After 14 years of infertility, my wife recently miscarried on her 5th IVF attempt. We took the miscarriage and buried it on a green Yorkshire hillside near a flock of sheep and thought about the future. We both believe that we will have children one day. It’s promised in our patriarchal blessings and numerous other priesthood blessings we’ve received. We live in an age when this is technically possible, given enough time and money, and a willingness to try egg donors and surrogate carriers if necessary. I know a couple who did 10 IVF’s and finally got one child. But IVF’s typically cost 15 – 20K each, not to mention 100K for a surrogate. It’s not something we can afford to keep trying indefinitely.
The question arises, why doesn’t God pitch in to help out a bit? There has been so much prayer and fasting on our behalf. Our names have been on temple rolls all around the world for years. We were on an adoption waiting list for 4 unsuccessful years before giving up. Statistics tell us that if we do enough IVFs one of them eventually will work. But when it does, will it be God who finally answered our prayers, or science, without God’s help? In trying to understand, we’ve entertained six possible explanations for why God might not be answering our prayers:
Answer #1: “It’s not the right time.”
Maybe God is waiting for the right moment. My wife has a successful career, one that may not have been possible if we had had as many children as we wanted. Perhaps God wants my wife to go further in her career first before having kids. Or maybe He has a special spirit that MUST come from a certain donor egg, which we will finally use during the 7th IVF, not the 6th. Maybe He is waiting for us to move to a certain location first because He has some kind of plan for the child that includes a certain school and certain friends. We most likely would not be living in England if we had had children.
But these explanation seem a bit outlandish given that God usually allows his daughters to get pregnant at the most inconvenient times, often straining marriages and relationships to the breaking point emotionally and financially. Not to mention the children born to unwed teenage mothers and through rape. Are those the “right moments?” And how could my wife’s career be more important to God than her motherhood, given what our leaders repeatedly say in General Conference?
Answer #2: “There is something we need to learn first.”
Is God waiting around for us to develop a certain level of patience, after which He will bless us? Will God finally help us succeed on the 7th IVF, but not the 6th, and not the 8th, because 7 IVFs is just the right amount of time God needs to refine us in His fire, or build an extra wing in our heavenly mansion? Where does it end? How much is enough? What do we need to learn before we are ready to move on?
Sometimes I think we see God like a genie in a bottle. He will answer our prayers after we’ve gone through a certain routine: righteous works, humble desires, sufficient faith. After we pass the test, God is magic, granting us whatever physical things we want, like manually helping out embryos in the womb. So we constantly ask ourselves if we are rubbing the bottle the right way. Is there some secret technique we need to learn first? Elder Eyring’s General Conference talk “Where is the Pavilion?” reinforced this idea. His daughter-in-law wanted a 4th child, but was having no success. Finally, instead of repeatedly asking God for another child she prayed: “I will give you all of my time; please show me how to fill it.” This apparently was just what God was waiting to hear, and two weeks later she got pregnant.
This question “what do I need to learn first” has continuously afflicted my wife. Is God waiting for her to quit her career, start babysitting other people’s kids or learn to use a glue gun, demonstrating to Him that she is ready to be a stay-at-home mom? Or is He waiting for her inner Mother Theresa to emerge, for her to be willing to adopt a special needs child from Africa or join the foster care system and help save the world? We could have adopted these kinds of children long ago if we had been willing. As a professional woman who struggles with feelings of worthlessness at our family-focused church, these are the questions my wife routinely asks herself.
Answer #3: “God has more important things in mind for us than giving us children”
God sends billions of people to this planet who will never have posterity, whether it’s because of infertility, the inability to find a partner, or premature death. What makes us think we are more special than these billions? What makes us think we are more special than the numerous single women in the church who won’t even have the chance to get married? Maybe having children is not the most important thing to God. After all, our children are really not our own. They are spirits on loan for a short period of time, after which they will become peers. Yes, children create bonds and teach parents important lessons, but maybe these lessons and bonds can also be created in other ways. Maybe God doesn’t answer our incessant prayers to have children because He is waiting for us to pray about other, more important things, like our desire to draw closer to Him, to develop more charity and love. It is our spiritual path is the most important thing, not our material desires.
