Walking through Infertility E-Book

Matthew Arbo

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 140

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

"This book was written to help you see and understand that God is the Giver of life. You are his child. He cares deeply about you. When you hurt, he hurts with you." —from the Introduction Infertility is the profoundly wounding experience of many couples, often leading to feelings of despair and shame as they grapple with shattered dreams and unanswered questions. But God does not leave them alone in their pain. The Creator and Redeemer of life has not forsaken the infertile, but has called and equipped them to participate in his church, kingdom, and mission. Overflowing with warmth and sensitivity, this book explores what the Bible says about infertility, helping the church walk alongside couples struggling with infertility and assessing the ethical issues surrounding common fertility treatments and reproductive technologies.

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“Infertility is painful. In these pages, Matthew Arbo gives biblical insight and wise counsel, offering both comfort and hope for those on this difficult journey. Walking through Infertility goes deeper than the superficial clichés couples often hear, which, though intended to comfort, can hurt. Arbo frames infertility within the biblical narrative, where it is actually quite common and significant—we find we are not alone. Additionally, he helps those navigating some of the complex ethical decisions made possible by modern technology for dealing with infertility—we are not without guidance. Ultimately, he points to our comfort in the community of the church and our hope in the God of life.”

Joshua Ryan Butler, Pastor, Imago Dei Community, Portland, Oregon; author, The Skeletons in God’s Closet and The Pursuing God

“I am glad to commend Matthew Arbo’s Walking through Infertility both to couples going down this road and to the friends, family members, and professionals who walk this road with them. It is sensitively done, and full of wisdom and insight about what these couples are facing. It’s a worthwhile resource, which I will often consult.”

Scott B. Rae, Professor of Christian Ethics, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University

“Walking through Infertility is a resource I wish had been available when we walked through our own struggles with infertility. In an age of increasing medical advancement, the options for couples are numerous and often overwhelming. Matthew Arbo has provided a helpful resource for couples as they consider what the Bible has to say about infertility and how God’s Word speaks to the various treatments out there. But Arbo also speaks to church leaders, who are often left wondering how to counsel those under their care. This is a needed book, and I’m glad it’s finally here.”

Courtney Reissig, author, Glory in the Ordinary and The Accidental Feminist

“The challenges of infertility raise serious and substantive pastoral and ethical questions, yet few accessible—much less biblical—volumes exist to address them. Matthew Arbo’s sensitive and careful discussion is alive to the struggles couples face, yet concerned about the ethical temptations that arise within them. This is a helpful volume, with theologically grounded counsel that lay leaders and pastors should weigh carefully.”

Matthew Lee Anderson, Founder, Mere Orthodoxy; author, The End of Our Exploring: A Book about Questioning and the Confidence of Faith

WalkingthroughInfertility

Walking through Infertility

Biblical, Theological, and Moral Counsel for Those Who Are Struggling

Matthew Arbo

Foreword by Karen Swallow Prior

Walking through Infertility: Biblical, Theological, and Moral Counsel for Those Who Are Struggling

Copyright © 2018 by Matthew Arbo

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Micah Lanier

First printing 2018

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-5931-0ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-5934-1PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-5932-7Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-5933-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Arbo, Matthew, 1981– author.

Title: Walking through infertility : biblical, theological, and moral counsel for those who are struggling / Matthew Arbo.

Description: Wheaton : Crossway, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017057938 (print) | LCCN 2018020306 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433559327 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433559334 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433559341 (epub) | ISBN 9781433559310 (tp)

Subjects: LCSH: Infertility—Patients—Counseling of—Moral and ethical aspects. | Infertility—Religious aspects. | Infertility—Psychological aspects.

Classification: LCC RC889 (ebook) | LCC RC889 .A67 2018 (print) | DDC 616.6/920651—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057938

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2020-11-20 10:38:20 AM

To Patrick and Jennifer

Contents

Foreword by Karen Swallow Prior

Introduction: A Modern Story of Infertility

 1  Stories of Infertility and God’s Abiding Promise

 2  Christian Discipleship and Human Affection

 3  The Vitality and Consolation of the Church

 4  A Moral Appraisal of Infertility Treatment

Appendix: Interview with Patrick and Jennifer Arbo

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

Foreword

Karen Swallow Prior

I’ll never forget the moment I realized that I hadn’t been given the gift of musicality.

