When couples are experiencing infertility, Matthew Arbo says there are a lot of lies we're tempted to believe. This, everybody's too busy. It's inconvenient. It's too hard.
Nobody really cares. Those are deceptions that are deep, but they have to be identified as and named as deceptions. Because the truth is that God loves us, and He intends for His church to be a community of love and self-giving. And when couples that are going through infertility begin to see that and begin to feel it, they themselves find themselves giving back. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson.
I'm Bob Lapine. It's important for couples as we experience infertility to remind ourselves of what the Bible says is true, and then to believe those truths by faith. We'll talk more about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.
Thanks for joining us. We are spending time in the valley of the shadow this week, and I know when you think about Psalm 23 where it says, Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. When you talk about the subject of infertility, you don't think, well, I'm walking through the valley of the shadow of death. But there's a very real sense that this is a death-like experience month in and month out for couples who are longing for kids. Every time a woman starts her cycle again, there's a death that just happened.
Oh, that's very true. I was just leading a Bible study this past fall, and there were eight women and three were struggling with infertility. And the pain in the room that was so present every single week was hard.
And it was really hard because then there was another woman that was pregnant. And so they were celebrating her, but there's also this pain that they're bearing that they're always wondering, will that ever be me? And it's interesting to think, because I'm with those husbands, and I've got to be honest, often those husbands are quiet. They're not coming to a group and talking about it. They're just hiding, and yet the pain is just as real, and you almost have to draw it out of them to say, hey, man, what's going on?
And usually they're not going to go there unless they're really desperate. So it's a quiet pain in that dark valley. Well, and this is a question I've got for our guest who I want to introduce to our listeners today, Matthew Arbo, joining us again on Family Life Today. Welcome back, Matthew.
Thanks. Matthew is a professor of Christian ethics at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Matthew and his wife have been married since 2007. They have two boys and a third child on the way, right?
Correct, yeah. You've written a book called Walking Through Infertility. In your investigation of this subject, as you talk to people in this experience, do men and women process and deal with infertility in different ways?
Absolutely. Women in general are more open to talking about their experience with other women, particularly if the other woman has had that experience herself. Men are very, very unlikely to talk about the experience, and there are all kinds of interesting cultural reasons for that. One of the more interesting ones, because it's so common, is there's this feeling of worry about virility and of this longstanding cultural assumption that masculinity is bound up with virility. And that's a lie. Who we are as a gendered person is bound up in Christ first.
And it says nothing about me as a man whether I'm able to have children or not. Yeah, it's interesting. Men, you know, this whole area of the sexual performance, they'll joke about it. You know, it's something you joke about, and it's a coverup because we're afraid to talk about it, especially when there's pain that they're going. So what do you say to a man who's unwilling to talk about it? Yeah, admittedly, it can be difficult to know from the guy's vantage point, you know, what's going on, because conversation just typically isn't about these sorts of subjects. But one thing you can do, I think, is if there's enough closeness and you have enough of a sense of their ordinary day-to-day life, asking questions that kind of coax that aren't less sort of like a challenge, less sort of right to the point, like, hey, are you, is this your problem? More or less kind of inviting them to talk around it, and then circling in closer to the nature of the hurt or the nature of the difficulty, does that make sense?
Yeah. In a way also kind of relieves the possibility of pride, of suspicion. There's guys, I mean, can be weird about discussing how they feel about anything, depending on the circumstances.
But this one in particular, I think there's a real worry about judgment. Well, I know Dave Wilson well enough to know that you don't have any problem asking very direct, bold, nosy questions of guys, right? Yeah, he was saying that you were nosy, but he is too, Bob. Well, I am that. I can imagine you- Bob, have you ever struggled with us? Talk about you right now. I can imagine you with a guy just saying, almost matter-of-factly, but you'd have thought this through carefully, but say, so are you and your wife trying to have kids?
Have you had any struggles in that area? You would ask it on a level that invites a guy to be open and to have a conversation about that, right? I would. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I like going sometimes to scary places, even with strangers.
It may be easier with a stranger than a close friend, but yeah, I would want to go there. But I'll tell you something, if you think I'm bold, this woman sitting over here, she just snorked. You hear that? That was not even a laugh.
That was a snork. It's like I have seen her in our kitchen, and I'm not going to give you an example, but there was one time I had a buddy over, and she walked by him and said, hey, Mark. And I'm like, you do not ask a man anything near that kind of question.
And she'll take a risk and do that. So you want to respond to that, honey? It's true. Yeah.
Back in my younger days, there weren't a lot of filters going on. I hope that I've learned a little bit. But yeah, that's true. And here's the reason, and I love this about her, is she is not good at small talk. I'll go to a party. I can talk to everybody in the room about pro sports, you name it, music, movies. She doesn't like that.
