As with a lot of husbands and wives who marry, Adam and I decided after the first year that it was time to have a baby and join parenthood.
We had the faith required, we were serving God in obedience to God. But year after year, I failed to get pregnant. My first instinct was that God was withholding the blessing because we were doing something wrong.
This wasn’t the case. Rather, God wanted to stretch my faith.
And this first step of faith outside of the college ministry I was part of became the leverage to see that God is so much bigger than stories from the Bible, so much more wonderful than a prayer said at night and peace in the morning. God cares for our hurts and He knows our dreams.
He is delighted to stretch our faith. Sometimes He waits until we are at the foot of the mountain before He dumps it in the sea—and other times He takes a faithful, devoted daughter of God and plunks her in a room of medical equipment void of prayer or God’s name.
I believed that God was the Creator of the heavens and the earth. Nothing is impossible for Him. To me, going to an infertility clinic meant that I had turned my back on God, that somehow I had checked my faith at the door.
Even as I worried that I was sinning against God by seeking help outside of trusting Him, my prayers had never been so honest, my testimonies more exhaustive, my Bible studies deeper. I had never been closer to God than Adam and I was during those five years!
While my heart was open, God revealed a truth to me I hadn’t discovered while reading God’s word.
We had been reading A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 by Phillip Keller (note: links are affiliate) and God told me through that book that as my shepherd, He wants me to be fruitful. A shepherd needs his sheep to be healthy and have abundant wool, otherwise they are out of a job!
Through this book, I had assurance that even if Adam and I never had children, God still wanted me to be fruitful. That year, in April of 2011, Adam and I purchased new Bibles in the new version (NIV 2011) for our small group at UIC as our genuine offering of love to God. That same summer I gave my heart to serving God like never before, even by making a poster, and Adam and I singing a duet. It was our decision to bear fruit to God, even if it wasn’t what we thought God required.
This was also a huge step in my journey to knowing God, the God who is real, who listens, who cares, who is holy and loves at the same time.
A few weeks after this revelation of God, in August of 2011, I learned I was pregnant. Instead of the elation I thought I’d feel from getting a blessing to God, I was in awe of God. I felt God’s love for me in a subtle, comforting way.
God became personal for the first time.
The God I had cried out to as a seventeen-year-old when I was alone and in need of a friend tenderly came to me and wrapped His arms around me. Through a simple decision to trust His love to me, He opened my eyes to His glory.
I gave thanks to God and in my heart gave this blessing back to God, as Hannah had given up Samuel, as Abraham had given up Isaac.
Even before we knew the sex of the baby, I knew he was my personal encouragement from God, my “Barnabas.” In April of 2012, a year after we first committed to bear fruit to God, Barnabas Kramarczyk was born.
It is easier to obtain God’s blessing that it is to maintain it. Only eighteen months after he was born, I fell into the temptation of earning God’s attention.
But God continued to lead me to know Him until today. Now, I’m not fully there yet, but am that much closer to trusting God’s love for me because — Praise God! — I have a Shepherd who is forever patient, who never gives up on me, and loves me and is guiding me to be fruitful for His glory!
[Check out my full testimony here.]
Like what you've read? I'm also on Facebook and Twitter!
