Oh God, Would You Move?

“Mama, what are we going to name my baby sister?”

The question floated up from the backseat this morning with all the innocence and certainty of a three-year-old. I was driving Haisley to school, and I was already fragile.

I’m currently in the two-week wait after our second IUI, which means I am living in that very specific kind of purgatory where every completely normal bodily function becomes evidence in a case I am relentlessly building in my own head. My temperature went up. What does that mean? My temperature went down. What does that mean? Was that a cramp? Am I tired because I’m pregnant, or because I have a full-time job, a three-year-old, four thousand things happening at any given moment, and the general sleep habits of a raccoon?

This morning, my temperature dropped below baseline. Then LabCorp canceled the time-sensitive appointment I had carefully wedged into an already impossible schedule.

And somewhere in the middle of mentally calculating dates and DPOs and progesterone and whether any of this means anything at all, a tiny voice came from behind me.

“Mama, what are we going to name my baby sister?”

I answered her calmly, because she is three. She doesn’t understand IUIs or follicles or trigger shots. She doesn’t know that babies aren’t something you can simply decide to have. She certainly doesn’t understand that her mama is 42 years old and that statistics and biology have plenty to say about what we are trying to do.

She just knows she wants a baby sister. And apparently she believes we are getting one.

Then she asked:

“Mama, when are we going to go pick up our baby sister and bring her home?”

Oh, sweet girl.

If only it worked that way.

I gave her whatever answer I gave her. I honestly don’t remember. I held myself together, drove into the school parking lot, got her where she needed to be, and kissed her goodbye.

Then I pulled away, turned the music back up, and God met me there.

We recently started singing a song at church called Oh God, Would You Move.

Jimmy and I have talked about how strange, or maybe not strange at all, the timing has been. This song entered regular rotation at our church right around the time we entered this fertility journey, and every time we sing the bridge, I feel it somewhere deeper than I used to.

We’ve prayed our prayers
We’ve made our plans
If You’re not in it
We don’t want it
Oh God, would You move?

Only You can heal our land
Holy Spirit come and fill us
Oh God, would You move?

This morning, completely by chance, that song came through my Spotify playlist as I drove away from Haisley’s school.

And I lost it. Not graceful tears. Not the cinematic single tear rolling delicately down my cheek. I mean sobbing, tears streaming down my face.

Because suddenly those words weren't something I was singing in a room full of people on Sunday morning. They were my prayer.

We’ve prayed our prayers.

God, have we prayed them. Quiet prayers. Desperate prayers. Hopeful prayers. Prayers Jimmy and I have prayed together. Prayers I have prayed alone. Prayers I haven't even had words for.

We’ve made our plans.

Oh, have we made plans. Doctor appointments and bloodwork and ultrasounds. Medications and trigger shots and carefully timed procedures. Calendars rearranged. Work meetings moved. Money spent. Numbers calculated. Temperatures tracked.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am exceptionally good at making a plan. But fertility has been one long lesson in the limits of my own competence.

I can schedule the appointment, but I cannot make my body cooperate. I can take the medication, but I cannot command a follicle to grow. I can track ovulation, but I cannot create life. I can rearrange every meeting on my calendar and drive anywhere in Central Florida and advocate and escalate and research and calculate until there is quite literally nothing left for me to do.

And then I have to wait.

There are few things I hate more than waiting, especially when the thing I am waiting for is something I cannot control.

Only You can heal our land.

I've sung that line countless times. But lately, when I sing our land, I think about my body. This body that has carried a baby before. This body that grew Haisley. This body that has also frustrated me and frightened me and required far more medical intervention than I ever imagined it would. This body that I am asking, at 42 years old, to do something extraordinary again.

Heal our land.

Heal me.

Not because I believe that if I pray correctly, God owes me another baby. He doesn't. Not because I think faith is a transaction where enough belief eventually produces the outcome I requested. It isn't.

But because I believe God heals. I believe God creates. I believe God still moves.

And I believe He is worthy of my praise whether He moves in the way I am begging Him to or not.

That last part is harder to write than it is to say.

We just finished studying the book of Acts at church, and maybe that wasn't an accident either.

Because Acts is full of movement. Go here. Wait there. Speak. Stay. Leave. A door opens. Another closes. Plans change.

In Acts 16, Paul and his companions are traveling with every intention of going one direction, and the Holy Spirit prevents them. So they try another direction. Again: no. And then Paul receives a vision calling them somewhere they hadn't originally planned to go.

What strikes me about that story isn't that Paul somehow knew the plan all along. He very clearly didn't.

He made a plan and started moving. And then he allowed God to redirect him.

That has been sitting heavily with me lately because there are moments in this process when I wonder whether I am being faithful...or just stubborn.

There are days when I look at the odds and think, Amy, what are you doing? You're 42. You've already been given an incredible child. You have a beautiful family. How much time and money and emotional energy are you going to pour into trying to make this happen?

