(This is National Infertility Awareness Week. Statistics show that 1 in 8 couples are affected by infertility. After fifteen years of ongoing infertility, I want to share one story of how I was loved as 1 in 8.)
I met Ranelle when I was twenty-one years old. I was newly engaged to my now-husband and desperate for some mentorship. I had just become a member at the church Ranelle attended and where my fiancé served on staff. Spending time with Ranelle in Sunday school, corporate prayer meetings (which she hosted in her home), and fellowship meals endeared her to me quickly. She is my mother’s age and had been a Christian for about a decade when we first met. I observed the way she loved Jesus with her whole heart, and I loved her wry sense of humor and generosity of spirit. When Ranelle spent time with you, she made you feel like you were the only person in the world she wanted to be with.
I cornered her one Sunday and asked, “Would you disciple me?” Her eyes went wide, and she stuttered a bit before saying she was certain that someone else—anyone else—was far better suited to mentor me. “Maybe,” I said with a grin. “But I want you to do it.”
She agreed, and our relationship began with weekly meetings at her house where we lingered long over cups of coffee, talking about what God was teaching us from His Word, confessing our sins, and praying for one another. In the mentoring relationship a real friendship sprouted and grew.
She was excited for me when my wedding came, encouraged me as I learned to balance work and marriage, prayed for me when I told her my husband and I decided to start our family. Through church, mentorship, and our weekly shift where we volunteered together at the local crisis pregnancy center, our lives were tightly woven.
So, when the pages fell from the calendar and my desire to have children hadn’t yet come to fruition, Ranelle had a front row seat to my despair.
Six months passed, then twelve. I watched numerous couples in our young church announce their pregnancies and then visited them in the hospital when their babies were born. I burned with jealousy, shame, and fear. Grief would have been a reasonable response, but my anger obliterated any understandable sorrow. Why hadn’t we gotten pregnant yet? What was wrong with us? Was God punishing me for something? Ranelle patiently listened to my complaints, quietly urging me to pray and seek the Lord—not just for pregnancy but for the state of my heart.
She was right to be concerned. I had quickly grown bitter. Each month of disappointment kindled my anger toward the Lord. In pain, I grew cold toward friends and fellow church members who had no trouble having children. In one year, I moved from hopeful to hollow. I was an angry shell of who I used to be, and I had no problem telling people why I thought the Lord was holding out on me. I only prayed—no demanded—a child. I didn’t pray for submission to God’s sovereign, good plan, I didn’t pray for patience, I didn’t pray for contentment. I demanded that He give me what I asked for. When He didn’t, I turned inward and refused comfort.
Ranelle watched it all fall apart. We still met weekly, but my cold exterior made our meetings awkward. I didn’t want to confess any sin. I wanted to rail at God. And I did. She patiently directed me to Scripture, prayed over me regularly, and listened to my complaints. But our relationship, like all of my relationships, had become strained. I didn’t care that it was my fault.
Then one day she called and said, “Meet me at the coffee shop today. We need to talk.” I arrived first, ordered my coffee, and sat down at a table near the window. I watched Ranelle turn into the parking lot and get out of her car. She had a stack of books in her arms. She entered the coffee shop, plopped the books down on the table in front of me, and said, “We’ve got to do something about your bitterness.”
I could feel blood rushing to my face and indignation rising in my chest. I looked at the titles of the books: they covered topics of bitterness, waiting, contentment, and hope. I opened my mouth to refute her, but when I looked her in the eye, everything crystalized in that moment. I was in sin. And she wasn’t standing at the edge of the pit I’d dug and sunk into, calling me out with harsh judgment. She was throwing a rope down into the pit and saying, “I’m here to help you get out.”
She named my sin, called it what it was. And then gripped my hands with hers and said, “I’m watching you drown in bitterness. I can’t let you keep going down this path. You know I want you to have babies—I’m so very sorry it isn’t happening—but this matters more. You can’t follow the Lord and burn with anger all the time.” Tears filled my eyes and dripped down my cheeks. She was, of course, absolutely right.
So we sat in that coffee shop and sketched out a plan of attack. My sin was killing me. But I knew that Ranelle was with me in this fight when she said, “I’m committing to spend Wednesdays praying and fasting for you. Not for you to have children but for God to work on your heart.” She had a stake in my holiness. I knew she was already praying for me to have children, but this investment in my walk with Christ was something I’d never experienced before. I agreed to pray and fast on Wednesdays as well, and we kept up this practice for many months.
