Carrying the cross that transforms everything

I sat down to write a piece on Easter Sunday and inevitably I am brought first to Good Friday. For just as Venerable Fulton Sheen wrote, “Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday,” without the painful cross of infertility, our family would not be the miracle that it is. My womb never bore children, I remain infertile almost eight years after my husband and I said “I do”. This might look like an abject failure, like the absence of a miracle, but so too did the cross. In the story of our family, God brought life from death in a way that only He can. From my empty, barren womb and through one brave, strong, beautiful woman’s choice of life over death, God’s glory was revealed.

On Easter Monday five years ago, when the world was shrouded in the darkness, confusion and isolation of the pandemic, when churches and schools and stores were closed and face masks were required but hard to find, our daughter entered the world. Her presence in my arms after years of longing and heartbreak was the living embodiment of the Easter story. Babies born during this time are sometimes described as “pandemic babies,” but she is, and will always be, our Easter baby. It was not, however, our Easter baby who transformed everything, who transformed me, but the cross I carried to her. 

I remember reading somewhere that imagined suffering is often worse than the suffering itself. This was not my experience. Infertility was just as painful, hard and confusing as I feared. It broke my heart and spirit more times than I can count. But what I could never have imagined or conceived of was the grace given and the glory revealed through that suffering. How, in each crushing disappointment, God was preparing my heart, making a way for His ultimate triumph.

This victory after over two years of infertility and ten rejections in the adoption process was not embracing the baby girl in my arms but finally embracing the cross, embracing Jesus as my Savior. In willingly accepting the cross and uniting my suffering with the Lord’s, I surrendered to God’s divine plan for me and for our family. I chose to trust that He was doing a new thing as He promised He would. I chose to believe that infertility and our hopes for a family would not end in death but that it did require dying to myself and the plans and desires to which I was clinging. I placed my hope in the God I could not see, in His plans I could not understand, and the love I knew only by faith.   

In choosing the cross on Good Friday, Christ’s resurrection could, and did, set me free from the despair and discouragement of infertility and the difficult adoption process. God had done a new thing in my heart, made me new, and readied me to receive the gift He had been preparing all along. And when that gift came, the very next day on Easter Monday, in our home state where we did not apply to a single adoption agency during a global pandemic, my heart was recollected, at peace, and enlivened with a love and a trust that could only come from the Risen Christ. I resolved the morning after our daughter was born to give witness to God’s glory as we shared our news with family and friends. To love and honor and praise Him in the telling of our story, which is really His story. The story of a God who loves us and does not abandon us in our suffering, who is preparing good things for us beyond what we can conceive of, and who can and will bring the glory of His resurrection to those who hope in Him.