A good Christian marriage…is more than a religious metaphor: It is a first, tangible, visible, and most glorious fruit of the kingdom of God.
— Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage
Hope for a baby can be all-consuming, desperate, life-altering for the wife and for the husband. Infertility, miscarriage, and stillbirth can feel like a failure to thrive, body and soul. The ache for progeny in the adoption process threatens to make cynics of those who feel powerless to “be fruitful and multiply”: Why is it so easy for some and why do the seemingly worst people have no trouble having babies and we who long to bear children, provide for them, raise them to adulthood cannot? Hope deferred makes the heart sick, as the Proverb goes. How do we work, go on, when hope is gone, but the call to be fruitful seems so clear?
All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.(1)
Grief so poignant sends us desperately looking to medicine and science for answers, and justifiably so.
Some years ago, I conferred in an office across from a man in a white coat, the #1 fertility specialist in the U.S. at the time. He kindly answered all my questions about In vitro fertilization (IVF), the procedure whereby doctors implant fertilized ova to the womb to increase the possibility of a viable pregnancy. When I pressed for details, he added that, should multiple-fetal pregnancy occur, the specialist removes the unwanted baby (ies) according to the parents’ wishes and his judgment. (2)
Parents longing for healthy children have ever increasing options, which often can deliver on the promise to help them achieve pregnancy. At the same time, medicine threatens to reduce childbearing to a commodity, to transactions to bear the desired fruit, as if there are good reasons for culling the fruit of the womb, like so many apples.
Medical and technological breakthroughs in fertility can feed our panic and tempt us to control the uncontrollable, to reduce the marriage relationship to the quest. And in the process, the marriage relationship itself is reduced to the fulfilling of the desire for a child. Science can be confusing, because science cannot give us meaning and closes out a huge portion of reality. We cannot rely on medicine and science to tell us what to do.
But way back when in the garden, God made us not controllers, but stewards: of our marriages, of the medical options, and everything else. For religious and irreligious alike, physical existence is the realm in which truth must be worked out. The stage of infertility and loss presents the drama of body and soul begun in the first garden.
The truth is that marriage is a common grace, a creation ordinance and gift, intended to bless the whole earth (Genesis 1). More than that, true believers in the gospel of Christ enjoy the benefits of covenantal(3) marriage, where not just any garden grows, but one on unshakeable ground (see Hebrews 12: 28-13:4). None of us is fit for the garden, for the sacred space which is marriage—which is why Christ had to come, to make it possible for us to bear fruit, and fruit that should remain (Jn. 15:16). In the covenant we are given something to stand on. The form of the covenant gives us the courage to confess our inadequacies to bear fruit of any kind and to call on the only adequacy there is.
It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to deflect our
intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to
our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our
real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the
one that sings.(4)
In the desire to be life-givers amid infertility, suffering, and loss, nothing anyone says will help much or ring true. To grieve barrenness is appropriate: lament fully, knowing grief takes time to process. Chase after trust in a Person, not in an outcome. Know hope and joy are real possibilities. Your marriage can nourish the world.
Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights. (Hab. 3:17-19)
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1 “Work without Hope,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
2 https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/committee-opinion/articles/2017/09/multifetal-pregnancy-reduction Accessed September 3, 2026 . Multifetal pregnancy reduction is defined as a first-trimester or early second-trimester procedure for reducing the total number of fetuses in a multifetal pregnancy by one or more. The term morphed a bit from selective reduction to soften the blow. But nothing can soften the blow to the child in the womb.
3 A relationship whereby faithfulness of the initiating party (God) is secured through eternity
4 Berry, Wendell. Standing by Words. Shoemaker & Hoard, Washington D.C. 1983, p. 97.
Resources:
https://bridgetscradles.com/post/episode32/
Gibson, Jackie. You Are Still a Mother: Hope for Women Grieving a Stillbirth or Miscarriage
Wtsbooks.com