"I don't know."

As a little girl, I was always inquisitive.  I'm sure that most small children are.  In new locations and situations, I consistently had at least one question.  God bless my sweet parents.

Does everyone on the planet have a different number of hairs?  Yes.  Everyone?!  Yes.  Even identical twins?  Yes.

Can I skip my vegetables?  No.  Why does Dad get to?  Your dad is a grown man.  Do all grown men skip their vegetables?  No.

Where do babies come from?  Maybe we'll discuss that later.  When?  Not now.  Later.

Why did Grandma get cancer?  I don't know.  Does Granddad know?  No.  Then who does know?

Obviously, I was not only inquisitive, but I was also persistent.  I wanted answers, I wanted complete answers, and I wanted them immediately.  Not a lot has changed.  Then, and even now, "I don't know" is insufficient and unsettling.   

When Andrew and I went back to the doctor for his second follow-up appointment a couple of weeks ago, we weren't expecting our situation to be any different.  (We recently found out that his surgery in April yielded unfavorable results, and we didn't think that that had changed.)  What we were hoping for was a reason why, an explanation.  Because of the vast amount of medical research and technology available these days, we anticipated that the doctor would be able to say, "Your situation is like this because of X."  "You will be able to have children if Y."  I would have even been okay with, "It is highly unlikely that you will get pregnant because of Z."  A "no" would have allowed me to close the door and move on.  Instead, he looked sympathetically at us and said, "I'm sorry.  I really don't know.  I've done all there is to do." 

We are one of the thousands of cases of "unexplained infertility."  I hate those words.  I've felt sick about the whole situation.  I've been angry.  I've been confused.  I'm still all of those things at least some of the time.

But what I'm slowly discovering is that freedom does not come in having the answers that I want, or in having answers at all.  On this side of eternity, there will always be questions that don't have answers.  I think freedom must come from resting in the knowledge that God can make beautiful things out of the "I don't knows," because He does know.  I'll probably forever be attempting to make sense of that. 

Back to when I was little, my parents never told me, "MR, we really can't take another question."  They never got annoyed.  They never told me that I was foolish for not knowing.  Instead, they encouraged me to keep asking.  So today, I will keep asking.  And I will try to trust that "I don't know" isn't the end of the story.