Infertility feels like being smashed against the rocks again and again and again without end.

Infertility feels like death by a thousand paper cuts; daily triggers causing invisible emotional seizures which start and stop as they please.

This pair of anxious eyes scans the horizon for God to intervene, or simply draw near, as the heart tries and fails – and sometimes succeeds – to lay down the longing of another child in surrender and leave it on His Altar.

And every day there is the simple agreement to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Over the last 24 hours I have had the absolute joy of spending time with two friends’ children. Both are baby number two. I have reveled in a ten month old’s ecstasy as he learns to stand on his own for handfuls of seconds to rapturous applause. And I have been warmed with delight in accepting the request of a secure two-year old to chat, play, hug and go all in with the intimate invitation of scooping out macerated carrot from her gooey, uncertain mouth.

I adore children and I am good with them. I always have been, and it’s not meant as a boast to say it’s a gift and a calling. God has blessed me in this way and I am so very thankful because it is a privilege and pleasure. I am deeply, daily thankful that I get to tuck my own treasured child into bed every night. I still mourn with those who have not been given opportunity to do the same.

But I also remain utterly heartbroken for myself because one child was never the plan, and no matter how much people might want me to choose acceptance, it’s still not that simple.

I went into last September on the back of a sad Summer, feeling like I was coming once again to the end of myself with hoping and longing. I was crying out to God to let me know once and for all whether to continue to ask for more children or accept our reality and let go. For the sake of my heart, certainty seemed like a good idea. So I gave him a deadline (don’t we all do that sometimes?) – a conference I wanted to attend where it seemed highly likely that prayer and prophecy over my life would be readily found and I would get my answer. But our plans changed. I never booked onto the conference, and so I accepted that the possibility of knowing from Him how to position my focus was lost for good.

Until I went to a different church on a whim that same weekend locally.

I went with no expectations, only the desire for my daughter to experience lively, spirit-filled corporate worship, and the hope that I wouldn’t disgrace myself with tears in an unfamiliar space. But God had other plans (doesn’t he often!?) to answer that request for a meeting and ambush me with grace. In stealth mode, God’s word crept into my heart and I found myself drawn into the talk on naming our pain and releasing it back to Jesus. I know a thing or two about pain but I wasn’t expecting anyone to talk about it so openly in church. And I wasn’t expecting to confront my pain when it’s so carefully zipped away from everyone week upon week.

But there I found myself, kneeling at the front at the end of the service, weeping like Hannah in 1 Samuel as a loving lady (whose name means ‘beautiful songbird’ or ‘bright, shining light’) came to pray with me just as I’d longed for at that missed conference. What’s more, her credentials for and experience of praying for barren women to conceive and seeing them go on to conceive was on a scale that blew me away. Her words were perfect in their sensitivity, compassion and understanding of our situation. She just got it. I was filled with fresh hope, my faith reignited to keep on seeking God for miracle babies, and met by the kindness of Jesus when I’d assumed that my daft deadline was pointless and of no importance to Heaven.

And as this lady prayed, chatted and prayed some more, my little girl decided spontaneously to run over to my hunched, hurting frame and cover me in piles of rainbow-coloured pom-poms that she’d found, throwing them over my head, around my neck and dumping them in my lap. A child of promise showering me again with promise. What a miracle in itself. I felt in that moment to be in the very presence of El Roi, the God Who Sees Me (Genesis 16:13). All my hope for our daughter Hope, all the promises we had been given and had clung to as we waited for her to arrive, now being poured over me afresh by the prophetic, faith-filled instincts she was acting out with her hands.

And with this renewed sense of hope and faith, I went away armed with two ‘tools’:

1) to choose not to make an agreement that God was / has been / is withholding children from me for he is a good Father,

2) to give my pain to Jesus whenever I found the need.

These actions felt do-able and I was resolved and fortified in the waiting.

And then the most mind-blowing answer to prayer happened. Within ten days of this encounter, a close friend who I have been praying fervently with for 5-and-a-half years for a second child, messaged me to tell me that she was six weeks pregnant. My faith for this baby to thrive (after her previous pregnancy ended in miscarriage) was so vibrant and sure, thrumming excitedly with hope and expectation after my recent encounter at church. It was amazing to feel the certainty of God’s goodness all over this incredible, longed for, wonderful miracle. She, understandably, was terrified but off the back of my time in that church service my faith was rock solid. This beautiful tiny life was here to stay, I was sure of it. Six weeks later, a second friend messaged to say she too was pregnant after years of miscarriages and heartache with her second baby. As I type, the former is approaching 22 weeks pregnant and the other is now 16 weeks pregnant. How amazing is that!?

And yet… despite the tools which my Autumn encounter brought, despite the breakthroughs for my dear friends which have brought such praise and hope, my heart has shriveled in these weeks, back to a place of isolation and doubt because my womb still remains empty. In fact, since that time I have started to wonder whether I am having perimenopausal symptoms and have also been booked for an operation to remove yet another uterine polyp. Physically, the outlook is bleak, silent and seems unlikely that a second child could ever be conceived, especially as, unlike these two dear friends, I am not having any medical fertility support. My expectation that God will intervene with a miracle for me, as he has done for the other two, seems to have been obliterated despite our intimate meeting only months previously. Circumstances can shout loudly in the face of faith. Their pregnancies march on with families expanding, and all I can smell is the stench of stagnation. He continues to bless everyone else but me. Again.

And while I do believe that when God speaks a word, He will fulfil it because He is faithful, I also know that it may not happen in the manner in which I hope. Or while I walk this earth. And so I wander on, still hoping and still mourning; caught in the pendulum swing of joy for those I love with their growing bumps before it wildly rushes back to gnawing envy for all they are now enjoying.

I turn over and over that encounter from last September and the prophetic words and dreams of the last six years, and I wonder what it all means. My night-time and morning cries are still for God to answer our prayers for another child, but they’re also simply urging Him to speak to me, to be with me, as I try to release myself from the hold this desire has on me. I ponder the obstacles that still haven’t moved – my mindset, my pain, my self-sufficiency, as well as the physical ones that I hope will be healed.

I guess I’m still groping around trying to problem solve it all, desperate to put my hands on the key that will unlock the answer to my prayers, whilst also really just wanting God to be God in all this, and blow the doors wide open with joy, laughter and thanksgiving.