I hate those. She wants to go deep and say, let's have an eternally life-changing conversation with a stranger or a friend. And so that's why she'll take that risk. I want to know people.
I want to know what they're going through and their pain. And life's too short to talk about small stuff. That's right, Bob.
That's exactly right. Let's get to the real stuff. Well, and one of the things that I'm thinking right now is as a married couple, as you're struggling with this topic, I'm imagining that it would be hard to even talk to each other. Does that ever come into play that you've heard of or even your brother and your sister-in-law?
Absolutely. For all sorts of very interesting reasons, but the thing I think I hear most about is not just the breakdowns of communication, but then kind of islanding, you know, just becoming their own independent universes. And it doesn't take very long before the other person almost becomes a kind of object of resentment. And there's not even a sense of like how to begin talking anymore. And at that point, things are very dangerous and on very tumultuous ground. Hopefully, if this couple's in the church, their pastors are alerted that there are problems, you know, maybe they can intervene. But what I tend to see with couples and hear from couples is this sense of profound isolation, of not even knowing how to begin to have this hurtful, difficult conversation without it becoming about the blame, about fault, about explanations.
And it's just really difficult to forbear. Dave and Ann are going to be able to finish this sentence very easily. The natural drift in every marriage is what?
I don't know, Bob. I have to think about that. Toward isolation. Yeah. And especially in this circumstance, if we were experiencing this, for me to come to you, Dave, and to say, how are you feeling? Tell me the things that you're feeling right now about all that's going on with us.
Would that be scary for you? Because I say that a lot. I say that a lot to him. Well, welcome to our date night right there. We'll go on a date, and I'm not kidding, I'm a talker.
You know, I come home every day from work. He's great at communicating details of the day. She loves this. I give her details, here's what's going on, and she just loves it.
And then we'll go on a date, and she'll say, let's talk about us, and I just clam up. Does he say, I don't want to talk about that? No.
He just fumbles his way around? Yes. We're good.
Yeah. We're good. In this circumstance, if a couple's really struggling, would it be bad for one of either the husband or the wife to say, honey, how are you?
Tell me truthfully. What are you going through? What's going on in your mind? How are you feeling? Is that a bad question to ask? It's essential. I mean, that's the kind of question that the couple needs at that moment.
I mean, that's like a life buoy. You know, if we're talking about their total isolation, opening up just in an initial way, just an invitation to communicate about how things are going. What are you feeling in that moment? And then just the actual externalizing of the feeling. I'm feeling angry. I'm really angry, and I'm really upset.
I feel like you don't care. All this stuff that the other person, of course, didn't know. The other person had no idea that they felt this way. And I would guess it's not only just with your spouse. I would say to the men out there, you need a guy.
Women, you need a woman that you can feel safe enough with. I can remember when Ann's sister was struggling and ended up dying from lung cancer, and Ann was down taking care of her often out of her home. And I remember a buddy coming over, and this is months in, and we were literally in my driveway shooting baskets. And I look back and it's like, that opened up my heart. He's not looking me in the face.
We're just shooting balls. And he just said to me, he goes, how are you doing? I broke down.
Just that question from a trusted friend with no judgment, really no agenda. I'm your friend. I'm here. How are you doing? I remember sitting on my driveway, and man, I'm struggling.
This is really hard watching my sister-in-law die, watching my wife's best friend. But having that friend there, I just want to say to every guy, you need that guy. And why did I have that guy? I pursued him years ago. He pursued me. It wasn't I waited. I went after it.
I got ants, got those, and Bob, I know he has in real life. It's like, you got to go after that guy. So I would say to the men out there and the women, hopefully it's your spouse, but it needs to be somebody else. So talk about the role of those people in your life.
How important is community as you're walking through that valley? Yeah, and I spent a lot of space in the book on this, because I think it is essential for the church to have a sort of unfolding love and compassion for the couple that's going through that. Now, that may not always be known for reasons we can talk about and have talked about, but we may not always know that a couple is going through that. But when a couple has trusted friends, and even if the marriage itself is fraught, they at least have this to lean on.
They can lean on these people, and they have this sort of net that will uphold them in their difficulty. If they do not have that community, if they've, say, withdrawn themselves from the church, then the isolation becomes compounded. And not only do they not have each other, they have no one. Maybe they have a family member or some other friend from college.
Who knows? But the church is a community of reciprocity. And I mention this in the book, and I really do mean it, that the church also needs infertile couples.
It needs all kinds. It needs infertile couples, single people, married couples. And that's the nature of the church.