As the granddaughter of an accomplished bandmaster and the daughter of a lifelong choir singer, I was six when, immediately upon showing an interest, I was started on piano lessons. For years, I had weekly instruction and practiced daily at home on our old wooden upright.

One afternoon, I arrived at my piano teacher’s house early and sat in the foyer to await the end of the session of the student ahead of me. The girl was a year older than me, but I knew she’d been taking lessons for less time than I had. Sitting quietly by myself, listening to her play, I noticed a smoothness and gracefulness in her notes I had never heard from my own fingers. In that instant, I recognized for the first time that—not for any lack of trying or desire—I truly lacked musical talent. Suddenly, I felt free. I was but a teenager, but I had figured out on my own what no one else seemed able to see or willing to say.

I quit piano lessons and took up cross country. I’ve been running ever since.

My journey through infertility replicated this experience in significant ways.

Like most women, I desired from a young age to become a mother someday and assumed that I would. Everyone around me, particularly in our church life, appeared to share this assumption. When my husband and I didn’t conceive right away, everyone seemingly assumed we would follow the prescribed course for most infertile couples, partaking of increasingly invasive and risky procedures until pregnancy was achieved. No one advised us to stop and consider that perhaps God simply wasn’t going to give us the gift of children. But my husband had the wisdom to apply the brakes. Yes, we desired the gift of children—but we weren’t willing to create life in ways that we believe risk harm to that life. Notably, the verse in Psalms that proclaims that children are a gift of the Lord (127:3) is preceded two verses before with the caution, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (Ps. 127:1).

Not long after we were married, a family member gave me some of her old maternity clothes, baby clothes, and a fold-up stroller. Unquestioningly, I took them home and packed them safely away for someday. Because it was a long time before my husband and I learned that we were infertile, we dutifully lugged these items around for years, from apartment to apartment, where they took up scant closet space, before eventually giving them away to someone who could actually use them. It was even longer before I realized what a burden that baggage had been. And I don’t mean the baby supplies. The real baggage was the presumption that every godly family follows the same course and achieves the same standard outcome.

God’s design for the family—the fruitful marriage between a man and a woman, the union of two image bearers that brings forth more image bearers—is mysterious, wonderful, and good. To desire such is good. Both marriage and children are God’s good gifts. But to assume that God will give certain gifts is not good. Nor is it good to cultivate within the church the presumption that God is going to give his gifts to everyone—just as surely as I won’t be accompanying next week’s soloist at the piano.

To have one’s longing to marry and have children go unmet is, as with any frustrated desire, disappointing. However, the depth of that disappointment can be increased even beyond what is natural with the additional imposition of expectations—whether others’ or our own.

As Matt writes in the following pages, “Every experience of infertility is a storied experience. . . .Through story we situate ourselves and others to help make sense of where we are and how we got here.” The fact is that what we think is the standard story for the family is more culturally influenced than we realize. Indeed, in many chapters of church history, beginning with the apostle Paul, marriage and family have not been the assumed norm for those devoted to lives of service to Christ. The power of the stories we tell ourselves—based on the story given to us by our culture—can be positive, but it can also be destructive. The prevailing narrative within the culture, church culture included, that assumes family life looks a particular way and follows a certain path conditions those who don’t adhere to that plot to feel, wrongly, out of place in the story. Recognizing those pressures for what they are will not, of course, eliminate entirely the sense of suffering and loss that comes when our personal desires are thwarted. However, embracing the understanding that life doesn’t always (nor does it have to) look one way in order to please God and be fulfilling can go a long way in guiding our responses to frustrated expectations and desires.

Matt wisely writes that “the Creator and Redeemer of life has not forsaken the infertile but has instead given them a slightly different way of being family and thus of participating in the life and mission of God.” Imagine what the church would look like if infertile couples were taught, discipled, and encouraged in the knowledge that God has other plans for their earthly ministry, and if the church equipped them to find and carry out those plans. Some of these couples might be called to adopt children. Some might be called to devote time to other members of their families. Some might be called to serve the kingdom through church ministry, intentional communities, creative artistry, or secular vocations.

Another part of this picture we might envision is what a church that purposefully makes space for childless women to offer the gifts of their minds, mothering, and time would look like. Not only might infertile women feel a bit less the burden of longing, loss, and shame that often accompany infertility, but the church would be richer in cultivating and receiving the gifts such women have been given. I’m thankful this has been my own experience in the church. But I lament that this experience for infertile women is not universal.