Answer #4: “God answers our prayers through modern technology”
Maybe God doesn’t intervene in any of our IVFs, because science is perfectly capable in our day and age of giving us a child. God doesn’t do for us what we are capable of doing for ourselves.
This seems to make sense to me. But it is difficult for my wife to swallow because it feels like giving up on God. What use are prayers, if God isn’t going to help anyway? Why give Him credit when it does work? Why say it is a miracle? And why would God want us to waste so much hard earned money on such an imperfect and drawn-out process when He could easily step in to make it work?
Answer #5: “God does not alter the course of nature (or very rarely)”
When the early saints sold everything they had and crossed the plains, God could have been a little more easy going on them. Why did He send early ice storms that year? Why cause the temperature to be just low enough to kill dozens of their children? Why didn’t He answer their tearful prayers? Isn’t He the God who calms the storm, who says “peace be still?”
Deadly ice storms still sweep across the plains of Wyoming today. They are as fierce and cold as they were in pioneer days. But the people on the plains today aren’t living in tents pushing handcarts. They live in warm houses with double glazed windows. The people in these warm houses go to church on Sunday and bear testimony of how God has blessed them. But has God really blessed them? Why didn’t they die in the ice storm last night? Was it because of their blessed righteousness? Or was it because they happen to live in a culture that builds cheap, strong, warm houses, that offers free education and well paying jobs?
Maybe the rough, unforgiving God of the pioneer storms is the same God we have today. The only difference is that we have built for ourselves a safety net from this rough God, a safety net of warm homes. God is not blessing us. We are simply protecting ourselves from Him, from the inhumane power of Mother Nature. When Mother Nature decrees that my wife shall be barren, maybe Her decrees are as unalterable as Her decree that ice storms will come early this year. We build safety nets to protect ourself from God, and we hire scientists to work around His unalterable decrees.
Answer #6: “We don’t have enough faith”
This is my favorite explanation. I believe in the power of faith to work miracles. But that faith is a gift. Doctrine and Covenants says “To some is given the gift to heal, to some is given the gift to be healed.” Maybe my wife and I simply do not have the gift of faith to be healed. Few people do, through no fault of their own. Maybe God doesn’t want us to have this faith. But we DO have enough faith in science to keep pouring money into fertility clinics and adoption agencies. I firmly believe that our faith in fertility clinics WILL give us a child.
My wife has a cousin who did one IVF and the doctor told her she had poor quality eggs. So she gave up, deciding she would never be able to have children. She has no faith. But if she would just look into it, she would be able to see that she COULD get pregnant if she kept trying, if she saved more money, if she went to a healthy egg donor. But it is too painful. She has lost her faith and wants to move on. But we will not give up. We have faith in science, even if our faith in God falters.
Conclusion
I believe in an interventionist God of miracles. I have a blog dedicated to accounts of miracles in the last days. I believe God CAN and DOES intervene to heal the sick. But most of the time, God does not intervene. I don’t always know why. At various times, I’ve entertained all of the above explanations. But I still sometimes feel overwhelmed by the contradiction between the simplistic Magic God of LDS culture, who is said to awaken through a certain formula of righteousness, patience, and faith, and the silent God of our infertility.
Questions:
- When God has not answered your prayers, what has been your explanation?
- Which explanation of the above do you prefer?
- Have you had similar experiences with infertility or other trials of God’s silence?
Wheat & Tares 
A moving story. Like you, I don’t have a clear simple answer othr than an appeal to 1 Cor. 13:12. My thoughts and yearnings of the heart reach out to you and your wife.
