My 8th April
Joyful Anyway
This is my 8th April.
I know it before I open my eyes. Something in my body registers it before my brain catches up — a low familiar ache settling into my chest like it lives there. Because at this point, it does.
When April arrives, it means another year has passed…
Mother’s Day is coming. And I can’t forget.
This week is National Infertility Awareness Week (April 19–25). And every year when it arrives, my feed fills up with the same well-meaning posts. God has the final say. Speak life. Your miracle is coming. Don’t give up.
I want to be careful here, because I believe every word of that — and I also need to tell you what those words did to me.
The hole doesn't go away. You just learn to live around it.
What the Encouragement Posts Almost Cost Me
I am eight years into infertility. We have tried to adopt three times. I am not writing from the other side of this. There is no bow on this story. Not yet. Maybe not ever — and I’ve had to make peace with that possibility in ways I never expected.
For the first several years, every “speak life” post, every “God has the final say” declaration, every infographic listing every infertile Bible couple who eventually had a child, they felt like encouragement. And then, slowly, they started to feel like something else.
They started to feel like a checklist I was failing.
If God has the final say, and my miracle hasn’t come… What am I saying wrong? What am I believing wrong? What is wrong with me?
I want to be clear: the people posting those things love God, and they love people in pain. I am not questioning their hearts. But I was on the receiving end of that theology for years, and I need to tell you honestly — it almost broke me. Not the infertility. The framework I was handed to understand it.
I came closer to deconstructing my faith entirely than I have ever admitted out loud.
The Reconstruction
What pulled me back wasn’t a miracle. It wasn’t a resolution. It was a different framework entirely, one that had room for the messy middle, not just the ending.
Dr. Kate Bowler was a significant part of that reconstruction. A historian of the prosperity gospel who was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer at 35. A woman who has written and spoken with unflinching honesty about what it means to hold faith and suffering in the same hands without forcing one to fix the other.
She taught me — through her books, her podcast, her writing — that the prosperity gospel isn’t just a fringe theology. It has permeated every facet of American Christianity (regardless of your faith tradition beacuse it is at the core of American mythos). And when you’re fragile, when the formula isn’t working, you feel its influence in ways that people standing on solid ground simply cannot see.
Which brings me to last Monday.
God Hitting Me Over the Head
I have to tell you something I find almost funny, in the way that only God can be funny.
This is my 8th April. The week before National Infertility Awareness Week. And somehow, in the middle of all of it, I found myself sitting in a room listening to Kate Bowler talk about her new book — Joyful Anyway.
In typical academic librarian fashion, I took five pages of notes!
I’m still processing…
But one thing she said I haven’t been able to put down. She said (this is as close to a direct quote as I wrote down) that those of us who are fragile are able to see the problems in the systems that are supposed to shelter and protect us.
Eight years in, I’ve seen it. From right here. From the middle. From the place the formula didn’t reach.
And I couldn’t help but notice the irony — that in my 8th April, the week before IAW, God was hitting me over the head with joy. Not the performed kind. Not the “my miracle came” kind. The anyway kind.
What the Bible Actually Says About the Middle
Here’s where I want to slow down, because this matters theologically.
The “speak life” framework isn’t wrong because God can’t heal infertility. He can. He does. Miracles are real, and I will never tell you otherwise.
It’s wrong — or at least dangerously incomplete — because it treats the middle as a malfunction.
As if the only faithful response to unanswered prayer is louder, more persistent, more correctly-worded prayer. As if the people still waiting are waiting because something in them hasn’t quite gotten it right yet.
But Romans 8 tells us that creation itself groans. Not as a sign of weak faith. Not as a temporary inconvenience on the way to resolution. As the honest condition of a broken world that God has not abandoned.
And in John 9, when the disciples asked Jesus who sinned, this man or his parents, to cause his blindness, Jesus didn’t say, " Have more faith, and you’ll see.” He dismantled the framework entirely. Neither. The suffering wasn’t caused by a failure of faith. It just... was. And God was present in it.
Paul asked God three times to remove his thorn. God said no. Not, not yet. No. And Paul was not faithless. Paul was not being punished. Paul was not outside God’s plan.
Faithful people carry unanswered prayers. That is not a malfunction of faith.
That is faith.
What “Joyful Anyway” Means (to me)
I used to think joy required resolution. That it lived on the other side of the answered prayer, the completed adoption, the positive test.
Kate Bowler’s new book is called Joyful Anyway. And sitting in that room last Monday, eight years in, still in the middle — I think that’s exactly right.
Not joyful because the miracle came.
Not joyful after the grief resolves.
Not joyful instead of the ache.
Anyway.
The theology I’ve had to rebuild from the rubble of the framework that almost broke me says this: God is present in the ache. In the 8th April. In the room on a Monday when you’re still in the middle, and someone hands you a framework that finally has room for where you actually are.
My wound isn’t gushing the way it used to. It’s more like an ache now. Scabbed. Still tender. Still there when I (or circumstances) press on it.
But I am still here. And I am — somehow, anyway — still finding joy.
Joy vs. happiness is a different conversation. For more details, see Joyful Anyway by Kate Bowler.
For Those of You in the Messy Middle
If you’re reading this during Infertility Awareness Week and the “speak life” posts are making you feel like you’re failing — I need you to hear this:
You are not doing it wrong. The ache is not evidence of weak faith. The unanswered prayer is not a verdict on your worthiness.
You don’t have to perform hope you don’t feel. You don’t have to explain why April is hard. You don’t have to have a testimony with a resolution yet.
You can hold your grief and your faith at the same time. You don’t have to choose.
The fragile ones see clearly. And what we see — from right here, from the messy middle, from the place the formula didn’t reach — is a God who is present not just on the mountaintop but in the valley. Not as a consolation prize. Just... here.
We’re here.
We’re still here…
And that — even now, even in the 8th April — is enough to build on.
I’m still here with you,
Rachel
P.S. Season 2 is still on track to begin in July 2026. I'll see you there.
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