We're a very eclectic crew. And it turns out that there's heaps of people in the church that want to be there for people. There's a lot of people that really do have the open hearts of love, and they want to come right alongside. I mean, statistics, the more recent ones, suggest that about one in ten couples will experience some form of infertility. So, I mean, you take a stock of your own church, and you can get a pretty good idea about how many couples in a church would have gone through that. I'm thinking of friends I know who I know have struggled with this issue. And the thing that's always been in the back of my mind when I see them, I mean, it's almost like a little buzzer goes off.
The thing that I know about them is they're dealing with infertility. But you don't want to, every time you see them, say, so, anything happen? What's going on?
You know, what's this month like? How do you know, to try to be a comfort and a friend, how do you know when to bring it up, how to bring it up, if to bring it up? How do you gauge that with somebody? As a congregant, as non-pastoral staff say, I would say that you need to have that trust there, at least as a familiarity.
And actually, I think venue matters, you know, just how many ears are listening in, you know, where are you, have a sense of space. But when I say for pastors, though, you know, a pastor that is shepherding their flock well knows which couples have had that before, and they'll also know who to introduce to who. You know, they'll have known that, well, this couple, they've just experienced their first miscarriage, and they know that this other couple had also experienced miscarriages.
You want to talk? That's good pastoral ministry. They don't themselves have to say everything they say about miscarriage, but they know that there's love there.
That's what I was wondering. Like, if you've gone through this, is that a ministry that God could be calling you into? And even as a pastor, are there ministries that you could pull people in who are really struggling?
I think that would be beautiful, Pastor Dave. Yeah, I was just going to say, as a pastor, thank you, honey. So often, a couple or a person will come up to me, and they think I'm the person they need to talk to.
And as I hear their story, like it could be infertility, I'm doing exactly what you said. Oh, hey, I've got a couple. And they look at me like, no, no, no, no, I want you. And the only reason they're saying that is they just heard me speak, they can connect in some way, and yet when they follow through and go, okay, I'm going to meet with this couple, guess what I hear later? That was the perfect, you know, thank you for putting me there.
And I'm like, yeah, you wouldn't believe me, but that is the body of Christ. That is what God has put us all together to do, to minister to one another. So has that been your experience? You've seen that happen?
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And there can be the commendation, too, in conversation that, you know, open yourself up to receive from people. And that feels really risky, given what you're going through.
Keep imploring it and keep praying for them. And it's there, you know, there is a place in the human heart to receive, you know, the love that another person has. Everybody wants to be loved and to receive love. And they don't want, no one wants to close themselves off to it. There's other stuff going on. So that, like when you read the passage about just sort of sticking with it, just sort of coming back, dropping by to just, and we've done this before, we've just taken people ice cream, you know. We don't want you to come in, we just want to bring you some Halo or whatever it is. And who doesn't want that? Nobody's ever said, you know, get out of here.
Bring me Haakon-Dazs, not Halo, okay? And here's an interesting thing I've watched in the church, not just as a pastor, but even growing up around it, is the church can be the place where people hide the most. Oh, absolutely. It's so bad to think that's true, but, you know, I think I read years ago in a book, years ago, that I think it was Chuck Swindoll was writing, he said the church should be more like a bar. And I don't get your attention, like what in the world are you talking about? He says you go to a bar, you sit down beside somebody you don't know very well and you start sharing your problems, and they go, hmm, yeah, I've been through that too. We go to church, we hide. Everybody here is perfect, nobody else is infertile, there's nobody else struggling, and yet it should be the place where we can go and find comfort as we share. So, I mean, what would you say to the person that's hiding or keeping it to himself? How would you encourage them to say, you've got to take the risk?
Yeah. So, one thing I would say is there are people in your church who have or are right now experiencing what you're experiencing. Maybe not in the same degree, maybe not with the same sort of shape and contours, but they've had that experience or they've had familiarity with it, and you are not a stranger to them.
Your case is not so different that there's nothing that can be said and nothing can be done for you. And one of the key truths, and it's worth repeating again and again, you're not alone. You don't have to be alone.
There is a God who loves you and is present to you at all times with open heart and open arms, and you have many in your community who have open arms if you'll let them, right, if you'll let them in. And I would just keep reminding the sort of basic truths, which are easy to sort of switch off in our head, in our hearts, that nobody really cares. Everybody's too busy. It's inconvenient.
It's too hard. But those are deceptions that are deep, and they can be sustained, but they have to be identified as and named as deceptions. Because the truth is that God loves us, and He intends for His church to be a community of love and self-giving. And when couples that are going through infertility begin to see that and begin to feel it, they themselves find themselves giving back, right, almost immediately giving of their gifts to others and being fully participating in the life of the church. So those are the kinds of truths that I begin to—they're very basic ones that Paul talks about in his epistles, that Jesus talks about how we are a community together.