Great article. It is a head scratcher when God will help me find my keys but lets a pleading child starve to death in Africa. I have had experiences in my life where I have felt certain events were steered by God, almost undoubtedly. But is it coincidence with an LDS confirmation bias. Recently the Gilbert Temple open house was to have a huge youth production/celebration. The forecast was for almost certain drenching rain. Those involved fasted and prayed for no rain. My sister even posted a picture of clouds but an open circle of sun and blue sky directly over the temple that day at dress rehearsal with the caption, “THE TENDER MERCIES OF THE LORD.” However, at the beginning of the celebration and throughout the entire event, there was a huge downpour with the field flooding. No mention from my sister about the tender mercies. My point? When we pray and our prayers are answered in our estimation, we have CONFIRMATION BIAS. When we pray and our desires aren’t met, we have COGNITIVE DISSONANCE and chalk it up to some reason God had as to why our prayer wasn’t heard.
We can’t have it both ways can we? If God is an interventional God….why so haphazard and random? Is He elitest? Is he deaf to the cries of the millions of homeless and the hungry but TRULY cares that the carb-filled cookies and punch after YM/YW activities “nourish and strengthen our bodies”? Tough questions. Hard to find answers. Maybe I will pray about it.
Nate-It is inspiring to me and to others that you continue faithful not withstanding the disappointments you and your wife have dealt carried.
My wife and I have been through a number of parallel experiences. Not with child birth, but with employment, raising our children, and health challenges. Like you and your wife we asked questions as you presented in this post.
With some of the challenges we were blessed with heavenly intervention that was obvious, powerful, and complete. With others there has been help in the form of comfort, and a packet of help here and there, but no resolution.
With the number of years we lived and dealt with the facts of mortal life we have arrived at a place like Elder Worthlin related in his talk, Come What May, Love it.
I hope we can continue faithful and endure to the ends as we enter the trials of advanced age.
Following are a couple of links that may be of interest.
Elder Wirthlin talk:
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2008/10/come-what-may-and-love-it?lang=eng
Gene R. Cooks trial having children:
http://www.ldsaliveinchrist.com/2014/12/the-lord-seeth-fit-to-try-his-peoples-faith/
This is something that’s been an intellectual and spiritual battle for me over the last year or so. When my husband and I both got promotions around the same time, someone made the comment that we were being blessed because of our righteousness. “That’s silly,” I thought. “I have friends much more righteous and faithful than I am who struggle with bad jobs and low salaries for years, so what makes me special?”
Before that point, I hadn’t really considered the harmful message of the Magic God/prosperity gospel teachings I had heard so repeatedly. I also have problems with “God wants to bless you, but you have to ask.” So the righteous people who aren’t being blessed just aren’t asking hard enough? Or is the lack of perceived blessing really the blessing itself? Or maybe we’re not asking for the right blessing so God can’t give it to us? Or maybe we’re not doing ABC in the right order so we’re not worthy of the blessing? It’s almost maddening.
I guess if I had to choose from one of your explanations above, I would choose “God rarely alters the course of nature,” but that doesn’t really describe how I feel about it. I’ve stopped considering things in my life blessings/non-blessings and instead just consider everything an opportunity. Instead of praying for some blessing/outcome I want, I pray to be able to do the best I can with the opportunities presented to me. Maybe that’s a lack of faith (or a cynical view of an interventionist God) on my part, but it’s really helped me to break out of my cycle of “But WHY weren’t my prayers answered?” and instead just trust that I don’t know how God works or even how prayer works. Honestly, I don’t know if prayer can change a physical circumstance. All I know is that it can help change the way I see a circumstance.
the good news for you is, you haven’t built into your model the possibility that god doesn’t exist or priesthood blessings can be wrong. So, even if you never have natural children, you will fold this all into part of god’s plan to teach you something else.
i’m jealous that you always have this to fall back on. when i couldnt have children, it made me look around and realize that i wasn’t going to live the rest of my life pretending there is an interventionist god.
Here is an interesting perspective from Pres. Packer, his April 1987 GC talk
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1987/04/covenants?lang=eng
I only wish you well and I wish i could help in any way! I too have prayed and prayed and worked to get good things in my life, a better job, a wife but nothing. no answers have come forward. I have given up a various times and resigned myself to say if it isn’t important enough to God to answer this then it isn’t important to me anymore, Matt 7:9 isn’t helping any either! I wish you all the best mate!
