— How Leviticus Changed My Perspective on Infertility —
Dear friend,
Speak to the whole congregation of Israel and tell them:
Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy.
- Leviticus 19:2 -
The white cottage cupboards were cold against my back as I sat crumpled against them in our galley kitchen. The happy yellow walls smiled down at me, my Julia-Child-inspired pegboard and blue willow dishes attempting to brighten the mood. I didn't see them. I cried into my hands and felt the salt of my tears run down my arms, stinging the open, weeping wounds on both my wrists. Where they streamed down my cheeks, the salt burned in the wounds around my mouth, splitting, weeping fissures from the corners of my lips to my chin.
“It just… hurts… so bad.” I sobbed.
I found out I had pemphigoid gestationis when I was a few months postpartum with my first baby. After breaking out in full-body blisters two days after she was born (something I simply tolerated for the first month), I saw recurrence every month, like clockwork, with the waxing and waning of my hormones. A kind doctor pulled out a reference book at her desk and flipped through pictures until I identified my condition. “This is rather rare,” she said sympathetically. “Really all we can do is a steroid cream.”
So it began. Years on years of blistering rashes, moving from my legs to my arms to my neck to my face, weeping and splitting, blistering, multiplying, disappearing, coming back. “It's connected to pregnancy,” the doctor told me. “It will recur each time, and it usually gets worse, coming back with every period."
Then began the bleeding. For weeks at a time, bleeding - flaring - bleeding - blisters. Desperate, I took an oral progesterone that revealed I did not just have PG, but was allergic to my own progesterone: Autoimmune Progesterone Dermatitis. I could not take progesterone. But I needed it.
Ivan's birth seemed like healing. After five years of skin disease, he was born – and nothing happened. The redemption of his birth was the light in anxious year (2020), when Josh came home to join Every Woman a Theologian and we took the extremely risky step of running a ministry together on one barely full-time income with three kids under five.
What we didn't know is that my lack of skin disease was evidence of completely absent progesterone. I wasn't flaring anymore because I had nothing to react to.
Consumed with building a ministry and raising small children, I thought my exhaustion and depletion were simply a product of our season. I was surprised at how much sleep I needed at night; at how I could barely take time to walk, much less exercise; at how erratic my emotions were. But I chalked it up to the stress of providing for ourselves and fledgling team. And because we weren't actively trying for a baby, we didn't see these preliminary signs of secondary infertility and crashing progesterone until we were years into it.
By 2024, our two back to back miscarriages revealed what had gone unidentified. Something was seriously wrong – and had been a wrong a long time. My body was broken. Even though I was now working out regularly again, eating quality dairy and meat, consuming plenty of protein, drinking water and limiting caffeine…. something was still wrong. In the wake of our second loss, I sat in a camp chair looking at the lake we'd planned to enjoy, watching a sunset that felt devoid of all beauty.
“It just hurts… so… bad.”
People gave a lot of recommendations to us in 2024, all well-intended. One of the top recommendations to women who struggle with infertility and miscarriage is, of course, progesterone supplementation. “Thank you,” I'd respond to the kind DMs. Inside my head: I'm ALLERGIC to the ONLY THING that can SAVE MY BABIES. THANKS.
Every year I read through the Bible. Every year I read Leviticus. I read Leviticus and I see women like me: Women with a constant issue of blood, women with skin disease, women who lose babies. Some people read Leviticus through a lens of judgment, or at the very least, confusion. It IS confusing to our modern eyes – laws for cleanliness and holiness and menstruation! Why does God even care?
But that's just it. God cared. It was the fifth or sixth time through Leviticus, with burning wrists and a blistering face, not aware of the infertility roiling within me – I realized: “If God makes laws about womens' bodies, it means He cares about womens' bodies… and if He cared then, He cares now.”
The laws, too, were for protection and honor. Blood represents life. It was to be honored and cleansed when outside of life-creating context. In menstruation, blood represents the absence of life. After childbirth, blood represents both the beginning of life and the effects of the Fall on life-giving – resistance, pain, labor – marks of sin's effect on a sacred, supernatural reality. My body, too, bear the marks of a fallen world on my act of life-giving. My body broken, scarred, blistered, burning – but not alone. I stand in the company of many women for whom God made a way. It was a way to come close to His presence; God's very holiness, dwelling in their midst in all His glory and goodness – a place only Adam and Eve and Enoch and Moses knew. He made a way for them. He did not see their brokenness or their bodies as a liability; instead, He created a law of grace to bring them near.
Under the new covenant of Christ we no longer see the physical dwelling of God in a temple on earth. Instead, His personal Spirit dwells in our bodies – a thousand-thousand temples, all around the world. We are sanctified by the very Spirit who dwells with us, becoming more and more holy as we walk in step with Him. The blood of Christ's covenant cleanses us, purifying permanently what the law cleansed temporarily.
I, in my broken body, am a temple of the living God. And I am no less a temple of the only good God when I am infertile. When I am suffering… When I am broken... When I am afflicted… And He is no less here.
Yes, it hurts so bad.
And: “He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.” 1 Peter 2:24
After four rounds of Femara with a fertility doctor we ended treatments (we will not pursue IUI or IVF) and instead began working with a PCOS specialized registered dietician who has been immensely helpful to my journey.
Shop Favorites This Week
A few bestsellers from over the weekend! Revelation is topping our list as people grab their copy in time for the community wide study starting online April 1st!
Shetland on Britbox: We basically only watch Britbox now and though there are a few things to filter, we have loved this detective show based on Ann Cleves' novels.
