I Always Say Nine

How many kids do you have?” Nine, I casually tell them. Then, because I can already see the shock starting behind their eyes, I admit I only gave birth to one.

After seeing their jaw drop a little, I explain. One biological daughter. Four adopted — three from across an ocean, one from foster care right here in our home state. And four more I call my bonus kids, the ones who came with my second marriage, who I count without hesitating because God did the adding, not me. Nine. A family I could never have drawn up on my own if you’d handed me a pencil and a hundred years.

What I usually don’t say to the stranger in the checkout line is that I always wanted a big family — I just pictured more of it coming from me.

I believed Him, and I was in turmoil

Soon after my daughter was born, I knew something. Not the knowing you reason your way into — the kind that settles into your spirit and won’t be talked back out. To borrow a phrase from a dear friend, “I know in my knower,” I would be a mother of many. I had no doubt it came from Him. I only assumed I understood what He meant by it. Mother of many. Surely that meant more pregnancies. A houseful, the usual way, the way I’d planned.

Then the empty months started stacking up. The PCOS diagnosis I received before my first pregnancy had been background noise most of my adult life, but the noise got louder after my one pregnancy and never quieted again. Babies kept arriving — for other people. I went to the showers. I held the tiny outfits up for the circle to admire. I smiled, and I meant it, and then I drove home and sat with the very particular ache of believing a promise you cannot find one shred of evidence for.

That’s the part I want to be honest about, because faith gets sold as the absence of that ache, and it is not. I believed Him. I never once stopped believing Him. And yet I was often in turmoil. I filled proverbial buckets with my tears each time a friend or family member would announce a pregnancy. I firmly held the deep faith I needed to believe Him, while the confusion of not yet seeing the promise remained. Both things. At the same time. I knew exactly what He had said, and I could not for the life of me see how He intended to keep it.

The woman who said, “It is well”

There’s a woman from the town of Shunem in the book of 2 Kings the text never even bothers to name. We first meet her being generous — she builds the prophet Elisha a small room on her roof to stay in — and that, usually, is where we often settle her. Hospitality. A kind lady with a spare bed. I think we shortchange her badly when we stop reading there.

Because she gets a promise too. Elisha tells her she’ll be holding a son within the year, and her first reaction isn’t joy — it’s nearly fear. From the New International Version, “No, my lord!” she objected. “Please, man of God, don’t mislead your servant!” She knows precisely what a broken promise would cost, because she’s the one who’d have to carry it. I have sat in that exact pew. The not-wanting-to-want, in case it gets snatched back.

As promised, the son comes. And then, years later, the son dies — in her arms, on her lap, around noon, just gone.

Here’s the part I keep circling back to. She carries the boy upstairs, lays him on the prophet’s bed, shuts the door, and saddles a donkey to ride out to find the man of God. Her husband asks why she’s going; it isn’t a holy day, there’s no occasion. And, in the New King James Version, she answers with three powerful words. “It is well.”

She says it with a dead child in the upstairs room. She says it again on the road, when Elisha sends a servant out to ask after the boy — and she gives the same answer. “It is well.” Not because it looked well; by every visible measure, it was the precise opposite of well. She says it because she refuses to let go of the One who made the promise before she has her answer in hand. The text says plainly that her soul was in deep distress — yet she said it anyway. She also rode toward God anyway, and she would not leave Him until He answered.

That is the faith I am reaching for. I’ll be honest, I’m not there yet.

He kept His promise — just not the way I’d have crafted it

Because here is how “mother of many” genuinely came true for me: not through my body, but through a foster placement ultimately leading to a courtroom, a different country across an ocean, and a man who showed up with four children already folded into the count. The promise was kept. It was just kept in a new language I had to learn, on a timeline I’d never have chosen, in a shape I couldn’t have sketched if I tried. Nine children. I only gave birth to one. He never lied to me. And, truthfully, I never lost my faith (at least concerning this promise). I simply couldn’t see the road from where I was standing — an ache in my lap, smiling through somebody else’s baby shower.

I don’t know what you’re holding that hasn’t come true the way you pictured it. It may have nothing to do with children. A healing that hasn’t come. A door that won’t open. A prayer you’ve prayed so long you’ve half-stopped expecting an answer. From the inside, the waiting feels about the same, whatever shape it takes.

What that unnamed Shunammite woman teaches me — what I am slowly, unevenly learning — is that “it is well” is not something you say after the answer finally arrives. Anyone can manage it then. She said it before. Door shut, the absolute worst already true, she rode out to find God still holding a promise she couldn’t yet see Him keep.

In this season of rebuilding after fifty, my natural eyes want to laugh at the promises He’s made me that are still waiting to come true. But when I look back over the first part of my life, I have proof that He is who He says He is — countless promises already kept.

I’m not all the way there. But I’m getting better at believing it early — at saying “it is well” while the room is still dark, some days a good while before I understand it — and that, I’m starting to believe, is the whole assignment. He kept His word to me in a shape I never could have drawn. I have nine children and gave birth to one, and I’m learning to trust that this next dark room is no different: He’s already holding what I can’t yet see.