Yes, there are risks. God is with us. Yeah, when you said that, I thought of the verse that you just articulated without actually quoting it.
But it's the other side. It's the couple that maybe an infertile couple comes to and says, we're struggling, and you've been through it. I don't know if you've put this in the book or not, but it's 2 Corinthians 1, 3, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, here it is, who comforts us in all of our afflictions so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction. So it's like, man, when God's met me in the middle of my thing, God wants to use that in the future. I've been there. I've experienced God in the middle of it.
How can I help somebody else see that God is there with them? Yeah, and you saying, thanks for reading that, because a related passage, I think, of Paul's words in Romans 12, to rejoice with those who rejoice, thinking particularly of members of the community. Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. And we're sometimes pretty good about rejoicing. But, man, we can kind of be hit or miss on that, depending on our hearts. But weeping with those who weep can be really, really tough and committed.
But that's very often exactly what a couple who's experiencing infertility do. Well, hang on, if we're playing Bible drill, I'm thinking Galatians 6, because what comes to mind for me is, bear one another's burdens. Listen, and so fulfill the law of Christ. What's the law of Christ? Love God, love your neighbor. How do you fulfill that? Bear one another's burdens. So, if you've got a friend who's got a burden, when you bear that, you're loving God and you're loving your neighbor, which is the whole of the law. Well, let's address this person that's not involved in a church, that isn't in a Bible study, that really doesn't have any close friends that can bear their burden with them.
How do we address them, and what are their first steps? I would say in that case, I would offer the very almost silly in being so elementary and rudimentary. But I would say this, wake up and have your coffee, and get dressed, and walk out your door, and go to a place where you know somebody.
This could be a community of faith, right? This is the main idea here. Go to your local church, if it's your friend, your co-worker's place, somebody you follow on Facebook, go somewhere and have a conversation with someone and look in their eyes and have a human touch. Those all seem like very, very silly sequential steps. But for someone who is in the depth of the difficulty, the very basic thing of getting out of bed, getting cleaned up, Getting out the door. Getting out the door, and doing all the things you have to do as a person to get to the place where people are. That can feel like itself, this huge obstacle. But just breaking it down like that, take those few steps, and get to where there are people who will see you, who will see you, and they will touch, and they will invite you.
If you do all that, and you go to a place, and they don't see you, and there's plenty of other places that will. There are plenty of places out there who will, who will gather you right in. And that's a truth to hold on to, because that's what the body of Christ is.
It is a people who bear with one another in their wounds and difficulties because we are all wounded. Matthew, I have to ask you this before we let you go. The issues of in vitro fertilization, reproductive technologies, couples who are struggling with infertility, they're wrestling with, Is this okay? Is this biblical?
Can I do this? Multiple fertilized eggs, how do they process that? You know that Christians come to different answers on that. So just give us guidance in terms of how we can think rightly and make up our own minds and be responsive to our own conscience in that. And this is a big section in the latter part of the book, and I won't say rehearse everything I do there, but just refer listeners to that section.
But what will very often happen after a couple has been infertile for a year and a half to two years is they'll begin to seek the help of a clinician, and the fertility expert will give them advice on what to do. And usually the advice is non-invasive. Let's do some blood tests. What's your exercise regimen? How stressful is work? And when you do those analyses and you break it down, sometimes those very minor lifestyle changes really do help couples. But there are couples, plenty of them, who that doesn't work. They're very healthy.
They don't have stress. They try these things. So then you can upscale the level of intervention. And as you get further along and a couple may become eligible candidates for artificial reproductive technologies, that's where the ethics of treatment become a little thornier.
I treat two of them in the book. One is called IUI and the other is called IVF. I don't have any strong personal qualms with IUI. It's very common treatment.
What is that? Intrauterine insemination. Okay, so that's where the sperm is deposited within the woman's own reproductive organs. That is, the egg is not externalized.
IVF differs in that the specimen sperm and egg are externalized in lab and the fertilization takes place there. There are more risks involved there. And I call them moral risks and hazards in the book that I end up cautioning against IVF in the book.
And I try to do so in the way I am now in a pastorally sensitive way because I realize that there are eclectic experiences and some couples are different places along the path in that experience. But it's because of those risks that I end up cautioning against it. We often have a sense of what will happen if we do a thing, especially when it comes to medicine.