I probably lean towards the view that God rarely intervenes to alter the course of nature. We only struggled with infertility for two years. About 18 months into it I decided the only way to psychologically endure was to stop expecting to get pregnant. I got rid of all pregnancy tests. I had an aunt who struggled with infertility for 7 years, getting pregnant only after adopting their first child. I knew this could very well be a longterm thing, and we wouldn’t be in a position to pay for fertility treatments for awhile. I threw myself into the job I had, educating myself with the expectation that I would work towards a better position. And then I got pregnant. People couldn’t understand why I kept saying it was a surprise, but it was. I wondered why it took so long – was God punishing me for being unenthusiastic about being a mother when I’d first gone off birth control (my husband was the baby hungry one)? Did he need me to have the work and volunteer experiences that I did? When I started bleeding at 10 weeks I thought I was having a miscarriage. Was God taking this away after withholding it for so long? I had a hard time trusting the doc when she claimed to hear a heartbeat the next day.
My labor experience was unusual – it turns out I have a uterine abnormality that makes me high risk and likely contributed to the difficulty getting pregnant. If I’d had this baby in pioneer times, neither the baby nor I would have survived. Did God wait until I was in a bigger city where I could receive the medical help I needed to have this child? It turns out my son is autistic, did God provide the infertility experience to make me grateful for this child, no matter the disability?
My husband cares for children who have medical difficulties, usually resulting from genetic defects. Why does God allow so many children to be born with defective physical tabernacles? What possible benefit could there be for a child whose body contains cells that are XX *and* XY? Or just X, or X and XY, or XXY and XXYYY? There are millions of things that can go wrong in the development of a child. Most people have only a few defects like moles or color blindness. Others, though, are allowed to be born with so many that it will never be possible for them to have any quality of life. Why?
Why must some people endure life with mental illness, incapable of consistently experiencing the happiness and joy that comes naturally to others? One time I was particularly discouraged. My husband asked if I wanted a priesthood blessing. I told him no because it never changes what happens. Enduring the disappointment of so many seemingly unanswered prayers and blessings was too difficult, and I didn’t have the energy to deal with expectations of divine help dashed again. He wisely pointed out that one of the purposes of prayers and blessings are to ask for additional comfort and strength in dealing with the trials we face. They are still useful, even if the trials remain.
A lot of difficulties we experience in this life are natural consequences of the Fall. It isn’t fair, but we apparently agreed at some point to endure them regardless.
Nate, I’m so sorry you and your wife are going through this.
It’s so interesting to see how every couple approaches all of these questions, each situation unique.
My husband and I have been through 14 years of infertility, although only the first 4 were childless, as we gave birth to one child via $20k IVF in 2005. I have enough to say to be its own post…but to keep it short and sweet God answered my prayers in the celestial room by breaking through my stubborn, indoctrinated head that maybe He didn’t want me to have kids. Maybe He wanted me to build the kingdom other ways with my unique voice, gifts, and talents. And so I laid up my will and said thine be done. It felt like He said after 12 years of marriage, “You are _finally_ ready to listen.” The thing is, I know my answer is not for everyone; but it does explain my insistence of ending motherhood worship.
This article from PFS at the Trib helped me, when a woman in a similar situation sat by a rabbi on an airplane and asked how his faith counsels those with infertility:
“We tell the women in our temple that having children is a very, very important thing to do,” she recalls him saying. “But we also tell the women that if they cannot have children, for whatever reason, it means that God has something even more important for them to do. … It is obvious that God has deliberately taken from them their ability to have children for a good reason. We then encourage them and nurture them on their quest to discern what it is that they are supposed to dedicate their lives to instead.”
I would like to go to the local synagogue on Mother’s Day every year, but alas – I’m in Rexburg.
PS $100k for surrogacy??? In the states its $20-30k-ish. Good luck, my friend.
