In Good Company

Fruitful vines. Quivers filled with arrows. These metaphors are pictures of the abundance of God’s goodness in blessing His people with homes filled with children. Scripture is filled with this imagery. Church pews are filled with evidence of this blessing, a blessing that is a joy to behold.

Unless you are a woman struggling with infertility. Or, to use words from scripture which sound even uglier, if you are a barren woman.

During the winters of my infertility, I carried guilt about my jealous feelings toward those fruitful vines all around me within the church. In certain seasons, it seemed I couldn’t turn around without bumping into a blessed, bulging belly while mine remained flat and empty. I wanted to be happy for my sisters; I did. But I felt like they had all been invited to a party, and my invitation had been withheld.

And a nagging theological question haunted me: If these women were all rejoicing in God’s blessing, was I suffering under His curse?

Having grown up in a church that schooled me well with Bible drills and scripture memorization, I knew where to go to look for answers. I went to the Word, and a few too many Reese’s peanut butter cups, seeking answers and solace.

Tucked within the pages of scripture, familiar stories of fellow barren women echoed my own. It wasn’t long before I began to realize that, as an infertile woman, I was in good company: Sarah. Rachel. Hannah. Manoah’s wife. Elizabeth. I read and re-read their familiar stories, scouring the passages for clues that would unlock my theological questions. Had these women done something to earn God’s displeasure? Were they cursed? Did they repent and, if so, how did they repent? I wanted to do what they had done and pray the prayers they had prayed. I wanted the Lord to open my womb as He had done for each of them.

Each and every one of them.

I had gone to scripture looking for solutions, for procedures I could follow to ease my sorrow and my grief. I wanted to know how to appeal to God to open my womb, how to plead with Him, how to repent if indeed my barrenness was due to God’s displeasure over sin in my life. The problem I ran into was that not one of these biblical accounts was a repentance story. My infertile sisters were, for the most part, godly, noble women. Were they alive today, they would be pillars of the church. Their seasons of infertility did not seem connected with any particular sin.

Instead of solutions and procedures, I found patterns. I kept seeing recurring themes of barrenness and blessing and I began to wonder why. What possible reason could God have had for including these broken, barren women in His story of redemption? Slowly, I began to realize that, as is so often the case with me when approaching scripture, I was simply asking the wrong questions.

I was wondering what these women had done. I was asking, What? when I should have been asking, Who?

As I peeked ahead to the next chapters in their lives, I read these names: Isaac. Joseph. Samuel. Samson. John the Baptist. Within the pages of scripture, each time a barren woman gave birth to an impossible baby, the narrative of redemption seemed to take a giant leap forward toward the birth of the most impossible baby of all.

The birth of Jesus.

The One promised in Genesis 3. The One whose miraculous birth was the only remedy for the curse of sin. And what was one of the most immediate, primary, heart-wrenching consequences of that curse?

To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.” Genesis 3:16.

The moment sin entered God’s perfect creation, childbirth—that beautiful gift God gave to His image-bearers mirroring the highest glory of His creative work—was broken, thoroughly corrupted. In the words of the Westminster Confession, in the sin of our first parents, all of mankind became, “dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body.”

Wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body. Every part of the body, including those designed for making babies was wholly defiled, broken, and corrupted. The thorough, pervasive, insidious consequences of our first parents’ sin are evident in the broad range of ways the blessings of pregnancy and childbirth can be damaged and distorted: Infertility. Miscarriage. Stillbirths. Birth defects. Crisis Pregnancy. Abortion. Sexually transmitted disease. Pornography. Prostitution. Sexual assault. Incest. Rape. All hideous, ugly perversions of what God created to be beautiful. Could it be that the pain referred to in Genesis 3 encompasses so much more than stretch marks, contractions, and labor pains?

When I read the accounts of infertility in God’s word, I could almost see Satan’s triumphant smirk. Time after time, it appeared he had brought the promised deliverance of God’s people to a screeching halt. Barren bodies could not produce that long-expected godly seed that would crush the serpent’s head. But each time, God opened a womb—delivering a patriarch, a prophet, a judge, one crying in the wilderness preparing the way—he assured the enemy that his doom was sure. And then He sent the most impossible baby of all to abolish the curse on childbearing.

In scripture I found the answer to my question, as I knew I would. Was I suffering under God’s curse? Yes. Of course the answer is yes for each of us. Those who suffer the pain of infertility feel it poignantly, striking as it does so painfully close to its point of origin. Because each woman bears in her body the brokenness and curse of sin, each child born truly is miraculous gift. Those fruitful vines, those quivers full of arrows enjoy God’s blessing indeed.

And the rest of us? How desperately we need the birth of that miraculously impossible baby.