We have a lot of confidence in medicine. But there can be unintended consequences once a path is taken. And I kind of bring some of those up in the book, kind of letting couples know, this is sort of out here, here's how this process works, here's what you're kind of committing to. But it's a long process and it's important, I think, as we've been talking about as a theme really in our discussion, to keep communication open.
And I think it's important for a couple to have clear boundaries and limits of what they're wanting to do or will do. They may proceed along with a specialist, they may get their advice, but they may also say, we're not going to do that, even though it's maybe medically advised. Infertility has the kind of hue of disease, but it's not a disease strictly speaking. When couples go through that, the reasons for it sometimes are not even medically known. There's a lot we don't know about why couples are infertile.
It's extraordinary given the advances of medical science. So it's important that couples have those sense of limits. God is indeed the giver of life. And one of the main ideas I have in the book is that infertility isn't a judgment or an indictment, but maybe. One way to think of it is God's just giving you a different way of being family. And so participating in his life of mission, and I think that bigger picture of how we are a family of God, eclectic as we are, different as we are, we don't have to live up to some American model of a family or American picture of a family, but one that's biblical and Christian and one which is faithful to what God has said about us as individuals and as couples and as family. And we can see we're living from those truths.
Then I think we begin to see how our commitments, what we proceed with, and that sort of thing, kind of flesh themselves out. We talked about the fact that your brother and his wife experienced infertility, then experienced a stillbirth after they conceived. What's their family today?
Yeah, update us. Yeah, so Patrick and Jennifer have adopted a sibling group, Amos and Anna are twins, and Colton is four. And then they have a daughter who was born around the time that the book came together. A biological daughter. Correct, a biological daughter, Ellie. So a family of four. A family of four, yep. And my brother, Patrick, and his wife are great parents, and they are shepherding their children well, and I'm so proud of them.
They've done great. And, you know, I would sort of wrap up the conversation with what I felt like on every page of your book. You start at the beginning and say, here's the central idea, which you just articulated. It's the fact that God's there, and He may have a different way for you to do family. And I thought as I read that and you just said it, I thought that's true for infertiles, true for fertile, it's true for people that are struggling in financial issues, health issues, relationship issues, you name it. The question we struggle with, God, are you here? Do you see me?
What are you doing? And your book so clearly threw out the theme is, He really is there. And I would just say to our listener who's going through that dark valley, even though I walk through the valley, thou art with me. And I know you can't feel it at times.
I've been there. You question it. The truth is, even if you feel it or don't feel it, God really is still there. He's walking, probably carrying you, and nobody knows the future. We don't know if you will have a baby or not, but we do know God is there. He will carry you. He will actually use it in some redemptive way if you'll trust Him.
Trust Him. That's a very clear message from the book Walking Through Infertility, which we've got in our Family Life Today Resource Center. Matthew, thank you for being with us. Thanks, it was a great pleasure. If our listeners are interested in a copy of the book, they can go to familylifetoday.com and order it from us online, or they can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to order.
Again, the website familylifetoday.com, or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. That's 1-800-358-6329 to get a copy of the book Walking Through Infertility by our guest today, Matthew Arbo. You know, this subject of infertility that we've talked about today is a tough but real issue for so many, and the president of Family Life, David Robbins, is with us today. You understand a little bit about the toughness of this. Yeah, indeed. You know, the thread through the whole conversation today that was encouraging to me was that relationship is the environment through which help and comfort come to those who need it the most.
It reminded me of what Henry Cloud said. The body of Christ, God's people, are God's plan A for our growth and transformation. I think so often, I think we beg God to intervene in some supernatural, miraculous way when His people, with God's Spirit put inside them, is God's greatest provision for us, that He's giving to us right now. If people in your church or in your neighborhood are struggling in life, do they have the relational foundation and relational security to come to you? Do you have people who you can run to when hardships that are guaranteed to come and the complexities of life that compound, do we have those people we can run to? I think the place that starts is going deeper with the community that we are around today.
And as suggested today, perhaps, a great place to start is simply extending hospitality, bringing over some ice cream, because no one turns away ice cream. That's right. There is something about loving God and loving others that's pretty central to what Jesus taught us, isn't there? That's right.
There's the foundation, yeah. Thank you, David. Well, we hope you have a great weekend. Hope you and your family are able to worship together in your local church this weekend. Hope we don't take that for granted, right? After all we've been through this spring.
Hope you can join us back on Monday as well. We're going to talk about love. What is the foundation of real love?
What's real love all about? I'll give you a little spoiler here. It's not what the Hallmark Channel is telling us, okay?
The Bible has something much deeper for us to understand and experience, and we'll talk more about that Monday. Hope you can be with us for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. Have a great weekend. We'll see you Monday for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas. A crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.
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