c. 2008 Religion News Service

HUNSTVILLE, Ala. _ The Rev. Jana Williams still dreads Mother’s Day. In fact, if she weren’t a minister herself, and married to a minister, on many Mother’s Days she would have simply skipped church.

Skipped hearing the special prayers for mothers.

Skipped watching other people’s red-cheeked children run to take a rose to their mamas.

Skipped, in short, all those painful reminders of the babies she herself would never bear.

Even though she is mother twice over now, to an adopted daughter and a foster son, an echoed pain from those childless Mother’s Days still sounds for her each year. Her own pain has opened her eyes to the usually silent suffering of others around her who have birthed stillborn children, who have lost multiple pregnancies to miscarriage, who have seen their dreams of having the children the usual way be blown away.

This year, she and her husband, Howard, are leading a service on Mother’s Day afternoon for others who find the holiday painful.

Jana knows the Taize-style service of readings, prayer and music will offer a quiet time of renewal to any who come. She knows the service attempts to meet a need that church and society often forget. She knows that somewhere around a quarter of all pregnancies end in miscarriage and that 12 percent of women have difficulty getting pregnant or carrying a baby to term.

So does Howard. “We know there is a great deal of pain,” he said. “This is an opportunity to experience grace.”

Jana, 47, is the minister to families at Weatherly Heights Baptist Church, where her husband, Howard, 51, is minister of spiritual development. She spent years hoping to get pregnant. It’s what any happy young couple did, she thought, after they’d finished school and found steady jobs; “It was that next thing that was supposed to happen.”

It didn’t.

Said Howard, “We discovered it wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought it might be.”

Jana smiled sadly at her husband’s understatement.

“It’s easy to describe that in a few sentences, but that represents years of pain and suffering,” she said.

During those years of exploring fertility options, they watched people around them have children, a few not particularly wanted. Jana was working then with Child Protective Services, where she saw too many parents who either could not or would not care for their babies.

Howard endured his own type of pain _ he is the last of his particular branch of his family. His father had counted on him to carry on the family name in the traditional way, he said.

Where was God, Jana wondered. Her seminary training and pastoral qualifications failed to answer the most basic question: Why?

“And then I’d feel bad for feeling bad, for making Howard feel bad,” she said. “I felt guilt for questioning God. I’d wonder what I’d done wrong that God wouldn’t let me be a mother.”

Jana discovered that her personal theology _ though she knew it wasn’t biblical _ apparently assumed that if she did everything right, nothing bad would happen to her.

“I realized that my image of God was maybe something like Santa Claus,” she said. “I realized I must have been mistaken about God’s role in the world.”

Howard, despite being a preacher, found scant reassurance in his prayers.

“I don’t think there was much comfort in anything,” he said. “I didn’t think anybody understood _ I was not even sure that God understood. You pray, you ask, you don’t get.”

A Sunday School teacher at another church in town told them he could help with an adoption. He was a lawyer. Just pay him $5,000 to start the paperwork. He knew of a couple expecting a child they could not keep.

The Williams painted a nursery, bought a crib, allowed themselves to hope.

When time came for the baby to be born, the lawyer called to say the mother had skipped town.

“There was no baby,” Howard said. “There never was a baby.”

The nature of the scam made it a kind of double loss, they said.

“It was a loss about things in the past,” Jana said, “but it was also a loss about things to come in the future.”

Later, when a friend of the family contacted them about adopting the baby who would, in fact, become their daughter, at first they said, “no.” When they agreed to an open adoption, one in which their baby, Abigail, could stay in contact with her birth mother, their friends thought they were nuts. Open adoptions were a foreign concept in Jackson, Miss., 15 years ago, they said.

But not to the Williamses, who had already opened their home to children from the community.

“I figured the more family a child can have, the better,” Jana said.

The good that has come out of their own pain, they said, is a deeper understanding of the sorrows carried deep in the hearts of their parishioners.

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Howard never prays a Mother’s Day prayer at church without being mindful that some who are listening are mourning their own inability to become mothers or still hurt from the inadequate or cruel mothers they themselves have had.

Jana never learned the answer to her “why,” but she learned something about God.

“I don’t know if God caused any of this,” she said. “But God was with us the whole way. God wept as much as we did. Abigail is the greatest blessing we have received, but it’s difficult to remember that our greatest blessing is someone else’s greatest loss _ and God weeps for that, too.”

More than anything, her husband said, their ordeal made them realize they weren’t alone.

“People suffer silently,” Howard said. “We want them to know they are not abandoned by God.”

(Kay Campbell writes for the Huntsville Times in Huntsville, Ala.)

KRE/LF END CAMPBELL

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