Hannah's prayer

"Lord Almighty, if you will only look on your servant's misery and remember me and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life..."
- Hannah (1 Samuel 1:11)

I was looking through my old journals yesterday, thinking it would be fun to find something that I wrote on November 24 of a previous year and see what I was dealing with then. I found one journal entry written when I was in grade 12. I had just sat down with my parents and talked to them about different options for my future...Bethany was not even on my radar at that point! The very next year, I was writing about whether or not I should get to know Nathan better. I wrote that he could be the ONE but that, since I wrote it, it probably wouldn't happen. The next year I was adjusting to a new town and to life as an "adult" (I was hating the adult world with a passion at that point!). And two years later, I had written this verse from 1 Samuel.

After I read it and reread it, I copied the verse down and put it in my purse. This was my prayer for the day. I, then, proceeded to open my Bible and before me was story after story of infertile women who cried out to God and had their wombs opened and were able to conceive. God was very involved in family lines and in blessing women through childbirth and I believe that he still is today. He opened the wombs of Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah...and many, many more. I KNOW...and I have more peace about this now than I've had in the last two years...that I will have children one day. Nathan and I WILL be parents one day. God will bless us with a family of our own.

I have found that, over the last few months, I have put up a wall around part of my heart. In the past (my entire life actually) I have fallen in love with children as soon as I meet them. My heart melts at the soft innocence of babies and children and I just can't wait until I see the product of my own flesh and blood. In the past two-ish years, whenever I have held babies or interacted with children, I have left feeling such a void in my heart, knowing that these children that I love so much are not mine. I go home to a husband and a dog and a wonderful, beautiful home, but a home, nonetheless, without children. These countless empty days, and month after month of negative pregnancy tests, have bruised me and broken my heart time and again.

I find now that, when I see children, the deep connection and love that I feel for them isn't there to the same degree. At first this worried me...am I losing my desire for motherhood? Is God taking this desire away from me? But yesterday I realized, as I became completely honest with myself and with God, that my desire for motherhood is still there, alive and well. I still have the capacity to love, but I have been hurt. I have put up a wall around that tender part of my heart in an effort to protect that which has been hurt.

I talked with Nathan about this yesterday and he suggested it was a good, healthy wall. Sometimes we need walls of protection. Sometimes it is a good thing to guard our hearts from pain, as long as we are able and willing to take that wall down once the time is right. When I hold my firstborn in my arms, and feel Nathan's presence beside me, I know that my wall will come crashing down and the love and joy that I will feel in that moment will be unlike any other I have ever experienced. And it will be SO good.