the Lord,
and your plans will be established.
Proverbs 16: 1, 3
As I started getting more serious about my writing wherein my goal is to draw people to Jesus, I realized something key to plans God had for me. How could I focus on that endeavor while homeschooling two or more children? It’s hard enough balancing my writing life and the family I have.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Isaiah 55:8-9
Ultimately, God knows better than I what the right thing for me is. I don’t want to be like Abram and Sarai who took God’s plan into their own hands when Sarai gave Abram to her servant, Hagar, to bear him a son. That story does not end well!
I know many people longing for many good things. A dream job. A husband or a wife. A baby. Or whatever your dream is, insert it here. Sometimes the answer is just, “No.” This undesirable answer doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not you deserve a “yes” in answer to prayer. A “no” answer has to do with whether that’s the best thing for you. Probably God has something better.
I’m looking forward to seeing how my family and my writing career evolve over the next few years. I have a literary agent pitching my book to publishers around the country. I have a devoted husband working hard to provide for us. I have an intelligent eight-year-old son who is blossoming before me. I don’t want anything else in my life except for what God wants for me. My desire is his desire.
Bethany Marinelli is an author and speaker out of Orlando, Florida. She also supports her husband, Andrew, in his auto repair business and homeschools her son, Arthur.
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