My sin now exposed, I began to examine the ways I had hurt others in my cold bitterness. With Ranelle’s encouragement, I wrote several letters of apology to friends. I began to pray not just for a baby, but for a right view of God’s sovereign goodness to me. If He was saying “no,” then it must be for His good purposes.
When the time came for medical appointments and testing, I hoped the Lord would give us a “yes” with a doctor’s help. We endured all the embarrassing tests and questions. We waited for results, and I was so sure we’d have a helpful direction for next steps that I went to the follow-up appointment alone. My heart was in a much better place by then; surely the Lord would see fit to give us good news. Ranelle was the only person I told about the appointment. “I’m praying,” she told me. And I knew it was for more than just a favorable outcome.
Nothing, nothing in the world could have prepared me for what the doctor said to me that day. I sat on the end of the exam table, stunned into complete silence. “Really, really unlikely.” She recommended a specialist but said she wasn’t very optimistic about it. She wrote the specialist’s name on a slip of paper and handed it to me. I took it from her, my cheeks frozen into a plastic smile. I crumpled it into my pocket, knowing I’d never call. What was the point?
I kept the smile plastered on my face until I exited the building. The dam broke and grief swallowed me whole. I sobbed uncontrollably as I unlocked my car, left the parking lot, pulled into the flow of cars carrying normal people who were singing with the radio and talking on cell phones. At a red light, I sat in traffic between two cars manned by drivers looking so maddeningly normal that I screamed until I was hoarse. I worked my way to a back road just to get away from the people whose future had not just been emptied of its contents.
I drove recklessly, blinded by tears. I was nearly home when a familiar white car pulled out in front of me. The driver slowed and waved me over to a nearby church parking lot. I pulled over and parked parallel to Ranelle, the driver side of our cars facing one another. We both rolled our windows down, letting the steamy summer air swell into our vehicles. Sweat mingled with my tears, and as Ranelle quickly scanned my face and intuited the news, she reached out into the muggy space between us and grasped my hand. “I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry.” She gripped my hand as I wept with my head on the steering wheel. I’m not sure how long we sat like that—arms stretched across the space between our vehicles. “Go home to William,” she finally said.
So I did. When I explained what the doctor had said, my husband sat down on the edge of our bed and covered his face with his hands. We didn’t know how to comfort one another now that this word tied us together. Infertile. We stretched out on our bed and wrapped each other in the kind of tears and grief that accompany a dream that has been utterly crushed.
That was fourteen years ago. The week after that painful day, my husband and I moved to another state to begin his pastoral ministry in our local church where we still serve today. Ranelle and I are still close friends, and we’ve prayed one another through some of our darkest days from a distance. I had no idea how to be a 1 in 8. Ranelle didn’t know how to love a 1 in 8. But she loved me well through my years of infertility because she didn’t just pray for God to answer my prayer for a baby. She loved me in a good, hard way. She prayed for me to be like Jesus, and she held my feet to the fire when my desires morphed into idolatry. She didn’t cast judgment from afar but invested herself in both my sorrow and my sanctification. It can be tough to love someone who is walking through infertility. Life is a big ebb and flow of hope and despair—you never know which one your friend is experiencing. I’m sure Ranelle was tempted to tip-toe around my touchiness on the subject of pregnancy. But she was more concerned for my heart than my happiness, which made her joy so sweet years later when I brought home both of my sons through adoption.
It was no accident that Ranelle pulled out in front of me on a back road on a hard day so many years ago. In a city of nearly a hundred-thousand people, the odds of us meeting at that same time on that same road was as unlikely as my prospects at getting pregnant. Anyone else would have tried to offer platitudes or random Scripture verses in that moment of shared grief. But Ranelle loved me with honesty, investment, and presence through my struggles, so her silence in that parking lot when our hands stretched out between our cars was exactly what I needed. On some days she said hard things to me. On others, she grieved in silence with me.
All these years later, I’m still learning from Ranelle’s methods for loving me as a 1 in 8. When I see others weighed down with grief or deferred hopes, I remember to pray for their whole hearts, their contentment, their certainty of Christ’s love for them. I do pray for the things they long for—our desires for marriage, children, and hopeful futures aren’t wrong. But I know there’s danger in staking our hope on anything besides Christ. And praise Him, I know the gift of a friend who loved me enough to show me that.
She didn’t know how to love a 1 in 8. But she loved me well through my years of infertility because she didn’t just pray for God to answer my prayer for a baby. Share on XGlenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Betsy Herman says
Thank you for sharing your heart and your story! I point other women toward your writing – especially those dealing with infertility.
Natasha Metzler says
I am so thankful for those who loved me well through my own story. Community is so beautiful in the hard places, if we let it in.