My Belief In God

My friend, Isae, asked me the other day if I blame God for what I am going through. I told her "No, I don't. I think that God gives life, but I don't think that he takes it away." And I truly believe this. I have never subscribed to the common Catholic belief that there is a "wrath of God." The God that I believe in does not punish people. The God that I believe in gives life and tries to help each of us sustain it. I think that many of the bad things that happen in this world, such as cancer, are because of things that mankind has done to itself (e.g., environmental toxins, pesticides and preservatives in foods, poorly designed products, etc); and the rest of the bad things just happen because life is chaotic and imperfect.

I have always had a vague, comforting belief in God starting from when I was young, despite the fact that I never really attended church growing up. But my real, deep-down, heartfelt belief in God began about 6 years ago when Pete and I were going through all of our struggles to have children. After two years of trying, we ended up doing IVF to get pregnant and were lucky enough to have it work the first try. Forty weeks later we were blessed with a full-term, completely healthy, feisty little boy named Luke. Two years later, when we decided to try again, we foolishly assumed that the process would be just as easy. Unfortunately, we were wrong. We lost 5 babies and had many failed fertility attempts before we were finally blessed with a second child.

How did that whole roller coaster experience help me to believe in God, you might ask? Intuitively, it would seem that the opposite would be true! But the reality is that the experience helped me recognize that there is something completely beautiful and mysterious and unexplainable about how life begins; how a complex human can be created from just an egg and a sperm. Our doctors will tell you that the medical community has made enormous strides in the past 10-15 years in terms of understanding how reproduction works. But they will also tell you that there is so much that they still cannot explain. Why do some embryos look "perfect" under the microscope, but still not turn into babies? Why do some babies, who have no apparent chromosomal abnormalities, not survive? Why do some people pursue fertility treatments unsuccessfully for years and then suddenly get pregnant on their own? These are all questions which we asked time and time again in the years that we struggled to create our family. And all the doctors could tell us was "There is still so much that we cannot explain." I think that the things that we know are only a small part of the things that we cannot know.

Safely tucked away in baby books, we have pictures of both our children when they are a mere 8 cells. I wonder sometimes how they will feel when they are old enough to look at these pictures and realize that they are looking at themselves on Day 3 of their life! Somehow, someway, those tiny microscopic masses of cells knew to continue dividing and each new cell that was created knew exactly what it was suppose to become. In my opinion, the most miraculous part of the whole process happened around Week Five when somehow a "light switch" got turned on and a tiny, tiny flicker of light could suddenly be seen on the ultrasound screen. This was their heartbeat and seeing it brought us to our knees!

How does this happen? How does a mass of dividing cell suddenly transform into something that is living and that can eventually sustain itself? Where does this life force come from? No one knows the true answer, but I guess this is where faith begins. If you believe -- as I do -- that there is a Higher Power somewhere in the universe who is the source of this initial life force, then it's not difficult to carry that belief forward and to believe that this Higher Power is with us throughout our lives.

But what about the babies that we lost? Sadly, we lost all of them many weeks after their hearts started beating. Some might argue that God played a role in that as well, but I don't agree. I believe that the moment that the light switch gets flipped and the heart starts beating, that at that same moment the "life force" switch gets flipped on as well and that this life force is actually the small piece of God that lives within each living being. I think that this life force can sustain us through incredibly difficult circumstances. It keeps us fighting and it keeps us strong despite seemingly insurmountable odds. But sometimes the circumstances are just too difficult to overcome.

I know now that I had cancer at the same time that I was trying to get pregnant (the doctors estimate that the tumor has been growing for 5-7 years -- yikes!). And so I can't help but wonder if maybe this is why I miscarried so many times. Maybe my body was not able to handle the stress of fighting cancer at the same time it was trying to sustain a pregnancy. Or maybe we lost our babies for some other completely unrelated reason. We'll never know. But I don't believe that losing our babies was some sort of punishment from God and, in answer to Isae's question, I also don't believe that the cancer I have now is a punishment. In fact, I believe quite the opposite. I believe that I am not in this fight alone and that the strength and determination and "life force" that propel me forward each day are because there is a part of God that lives in me.