I am an older, never married, childless LDS woman who has prayed and prayed and been given priesthood blessings with promises that have never come. The only answer that makes sense to me is that other things must be more important to Him. I sometimes think we are a fertility cult with our worship of marriage and children. I’m not convinced that He is pleased with our obsession. The Savior made a point of instructing the people that they should love the Lord first, and that they should love their fellow man, not just their own families.
Wow, what a moving struggle and a testament to your faithful endurance.
Why? The universal question. We are all on our unique journey in this earth life. When faced with trials, many of us look to god for the answer. Sometimes, the heavens open and the answer comes. More often than not, it does not, many times leaving us hurt and confused. Why? Why does a loving heavenly Father allow this to happen this way?
We lost our 29 year old daughter last year. We know physically how it happened, but we struggle with why it happened. My wife prays for God to tell her all the answers she seeks, while I am content to know that I may never know what really happened in this life. that what I know is enough.
The same experience, but yet two different responses. And we’ve discussed it countless times.
God created nature to allow it to run its course. Could he intervene, and does he from time to time. I think so. But, most of the time, he allows nature to prevail.
No one has a monopoly on all the answers. We walk by faith hoping for greater light and knowledge in the future.
I’ve never known anyone who has lost their faith over a tragedy to end up happier, but I have know many who have kept the faith to become contented with their situation and regain their happiness.
I’m sorry for your family’s pain.
When my husband and I were going through a frightening time, this was something I obsessed over. I realized I genuinely hoped I had some “in” with God for being Mormon, or for believing in him, or for keeping the Word of Wisdom or something. But I recognized that it was completely unfair for me to expect to be bailed out of circumstances others in the world would see as a dramatic improvement to their own.
During that time I began to question the legitimacy of my expectations of God. What if God is pretty darn powerful but not ALL-powerful? (I once read that the idea of omnipotence was a Greek gift to early Christianity, not rooted in Old Testament theology.) What if, for centuries, we’ve blamed/praised God for disasters and miracles he has little control over? What if he helps us find keys because he can, but rescuing child sex slaves is simply too complex a problem? If we truly are God’s hands, how many capable and willing hands does he really have to save the world with? It was terrifying to me to think that he may not have all power, and comforting to think that anything he allows us to experience is for some greater good, but what if that’s just not so?
I don’t believe the purpose of prayer is primarily to make a reservation at God’s Blessings Bar and Grill, but to nurture a relationship with someone we need and who needs us (to meet others’ needs).
Thanks for the great responses everyone. I feel humbled hearing some of your similar experiences and trials, some no doubt worse than ours. In the end, we are probably all a little spoilt compared to just how bad life can get for some people on this planet. Like Jeff says, it all comes down to the universal question “why?” and maybe its not always a good idea to try to find an answer, or assume you’ve found an answer. Life is very uneven.
PangWitch, thanks for pointing out that I didn’t offer any Godless explanations. I’ve never doubted the existence of God, but I’ve certainly questioned His nature. Is He an intimate, loving Father, or a callous force of nature? I see both. But even if He is more of a callous force of nature, I still never question His existence. My idea of a “good” God is a dimension of God, one given to me by my culture and inborn moral sense. But God constantly challenges that idea. Rather than say He doesn’t exist like most people: “I can’t believe in a God who would allow that to happen!” I say, “I can’t UNDERSTAND at God who would allow that to happen.” Then I ask myself, who is this curious God anyway?
One positive result of going through these painful experiences is that there are people out there who actually understand what you’re going through. When we were still trying to have kids, I got a lot of “advice” from wardmembers on foolproof tactics to get pregnant. It really wasn’t helpful. After I got pregnant, I remember cleaning the church with a wardmember I was still getting to know. After I explained a bit of my background, she admitted that they’d been trying unsuccessfully for close to a year to get pregnant. For some reason I blurted out, “You know, it’s okay to want to punch people when they tell you they’re pregnant.” She got a shocked look on her face and I immediately regretted the comment. Then she laughed and gave me a big hug. She thanked me for saying it, she always felt like such a horrible person when she couldn’t be as happy for her friends as she wanted to be. I remember walking away grateful that I could say something that she appeared to find helpful.
