Happiness during Infertility

By James Knab

The author lives in Texas, USA.

When we decided to not let infertility consume our lives, we learned how to truly trust in the Lord’s plan for us.

I’m a private person, so I didn’t feel like telling everyone what we were going through. But when my wife, Allison, and I went to our new ward for the first time and, about 30 seconds into it, were asked if we were trying to have kids, I realized that not everyone is as private as I am.

Infertility is a difficult challenge. It was even more difficult when I would look around our young ward every Sunday and it seemed that every woman was pregnant except for Allison. When we weren’t having any success in getting pregnant, we started with basic infertility appointments. But when we prayed about whether to continue going down the infertility treatment path, we felt instead that we should wait.

This seemed odd. We wondered why we shouldn’t continue forward with these treatments. But then I remembered that the timing of when to have children is between the couple and the Lord. Our sadness leading up to this point was deep. We wanted to be parents more than anything, but even though the Lord didn’t give us a straightforward explanation, we trusted in the answer we’d received that it wasn’t the right time.

Happiness in Our Circumstances

We decided to not let infertility consume our lives. As we trusted in the impressions we had received, we began to pray for other things instead of focusing every prayer on our desire for children. Acting on the Lord’s answer with faith, we were able to move forward with our lives and feel genuinely happy again. We learned to be grateful during our trial rather than waiting until it was over to be grateful. Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles has taught: “Being grateful in our circumstances is an act of faith in God. It requires that we trust God and hope for things we may not see but which are true.”¹ We didn’t know what the future held, but we knew we could continue to trust the Lord.

Instead of constantly thinking about our inability to have children, we occupied our time with other things. We still loved being around children, so we offered to babysit our friends’ kids, we spent quality time with our nieces and nephews and our families at reunions and during holidays, and Allison enjoyed her calling in the Primary. But during this time she also got to finish up college and get her degree, and we even got to live overseas for six months for a job opportunity. These experiences brought us closer together as a couple than at any other time in our marriage. Knowing that we were doing what the Lord wanted us to do during that time, even though it did not necessarily seem logical, increased our faith and brought us closer to Him.

We Can Always Trust in the Lord

After a long period of patience, faith, and trust, one day Allison said she needed to take a pregnancy test because something was definitely different. We couldn’t believe it when it was positive after we had endured this painful trial for years. I think our ward and family were just as excited as we were to find out we were pregnant, as they all had been hoping for us to be for a long time.

During a time where we could have been consumed with sadness, we found light by trusting the Lord with all our hearts. We now know that no matter the challenge that the Lord needs us to go through in this life, we can put our trust in Him and He will help us. Whether or not we ended up having children—and we had started assuming we would not be able to—our experience in trusting in the Lord and acting on answers we received strengthened our faith and led us to have greater confidence in the Lord and His plan for us. Even if we can’t see how everything will work out sometimes, the Lord has a plan for each of us. And everything will work out according to His plan.