May this book help make it so.

Introduction

A Modern Story of Infertility

John and Lizzy first met at a student ministry gathering at their college in Colorado. It was serendipitous in the way so many comedic first-meets are. They were crazy for one another from the start. Infatuated. Inseparable. They had everything in common. A short year later, to no one’s surprise, they were engaged. He studied engineering; she studied journalism. They married in a small chapel in the Rocky Mountain foothills not many weeks after graduation. Parents wept, friends cheered, and the felicitous couple laughed their way through the first few years of marriage. And although they never really put it to themselves this way, both John and Lizzy felt deep down that everything in life had really gone according to plan. They were on their way together and figured at some point a gaggle of children would soon follow.

Seven years later, childless, John and Lizzy’s once raucous joy had stilled, and their hopeful expectations were all but muted by loneliness. When they ceased using contraceptives shortly after their third anniversary, they naturally assumed conception was imminent. But failing to conceive after six or seven cycles, Lizzy became anxious: was there some biological problem?

She discussed her nervousness with John over the next month or so and decided to schedule an appointment with her obstetrician. She was pleased she did. The OB instructed her to pay even closer attention to her natural cycle and to have intercourse with her husband every day she was at her most fertile. Her doctor also recommended some additional blood and hormonal testing, which to Lizzy’s surprise revealed a slight imbalance in estrogen, comparably easy to treat. Things were looking up again. This little imbalance must have been the problem all along. Nevertheless, despite implementing a rigorous sexual itinerary and treatment regimen, ten months later John and Lizzy still hadn’t conceived. And everywhere they were reminded of the fact.

The new impasse meant it was John’s turn for assessment. He and Lizzy were referred to a well-known fertility specialist and, following a battery of tests, John was given a clean bill of reproductive health. Nothing on John’s end seemed to be preventing conception. Results that should have been relieving were, in their case, crushing in their implications. They could not conceive, and the hidden reason had something to do with their bodies. It all felt deeply indicting.

Anxiety was assuaged somewhat by the specialist’s immediate rejoinder: there was still hope. It was time to try a new, more involved phase of treatment. Lizzy would undergo a fresh series of scans and screenings. They would get to the bottom of this, he told them. It would be expensive and laborious, but it was the only way forward if they wished to have a biological child.

In Vitro Fertilization: IVF. They had read a bit about the procedure in online forums for couples experiencing infertility. It seemed feasible for them on first glance, and they were certainly ideal candidates. But the sticker shock! They were still paying off college loans. And they had purchased their first home only the year before. The savings just weren’t there yet.

Quite apart from the financial concern, they also harbored reservations about the ethics of the procedure itself. Its clinical artificiality and transactional character rubbed their consciences wrong, although they couldn’t quite say why. IVF appealed to them, in a way, but they would need some time to evaluate their options. Maybe adoption made more sense for them. Or perhaps embryo adoption, which they’d begun to hear more and more about from random friends online, was something they should consider. Whatever they ultimately decided, they’d need more money, wisdom, and time to make it happen.

Through it all, from the earliest days of subtle worry to the later seasons of empty bedrooms and indelicate conversations at church, John and Lizzy felt the full range of emotions that attend the experience of infertility. Eagerness, worry, hope, disappointment, confidence, despair, embarrassment—they felt it all—and always, everywhere the irrepressible shame of not being able to complete the basic human task of reproduction. It was an irrational feeling, they knew, and yet they couldn’t fully banish it from their hearts. It had fastened itself to them. Shame dug at them with every opportunity—children bounding loudly on playgrounds, toddlers chuckling in shopping carts, birth announcements arriving in the mail, baby dedications at church—they couldn’t escape the reproach.

Inevitably the shame hardened into bitter anger each took out on the other. That’s often the nature of infertility, the “fault” is either his or hers. Human beings are pathological about wanting to fix responsibility for a problem. The trouble with this tendency is that fixing responsibility tends in reality to result in blaming. John and Lizzy took their turns with each other. Blaming became an almost daily venting ritual. At its worst, they both at different times wondered to themselves whether it would be better to leave and chart a new life with someone else, far away from the hell their life together had descended into. At its best, well, as far as they could tell, there really was no “best.”

Where We’re Going