Sometimes I wonder if the reason we have these trials is to have an inkling of what the Atonement is like. Christ suffered all our pains and sorrows so he is in a unique position to understand our trials. Being able to sympathize with someone else, to have a real understanding of the pain they are going through because you’ve been there, seems like an effective training tool for helping us learn to comfort others in a Christlike way.
Nate – I’m sorry you’re going through this. We spent the better part of a decade trying to have a child, and we eventually did. Looking back now – it’s almost thirty years ago – the only thing I know for sure is that I regret the time spent being so sad. I walled myself off from a lot. Good luck to you. That you can talk about it probably means you’re coping with the wait in healthier ways than I did. But it’s still hard to wait.
Nate – my condolences to you and your wife that your understandable and RIGHTEOUS desire to have children in the usual fashion have thus far been frustrated. I can’t claim specific counsel as to why the Lord doesn’t intervene somehow or offer pithy reasonings; I’m sure you’ve heard them all. All I can do is offer support such as this forum affords and a promise to remember you and your wife in prayers.
It does bother me that some would even bring up your ‘faith’. It seems trite and arrogant to chide someone experiencing the emptiness that being unable to have children that it may have someone to do with some quality supposedly lacked. The very fact that you’re willing to lay it out on this forum and consider all possibilities, even though some seem unpleasant, would indicate a great measure of faith on you and your wife’s part.
Do keep up your courage. I hope before long if not blessed with success in this endeavor, at least you get the answers you seek.
I’m sorry for the pain that you feel, but I draw strength from hearing your story. Thank you for sharing it.
Helping people to deal with pain and loss is one of the primary focuses of any religion I can think of. I have subscribed to most of the notions you listed at different times. For the most part I now believe that God interferes with nature very little, if at all.
This idea of limited heavenly involvement often doesn’t go over well in LDS circles, but I find some of the counter proposals quite troubling. For example, a friend of mine was in a coma when she was very young, leaving her brain damaged. She is now confined to a wheelchair and has various other difficulties. So some missionaries told her if she had enough faith she would be healed. I find that teaching to be reprehensible: it blames the sufferer for her own suffering.
PS as of late I have heard several times in General Conferences/devotionals GAs promise that “all of your righteous desires will be fulfilled.” #eyeroll #nope #dontmakepromisesyoucantkeep
PPS I have an interesting relationship with prayer bc of the last 15 years, it’s complicated
Your plight has weighed heavily on my mind. My wife and I waded through this trail of sorrow for a few years before we were able to have children. I really do not have anything to say that will lessen your burden at this time. In fact the potential to say things that are hurtful is not insignificant. With that I will proceed cautiously with a sort of parable that might be useful, or not.
Mr Bob founded a non-LDS scout troop (with which I am about to spend the weekend camping) in about 1970 and his legacy remains with us. He is still alive and his house is near mine. He served in the military during WWII and Korea. He seemed to have an uncanny understanding of the mind and soul of teenage boys and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the mountains and swamps. Details of some of his expeditions are partially preserved in a few scrap books and the oral accounts are probably exaggerated but he did some very intense things with those boys that changed their lives. Institutional memory of these events help drive our current outdoor program which is among the best in the area. Mr Bob pushed limits in many ways and there were times when his scouts thought he had finally gone over the top and they were going to die or worse. But he always brought them home in one piece and so much the better for it characterwise.
I think of my life as one extended camping trip with a scout master like Mr Bob. Our scouts (this weekend) are going to get wet, cold, tired, hungry and probably not lost this time. The younger ones will cry and lay down in the mud and curse. The older ones will have to carry their packs and help them some while muttering curses or we will not make it.
In January a scout cooked breakfast when the temp was 0 degrees F and his shivering and stumbling friend fell in all of the eggs which was all they had left to eat. They devoured a mixture of raw/burnt egg, with shell, ash, dirt and dried oak leaves. For the boys these problems are enormous at the time they happen. But Mr Bob (and hopefully we his successors) always know how far to push them and how to get them out of trouble and back home safe. I have come home from camping dreading the phone calls from tiger moms cursing me for what we did to their little darlings and within 24 hours the boys have reframed the adventure, exaggerating the accomplishments and discounting the pain. By the next day at school they lather it up to where they are little heroes.
