We Don't Have to Manufacture Hope
how the Holy Spirit is our source for all the miracles we could ever need
I wanted a miracle.
As the years of infertility piled up and expanded, the only hope I had left was for God to show up with one.
So maybe I should say, I felt like I needed a miracle. Like it was the only way I could know that God heard me and saw me in the middle of my sorrow.
I was right, in a way. I did need a miracle. I just wasn’t right in my assumptions about what that miracle would look like.
Because God did show up. He gave me everything I needed to be sustained through more than a decade of my body not working right. He changed me and healed me long before my body healed.[1]
In Scripture, we call this kind of healing transformation.
Be transformed by the renewing of your mind… is what we’re told in Romans. We’re called to stop conforming to the brokenness of this world and instead, to allow God to do the impossible: to renew our minds and change us from the inside out.[2]
And it is a miracle.
Through the many years of infertility, God worked in me and through me until I was walking in peace, despite deep sadness. He built joy within me to the place where I could celebrate good things while still mourning the difficulties of my journey. He multiplied my hope to the place where I could look ahead to the future without fear, even when I disliked some of the realities of what I was facing.
Miracle upon miracle.
And then, six years ago, I experienced another kind of miracle. This one was the miracle I had first imagined. My body healed enough that after more than a decade of infertility, I gave birth to a biological baby.[3]
This was outward evidence of God working that other people could see and marvel at, and we all did! But I knew even then it wasn’t any more miraculous than the internal miracles God had been doing in my heart for so many years.
I held my tiny six-pound daughter in my arms and knew both kinds of miracles, the internal and the external, and knew deep inside that each kind had it’s own value but the internal were the most essential to survival.
I was right. Because while there are good and beautiful things to celebrate in this life, there are almost always sad and heartbreaking things happening too. And if we are dependent on “good things” coming into the story to save us from the hard things? We’re going to spend most of our lives in turmoil and depression.
When secondary infertility stretched from one year to five years and littered my world with miscarriages, just as other tastes of devastating circumstances wore me down, I told God the same thing I had before: I needed a miracle.
But this time I knew that it wasn’t a sudden fix that I needed. It was healing for my heart. It was the ability to know joy in sadness. It was peace in the trouble. It was hope. Oh, how I needed hope.
And he provided. He met me in my despair, over and over. He sent people to hold me when I was broken. He was near me as I walked through the hardest moments of my existence.
As 2023 ended, with a miscarriage breaking my body down physically and heart-breaking circumstances torturing my mind, I felt utterly hopeless. I tried to look forward and could only see a year full of everything I didn’t want to live through.
I needed a miracle.
The year I dreaded, 2024, ended with all the upheaval and sorrow that I’d been worried about—another miscarriage, sad and difficult decisions and experiences—and also a peace that could only come from the hand of a loving compassionate Father.
Once again, he had transformed me. He helped clean up so many things in me that needed to be removed and he renewed my heart and mind—showing up day after day with compassion and love in such a way that I could feel my own compassion and love growing for those around me.
At the beginning of 2024, I felt hopeless.
At the end of 2024, hope was stronger than ever.
May the God of hope, we’re told in Romans[4], fill you with all joy and peace as you believe so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
We don’t manufacture hope. It comes from the God OF hope and we overflow with it by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by something within ourselves. We don’t create it, or force it, or demand it. We receive it.
I received a hope that wasn’t in a certain set of circumstances. Instead, it was in God’s presence and goodness. My hope was that God had not and would not abandon me. My hope came from the Spirit working, not through a more concentrated effort from me to just “be hopeful”.
As many of you who read my writing or follow me on social media know, 2025 is bringing us another miracle. Not just the internal miracles of 2024, but another baby who will be arriving in just a few short weeks.[5]
It still feels surreal, even though this new baby is moving inside me as I type, thumping little feet against my lungs with enough force to make me catch my breath.
I wish I could say this baby is coming after years of faith and trusting on my part—but that’s not the case. I, absolutely, did not have faith that God would give me another baby. This baby is a gracious gift. It’s that simple.
Yet, this little one is also the evidence of my hope.
Not hope in God performing a certain way to please me, but my hope that the Holy Spirit keeps reviving inside me: the hope that he is present and that he sees me and that he cares.
When I was a little girl, my family memorized Psalm 121 together and I can still picture myself standing at our kitchen table in Homer, Alaska, reciting, “I lift up my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.”
The Holy Spirit is our helper. The power source for our hope.
So if you need a miracle, like I have so many times in my life—know this beautiful truth: God hands out miracles left and right, over and over. He is our Helper, our Hope-Giver.
When we’ve got nothing left, when sorrow and sadness and brokenness leave us questioning and wondering and desperate for a miracle—may we learn to look up and experience the miracles he provides, in whatever form he provides them.
I pray this prayer for each of you:
May you look up and see that your Helper is not far from you.
May you experience the miraculous gift of that Helper powering hope into your world, no matter what circumstances you’re facing.
And yes, may you also know the gift of tangible miracles that surprise you and delight you and bring celebration and praise to your community and home.
Amen.
[1] you can read that story in my book The Christian Woman’s Guide to Infertility: Hope and Healing Even Without a Baby
[2] Romans 12:2
[3] Post: With or Without: A Love Story to the God Who Is Always Good
[4] Romans 15:13