On boundaries that gave peace {and a giveaway!}

The following is an excerpt from “Peace in the Process: How Adoption Built My Faith & My Family.” I’m choosing this portion of our story today to continue celebrating National Adoption Awareness Month. I never expected adoption to be our story, but it’s been the greatest testimony of God’s faithfulness. This is a little bit about how we got there and how boundaries actually freed us.

All the talk of trying to become pregnant monopolized my life. I had a job. Greg had a job. We had friends. We went on trips. But trying to have a family dominated my thoughts.

One day in August 2006, I thought about having a family in a way that didn’t involve blood vial, pills that made me crazy, and medical procedures. We heard about a local high school girl who was interested in finding a family to adopt the twins she was carrying.

Here I was wishing and hoping and pleading and praying and crying out to be pregnant and God stirred within me a new – albeit slight crazy – hope. We expressed our interest in adopting the twins through the high school principal, but we never heard anything else about it. Looking back, I realize God planted a seed. It was the first time I’d ever considered adoption.

Meanwhile, my doctor referred us to a big-city reproductive endocrinologist in September 2006 – about 21 months after I stopped taking my birth control pills and declared my readiness to get pregnant.

By this time, we also had learned Greg’s contribution to the pregnancy equation wasn’t helping our odds. The specialist – better known as a reproductive endocrinologist – talked about the possibilities of pregnancy given the issues in both our bodies and, of course, scheduled more blood work for me.

The most basic explanation is my body doesn’t make enough of the right hormones to sustain my eggs, meaning the quality and quantity was low. Along with the endometriosis, the specialist strongly suspected I had poly-cystic ovarian syndrome, a condition that would explain my imbalance of female reproductive hormones. So if I were to get pregnant, I’d have to have hormone supplements, too.

My new doctor helped us connect the dots and eliminate or correct any variables that were standing in our way. While he talked about sperm, eggs, ovulating, implantation, I thought about how perfect conceiving life is. The precise timing necessary to create a baby is more exact than anything we as imperfect people can control. In fact, it’s perfect, which is proof enough to me that God creates babies. He aligns all the variables and perfects a process inside our imperfect bodies. That is why I believe every baby has a purpose. Now, granted, babies don’t come into perfect situations, but they are here for a reason.

With that said, somebody could argue: Why ever go to a doctor if God is control of conception? I’ll tell you: We as humans need hope. God gave these doctors minds to help people like me that want to make sense out of what is – or in some cases, isn’t – going on inside our bodies. Even so, God is most certainly in control of making living miracles.

In the following weeks I grasped for more answers and hope, so I read a book called “Infertility: A Survival Guide for Couples and Those Who Love Them” by Cindy Lewis Dake. What stuck with me was a chapter on boundaries. I don’t really remember what Dake said, but I do remember coming away with the desire to set some emotional, financial, and physical boundaries.

Having Type 1 Diabetes, I knew pregnancy was going to be physically hard on me. There would be additional insulin shots and probably more blood sugar ups and downs than I had in normal life. I also knew infertility left me emotionally drained. While talking through all of this with Greg, we realized we needed to create boundaries for ourselves before we went to our follow-up appointment with the specialist in Nashville. And this was it for us: If the doctor recommended in-vitro fertilization, we would stop trying to get pregnant and turn our attention, money, and energy to adoption.

In October 2006, after 22 months of trying, a doctor who knew far more than we did told us our best odds of getting pregnant would come with IVF. We thanked him for the information and headed home. In those two hours in the car, I had more peace than I’d had since I threw away my package of birth control pills.

We had absolutely no idea what throwing ourselves into adoption would mean, but for the first time in my life I was experiencing the peace that passes all understanding. And I had yet to learn about a teenage girl who was just a couple months into her unexpected pregnancy.

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And there’s a giveaway! A few years ago, the sweet Cindy Lewis Dake friended me on Facebook after she happened upon a blog post of mine that I quoted her book – the one I mention above, the one that helped me move toward adoption. She donated a copy for me to giveaway in celebration of my ebook release and National Adoption Awareness Month.

Use the Rafflecopter below to enter to win. A winner will be chosen randomly Friday, Nov. 14.

a Rafflecopter giveaway
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I shared a similar excerpt earlier this week at Jennifer Camp’s You Are My Girls blog. It’s one of my favorite places on the internet, so sharing a piece of my story there was such a blessing. I’m sharing this post at the Soli Deo Gloria Sisterhood Gathering. 

Want more of the story? “Peace in the Process: How Adoption Built My Faith & My Family” is on sale at Amazon this month for just $2.99. Like me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, peek into my life on Instagram, follow 152 Insights at Bloglovin’, or subscribe to receive “Insights in Your Inbox.”