In life I do rely on human “scoutmasters” to help me make it but I also believe in a Savior who knows me and knows the mountains and swamps of life. He is taking me to some pretty edgy places on this extended camping trip called life and like the new scouts there are many times when I cry and lay down in the mud and curse. I don’t want to think about it but I know in general how this camping trip of life is going to end. Maybe Mr Bob got lucky when he always brought those scouts home but I trust that my Savior is going to get me out of this wilderness without relying on mere luck. And what a wilderness it is, filled with adventure and beauty and danger and suffering.
The greatest trial in your life will not be infertility. Several other things will outweigh it, such as your own death. Rarely do married couples die instantly without any warning and so one of the couple will face the horrible reality of the death of the other and the subsequent loneliness. We rarely have parents who outlive us and some of us are called upon to give our children back to God through that celestial season abroad program that includes the grave. The scoutmaster of life plays hard with all of us in turn and takes us places we would never wish to go.
The day will come when the Savior will lead us out of the wilderness and we will look back on our suffering and rejoice in it. The pain a person feels longing for children denied and unborn will be small in comparison to the blessing of raising them when they eventually are given to us. I tell my scouts while they are crying in the mud that they will be bragging about this within a week and they never believe me and I wonder if it is helpful. But it is true. The day will come when this and every other injustice will be rectified and it will be a glorious day.
In the meantime my prayers are with you.
Thanks for that story Mike and the nice allegory of the scoutmaster. Probably you are right that my worst trial won’t be infertility. (It will probably be raising children!)
Kristine, I look forward to hearing from you on how your prayers have changed through your infertility experience. That has been one thing, perhaps not related to infertility in my case, but how to pray to a God with whom you have a “complicated” relationship.
Mary Ann, thanks for adding what might be the best explanation of all: coming to understand the atonement better.
I’m sorry for your pain. It’s so hard to make sense of what is intrinsically unfair. I think you like the “we don’t have enough faith” explanation because it seems like the only explanation where you have some kind of control. But I doubt very much that it’s true.
I, too, have wondered why I haven’t been able to have more children and a daughter in particular. I’ve certainly entertained all of the explanations you have used. Mostly, I feel like it is selfish to want more when I have been blessed with so much. But in my dark moments, I feel like I don’t have more children because I’m not good enough; God doesn’t trust me or doesn’t want me to mess up more children. It’s an irrational thought, but a common one, I think.
Here’s a stanza from an Emily Dickinson poem I like:
I reason that in heaven
Somehow, it will be even, 10
Some new equation given;
But what of that?
I just recently wrote about his subject at LDS Anarchy. It’s been on my mind as of late — and the three scriptures that I always meditate on when seeking an explanation to a lack of intervention when I feel it’d be warranted have been: Jesus and the disciples on the boat in the storm, the Man in white leading Lehi into a dark and dreary waste, and the parable of the unjust judge and the widow.
I personally have had trouble with respect to gifts of healing I’ve fasted and prayed for. Also I’ve always been bothered by the Problem of Evil in general. I’ve never liked people who survive natural disasters saying “I prayed for God to save me, and He did!” when the same earthquake [or whatever] also collapsed the roof onto a room of school children. Or when people tell stories of God “helping them find their car keys”. Like the Maker of the Whole Universe would step-in and make your car keys appear so you wouldn’t be late for a play-date, but couldn’t be bothered to make a bowl of rice appear for a starving child.
I would rather live with a universe where God doesn’t exist or where God maintains a policy of never intervening and just lets things play-out how chance and the laws of physics describe — than to think that He can intervene and he chooses to find car keys or help you get a better job, rather than be bothered with child sex trafficking, terminal bone cancer in infants, or ecological disasters.
