"God closed my womb as discipline. He was teaching me something through infertility."
How it sounds in your head: People told you God was building character, teaching patience, or testing your faith through the barrenness. Surely if you learned the lesson, He would have opened your womb. You must have missed what He was trying to teach.
"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning."
-- James 1:17Religious teaching that suffering is always divine pedagogy, making God the author of pain and withholding.
At 78, you've had decades to analyze what lesson infertility was supposed to teach, and you've never landed on a satisfying answer. If it was a test, you feel like you failed because the womb never opened.
She was barren while her sister had child after child. Jacob said, 'Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?' They didn't call it discipline or a lesson - they called it WITHHOLDING. Then 'God REMEMBERED Rachel, and God listened to her and opened her womb' - instantly, not after she learned something.
I REFUSE the lie that God closed my womb as discipline. IT IS WRITTEN EVERY good gift comes from the Father of lights, and withholding is the THIEF'S work, not God's. IT IS WRITTEN God gives LIFE abundantly, and the enemy kills and destroys. I reject the teaching that suffering is divine pedagogy. IT IS WRITTEN it's His GOODNESS that leads to repentance, not punishment. I am the BLESSED of the Lord, and the BARAK covenant means He commands blessing on my life. My barrenness was warfare, not a classroom.
The Father is ripping up the report cards religious people handed you, whispering, 'I wasn't testing you. I was FIGHTING FOR you. Stop calling warfare a lesson plan.' He's been your defender, not your disciplinarian, this whole time.