At what point is continuing an act of faith? And at what point is stopping an act of faith?

I don't know.

That's the part I desperately wish God would make clearer, because I mean it when I sing:

If You’re not in it, we don’t want it.

I do.

But there is another sentence underneath that one that I haven't been singing out loud:

God, I really, really want You to be in this.

I want another car seat in our car. I want another tiny person at our dinner table. I want to watch Haisley become a big sister. I want the chaos and the exhaustion and the diapers and the bottles and the sleepless nights that I absolutely know I will complain about while simultaneously knowing I prayed for every single one of them.

I want to meet the child we have already imagined.

And apparently, somewhere along the way, my three-year-old started imagining that child too. She doesn't know about probabilities. She doesn't know about ovarian reserve or maternal age or follicles or IUIs.

She just wants to know what we're going to name her baby sister.

And when we're going to pick her up.

Maybe this is why Acts feels so personal to me right now. I keep wanting God to hand me the itinerary: Here is where you're going. Here is how long it will take. Here is what it will cost. Here is exactly how this ends.

I would thrive with that arrangement. Color-code it, put it on my calendar, and consider it handled.

Instead, I keep getting the next step. And then another. Sometimes a closed door. Sometimes a completely different road than the one I thought we were taking.

Maybe faith isn't knowing where the road ends. Maybe faith is trusting the One leading me enough to keep walking when He says go—and trusting Him enough to stop when He says stop.

I'm still learning the difference.

Right now, I don't hear stop. But I also haven't been promised the ending I want.

So here I am, somewhere between medicine and miracle. Between planning and surrender. Between God, please give us this baby and God, if this isn't what You have for us, teach me how to let it go. Between the little girl in my backseat who is absolutely certain her baby sister is coming and her mama, who knows enough about the world to understand that she might not be.

Maybe that's why I cried so hard this morning. Because for all my research and planning and tracking and problem-solving, I finally reached the end of what I can do.

I cannot manufacture this miracle. Only God can give life.

So this isn't an announcement, and it isn't a testimony with a tidy ending. I don't have the photograph that proves everything worked out. I don't know whether this IUI worked. I don't know whether there will be another cycle. I don't know whether another Patterson baby will ever come home with us. And I don't know whether someday I'll look back at this season and understand exactly what God was doing.

Today, I just know who God has already been.

He was God before we started trying. He was God when Haisley was placed in my arms. He was God when my body scared me. He was God through every appointment and every disappointment. He was God when the plans worked, and He was God when they fell apart.

He was God before this morning's temperature drop. He was God when that tiny voice asked me an impossible question from the backseat. And He was God when I drove away from her school with tears pouring down my face.

He will still be God when this story has an ending. Whatever that ending is.

So maybe I don't need to know it today.

Maybe today my job is to praise Him here, before the test, before the answer, before the miracle or the redirection. To open my hands around the plans I have been gripping so tightly and offer them back to the God who gave me everything I was trying so desperately to control in the first place.

We've prayed our prayers. We've made our plans.

And God, I mean this even though part of me is terrified to say it: if You're not in it, we don't want it.

So maybe I don't need to know it today.

Maybe that's the part I'm still learning: faith doesn't require me to know how this ends. It doesn't require me to pretend I don't know how I want it to end, either.

I believe with my whole heart that God can give us another baby.

I believe He can work outside the statistics that make me question what we're doing. I believe He can do something that right now feels increasingly unlikely. I believe in miracles—not as something God owes me because I've prayed hard enough, but because I believe in a God who is capable of them.

But I believe just as deeply that God can redirect me.

If this isn't where He is leading us, I believe He can make that clear too. I believe He can change my heart, reshape the desires I'm holding so tightly, and help me want what He wants for our family—even if getting there hurts.

Maybe that's why Acts has felt so personal lately. I'm not looking for proof that if I just keep walking long enough, I'll eventually arrive at the destination I've already chosen. I'm trying to learn how to keep walking while remaining willing to be redirected.

And right now, I don't feel redirected.

I still have hope. I still want another baby with an ache I don't really know how to explain. I still look at Haisley and imagine her as somebody's big sister. And yes, there is a very human part of me that desperately wants God's plan and my plan to turn out to be exactly the same thing.

Maybe they will.

Maybe they won't.

But I believe God can move in either direction.

He can make a way where I can't see one.

And He can show me another way if this one isn't mine.

That's where I was this morning—driving away from preschool, crying hard enough that I'm sure I looked completely unhinged to anyone stopped next to me at a red light, while a song I've sung dozens of times suddenly sounded entirely different.

A few minutes earlier, my three-year-old had asked me when we were going to pick up her baby sister.

I didn't have an answer for her.

I still don't.

But for the first time, maybe I'm realizing that Oh God, would You move? isn't only a prayer for the miracle I'm hoping for, it's also a prayer for the redirection I can't see yet.

Either way, I'm asking Him to move, and trusting that when He does, I'll know which way to go.