Sometimes miracles walk in your door, sit down at your table…even pose for pictures in your living room. That’s what happened when my longtime online friend, Natasha, joined me for a Passover meal in April.
Four years ago, Tasha wrote a book called Pain Redeemed, and one lesson from that book has stuck in my mind ever since: whether it’s the pain of infertility, the loss of a child, the wounding of a marriage — or the lack of marriage — we have far more that unites us than divides.
We’re all part of that not-so-secret club, the “fellowship of affliction.”
I wrote then that “My pain does not shut me out; on the contrary, it draws me into some of the sweetest camaraderie I will ever know.”
And it has been sweet. It doesn’t matter that I’m single and she is married. Tasha understands the gulp I sometimes feel when others get the blessing I long for, how I can 100% rejoice for them, and also wonder, Dear Lord, how long?
But y’all — Natasha wrote that book about her childlessness.
Here’s how she looked at my table:
And here’s how she looked in my living room:
And look who’s on the cover of her newest book:
In Counting Grains of Sand, Natasha tells the oh-so-Him story of how infertility and failed adoption and what felt like failed faith…somehow set her up for the joy you saw above.
It’s also all about how not to give God the silent treatment when life hurts.
Natasha writes:
It was when I closed down the communication…that I closed down my heart to finding faith.
I once wrote:
How else can I glorify God as a marriage-minded single? …By refusing to pull away from God when He does not fulfill my expectations. “Fine then,” I want to say to Him. “If you won’t talk about marriage to me, then I won’t talk about it to You.” But instead, I pour out my heart before Him.
Later, I continued:
Hope is inconvenient. It is paradoxical. It can be painful. It can search my heart and motives to the very bottom. I don’t ask for hope, and often I don’t actually want it. What I really want is for the desire to go away, or be granted. But by His grace, I hang onto hope anyway.
Tasha writes:
It’s not living true faith to throw things away. It does not show belief to pretend like the desire was never there to begin with.
It sounds like the fellowship of affliction. It sounds like an unconscious duet of bracing comfort, as God trains both our hearts through what Elizabeth Prentiss called the ministry of disappointment.
Y’all. If there’s one thing I know about singleness, it’s that it never stays the same. I’ve been the happiest girl I know in my solitariness…and I’ve been crushed. I’ve been hopeful, and I have grieved. I have been oh-so-very-impatient, and I’ve been full of grace.
I’ve grown to accept the delay of my dreams, but now I’m entering a new phase, in which I realize more clearly that sometimes God says no. Many of the “big sisters” of the faith whom I admire, women like Elisabeth Elliot and Amy Carmichael, suffered enormous loss. I just learned how He asked this delightful lady to wait until she was seventy-seven to marry…and then called her husband home a few months later. I see that He hasn’t allowed Tasha to bear a child.
Let’s be clear: I don’t give up hope in God’s goodness. I don’t even give up hope for my dreams. But for some reason, I find from time to time that I’m grieving the very possibility of never.
Listen in with me for a few brief snatches of what Tasha has to say in her book?
I don’t think, for a moment, that in giving to God, I’ll receive all the things I want. But I do believe that in living for God, I will see His kindness displayed in my life.
I still ache for the babies who will never be. I’m learning it is okay that I do. Because there, in the aching, I can know God. And knowing God is a glorious thing.
Isn’t it wonderful that God’s faithfulness to us is not dependent on our faithfulness to Him? He heard my heart’s cry and honored my prayer of trust: Lord, I believe. Help me overcome my unbelief.
It was so easy to be convinced of the lie that we had not been listening to God correctly because things hadn’t turned out how we expected them to. Yet, all the while, Christ was working His purpose. Not a single thing I faced would be wasted. Every loss is used by Him to accomplish gain in the true Kingdom; even those things that seem to carry with them only death.
Elisabeth Adams 