When the Lord promised Jen Maynard children, she assumed He meant biological offspring.
Maynard had one biological child at the time but had miscarried multiple pregnancies.
One day, she was in a drive-through line when it all came crashing down.
“I sat in the car, crying to the Lord, saying, ‘What is going on? You promised me that we would have children, and here I am losing child after child in miscarriage,'” Maynard says.
Maynard spoke to Charisma about her miscarriages for the “Grief in the Womb” series on the Charisma News podcast.
“And I thought when You told me I would have these children, they would be here on earth with me,” Maynard says she prayed.
Maynard was devastated, asking some of life’s hardest questions, wondering where God is and if He really was as good as she thought.
Despite her losses, the Holy Spirit kept whispering to her soul to trust Him.
“The pain makes you question what you ultimately believe,” Maynard says. “And for me, the Lord was really challenging me with the question, did I really believe that He was good? Or did I believe that He was an angry God?
“The challenge for me came when even though I was doing ‘the right things,’ and I always wanted to be the good Christian girl, sometimes we can wear masks, and we don’t really become vulnerable,” she says. “We don’t want to tell people, ‘I’m struggling. And I think my struggle is anger. Like I think I’m mad at God.’ And He can handle those emotions. He can handle those thoughts that we have and those things that we wrestle with. But it’s not until we surrender it to Him that we can have healing in our life.”
Once she surrendered, the Lord began to put the puzzle pieces together, including that promise she felt the Lord gave her.
“We oftentimes try to interpret words, that when we run them through our human filter, is not necessarily the same thing that God was saying to us,” Maynard says.
Yes, the Lord promised her children, but “what I didn’t know at the time [was] those children were going to come to me through various forms. We have fostered seven children. I have opened my heart in that time. And [we’ve] taken care of kids, two of which would not have survived if we hadn’t taken them in.
“It was just crazy situations that the Lord has put us in where I was their mom, I was nurturing them, I was raising them, I was growing them. And then we would end up adopting this baby from birth. And it was just a whole beautiful story that God was creating, that I couldn’t see at the moment in my mind, having more children, that I was going to give birth to them,” Maynard says.
Listen to the podcast to hear more.
