Not the Miracle We Wanted

By Brittany King

The author lives in Utah, USA.

Sometimes we pray and pray until our knees are sore for the miracle we want, but then God gives us the miracle we need.

In a few months I would graduate from college and, I hoped, have my first baby. My husband was as eager as I was to start having children.

One year, four months, dozens of negative pregnancy tests, five negative ovulation tests, two miserable months on medication, and thousands of tears later, we had no baby and little hope for natural conception. When the doctor’s office called and offered to refer us to an infertility specialist, we declined. Too stressed to handle more, we needed a break. Before I hung up, the nurse said, “Call us if you have a miracle.”

Miracles are, well, miraculous. They come big and small. They come when we least expect them and when we desperately need them. And sometimes we pray and pray until our knees are sore for the miracle we want, but then God gives us the miracle we need.

For a long time we prayed desperately for a child, but the heavens seemed silent. Eventually it occurred to us that we were praying for the wrong thing. God knows what blessings we need and when we need them. He sees the big picture. We see right now. So we changed. We stopped praying for what we wanted and instead started saying “thank you.”

Heavenly Father, thank Thee for blessing us with each other.

Thank Thee for caring family and friends.

Thank Thee for the children around us whom we can enjoy until we have our own.

Thank Thee for doctors and science that help uncover what does and doesn’t work in our bodies.

And (now the hardest thing to say) thank Thee for this trial.

Being grateful for the very thing breaking our hearts was hard, but we knew that Heavenly Father loved us. So somewhere in this trial were blessings. We would never find the blessings if we let the trial overtake us. Instead, we chose to be grateful—and when we did, the blessings became clear:

We relied on each other more, shared our feelings more, loved each other more.

We relied on the Lord more and prayed more.

We grew closer to the Savior, felt His presence more, loved Him more.

We felt the love of family and friends who were praying for us.

And once we acknowledged all these blessings, we were overcome with the purest, sweetest peace imaginable.

That we weren’t having a family right then didn’t mean God didn’t care. We just needed to trust in His timing, and we needed His peace to keep that trust alive. We needed His peace to bind up our breaking hearts and give us the faith to keep moving forward.

Peace was the miracle we needed—not the miracle we’d been begging for, but the one we needed most.