Mormonism may be in a better position with respect to theodicy than other Abrahamic faiths because we posit God as simply an advanced extra-terrestrial life form in the physical universe [not as some sort of ontologically supernatural-type being]. So there’s room for the conclusion that He may “allow” suffering simply because that’s the way stuff happened and He’s not in a position to change the way the dice fall anymore than you or I am.
So I feel better thinking that maybe part of learning to “be like God” is learning to just accept that sometimes “that’s just the way it happened” is the only reason for “why” something happened and you just have to find peace in that anyway — that there’s nothing the cosmic “Mommy and Daddy” can do you make it better or any different.
Hi Justin, you make some really good points. Why does God help us find car keys, but couldn’t be bothered to help feed a starving child?
Of course a lot of what we call miracles are “fooled by randomness,” the title of an excellent book by Nassim Taleb. Some are the result of placebo, which I think is simply another word for faith. Faith heals, placebo heals. Scientists don’t know why, they just know that belief itself seems to have a profound effect on the elements. Faith also motivates action, and action accomplishes things. Car keys are found through persistence, and persistence is aided by faith. Inasmuch as God is responsible for these natural laws, and is an object upon which to place our faith, He can be credited with the “miracles” we experience.
But I also think there is a genuine hocus pocus element. But it doesn’t have anything to do with goodness or fairness, with God answering the prayers of some overprivileged child in an LDS home, but not answering the prayers of a doomed child in Africa. There is simply an element of the supernatural in life. I believe in angels, demons, spirits of the dead, precognition, a teeming world of spiritual realities that we can scarcely comprehend. Our two worlds interact sometimes. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with right or wrong, with being more worthy of it than a starving child in Africa. I believe in angelic free agents, in deceased ancestors with special interests, in a spiritual world that could be just as unfair as our world.
I sympathize with your situation, especially because having children is one of, if not the, most righteous desires anyone can have, so all the more reason God should intervene.
But what if you and others like you are beating yourselves up when there is nothing you need to learn and there is no need for more faith and there is no better time and there is no improvement that you need to make in order to have kids?
In my life, and in your post and in the comments I have seen a lot of self blame, and a lot of negative sentiments: “I need to learn something, I need to prepare myself, I need to be more obedient, I need to have stronger faith, I am the problem, God isn’t.”
This saddens me deeply. But I can relate to these feelings. Honestly, it became very painful for me to attend sacrament meeting and hear members talk about how God helped them find their keys, or get a job, or make varsity, when there are children being sold into sexual slavery, and starving to death, and dying of awful diseases. (And of course, I had the selfish thoughts, why is God helping this guy find his keys but my prayers go unanswered?)
What if life just isn’t fair, and no amount of self loathing or prayer or fasting will change that? What if God never intervenes and all these mental gymnastics just depress you? What if God doesn’t exist?
My final prayer to God was, help those who truly need help: the kidnapped child, the starving child, the lonely, etc. But don’t worry about me. Frankly, it’s too painful for me to wonder if he might show up and help someday, so I don’t ask for help. I’m sure you think that is a lack of faith, but I think it is following the truth. And, respectfully, I wonder about your comments about your cousin, it sounds like she did her absolute best and found it just too painful to continue to hope for help that may never come.
I think people do a lot of mental gymnastics to try and sort out why God isn’t helping, and most of the conclusions are some of self blame. I think this is more destructive than good, and it saddens me very much. Maybe we should stop blaming ourselves. Maybe we should pat each other, and ourselves, on the back. We are doing our best, literally.
I agree with Dexter’s point. In response to me, Nate [#24] said:
That question makes a large assumption, namely that God was responsible for the first-world white guy finding his car keys [he didn’t just remember where he’d put them, or stumble upon their location by happenstance], while He’s choosing to ignore the third-world brown girl.
But that’s begging the question. You’ve already got God plugged into the equation, and then you’re trying to see how His [pre-assumed] existence can possibly fit the data [I wasn’t righteous enough, I have a lesson to learn, etc.]. When if you did it the other way around [looked at the data first], then I think you’d have to conclude that there either is no God up there to divvy-out supernatural aid, or any God who is up there maintains a strict policy of non-intervention.