Faith in the Face of Infertility

Dannah Gresh: Kristen Clark and her husband longed to have kids. Early on in her struggle with infertility, a friend came to Kristen and gently asked a heart-searching question.

Kristen Clark: If God never gave you biological children of your own, would Christ be enough?

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of “Let’s Go to Church,” for October 12, 2022. I’m Dannah Gresh.

What do you do when your fairy-tale life begins to fall apart? Well, on her wedding day, Kristen Clark seemed to have it all. She married the man of her dreams, and everything seemed picture perfect.

She was young, healthy, surrounded by loving friends and family, and excited about starting her own new family. But by the time she’d been married a few years, Kristen and her husband realized that that dream of having their own family was not going to be as easy as they had thought.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Kristen shared her story here at the Revive Our Hearts home base during an event that we call The Sisters in Ministry Summit. We had the joy of bringing together twenty-seven women, I think it was, for this special event. Some were in their thirties, some in their forties, a few in their fifties, and, of course, me in my sixties. We spent that week—what a sweet time it was—praying together, opening God’s Word, mentoring each other, sharing out of our personal journeys.

During that time, Kristen Clark walked through some of what God has taught her through a really difficult season. I know there are women listening right now who will relate to her story. Maybe you’re in the middle of circumstances that have made you look up and ask through tears, “Lord, what are You doing? I just don’t understand. I had this dream, but it’s not being fulfilled.”

Well, today Kristen will share how you can experience true joy even in the midst of confusion and grief, even when your dreams aren’t coming true.

Let me just take a moment to pray for you before we hear from Kristen.

Oh Lord, I lift up to You my sisters, every woman listening to this program today, some with shattered dreams, hopes that have never been fulfilled, things they thought would be different in their life by now. Maybe it’s the longing for a child. Maybe it’s the longing for a mate. Maybe it’s the longing for a different mate. Maybe it’s a broken heart over a prodigal child.

Lord, whatever it is, You know our hearts. I pray that even as Kristen shares her story, that You would touch the hearts of listeners and encourage and give perspective and comfort and courage, knowing that we really can trust You to write our story. I pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

Now, here’s Kristen Clark.

Kristen: I’m excited to get to share with you a little journey that I’m on that’s been hard. It’s been a really hard season for me.

I started out like any young woman, desiring marriage, and thinking one day I would have a family. I’m looking forward to that. I remember the first time I met my would-be husband. I was nineteen years old, and he was eighteen. We met at a conference.

I just remember seeing him sitting, like, eleven rows in front of me. I saw the back of him, and I was, “Ooo, he looks kind of cute—from the back.” Then he turned around, and I was, “Ooo, he’s really cute!” (laughter.) So my husband’s always, like, “That’s so weird that you thought I was cute from the back.”

We struck up a conversation, and then several years later, ended up getting married. I just felt like my life was starting out as a fairy tale. Since I was fourteen I had prayed, “God would You bring me a godly man, a man who loves You, who fears You.” And I would pray, “Lord, would he be a humble leader.” And then I would always pray, “And can he be tall, please, just tall” (cause I’m 6’1”).

God answered that prayer. He’s even taller than me. We started off life in 2011, and honestly, it felt like a fairy tale. I remember going on my honeymoon, thinking, Life is too good. This is too easy. I felt like I was living a dream.

Early on, my husband and I had conversations about kids—if we would start a family right away or if we would wait. We decided that we would just leave it up to God. Honestly, we were like, “We’re not really sure, so we’ll just let happen what happens. We’ll just entrust this to the Lord. If He gives us kids right away, we’ll accept that. If He doesn’t, we’ll accept that.”

Little did I know what that would actually mean. I thought it would mean that if I entrusted that to the Lord and didn’t prevent it, He would just give us kids right away cause that seems like that what happens—if you don’t prevent, you get pregnant.

And so, the first year of our marriage goes by. We celebrate one year anniversary not pregnant. I’m thinking, Wow! We entrusted this to the Lord, and He knew that we needed this year. He knew we needed this time to establish our marriage and build a foundation. I wasn’t concerned. I had no worries. I thought, “God’s got it.” I was trusting Him.

And then, as the next year rolled around, and we hit our second anniversary, and I still wasn’t pregnant, and we still weren’t preventing, that’s when I started to wonder. People started asking, “Are you guys . . . I know you’re not preventing . . . so you’re not pregnant?” And just kind of round-about ways they would ask how we were doing and if we’re concerned about we’re not pregnant. And honestly, at that point I was starting to get a little concerned, but I still wasn’t super-super concerned about it.

I think it was a week or two after our two-year anniversary, I found out I was pregnant. We were so excited. I just thought, Oh, God’s timing is so perfect. It’s all working out just the way He wanted it to. I felt like I was trusting the Lord. Everything was great again—fairy-tale life continuing on.

Then exactly six-and-one-half weeks into the pregnancy, I miscarried. It was so abrupt. I started bleeding, and then a couple hours later, it was all over. I just remember sitting back in shock.

We were just about to move from our apartment to our first home. So that dream of having the American dream with the home and the fence and the family, it all came crashing down. That was so hard for me. I didn’t realize in that moment how tightly I had been holding on to my life plan, because things had been going my way. When God took that away, it was devastating for me.

My husband and I, for the first time, were facing something really hard in our marriage. So we wrestled through it. I didn’t really know how to follow. He didn’t really know how to lead. We have amazing family and support, but it was so hard for both of us.

As we were seeking the Lord’s strength and realizing that that had become an idol, God was helping us to slowly open our hands and surrender that area of our life to Him in a deeper way. We thought we were surrendered, but we weren’t.

The months tick by, and then exactly six months after that, the day after Christmas, I find out I’m pregnant again. I was doing the research. You know, Google can be your best friend and your worst enemy. I’m researching, and everyone online is saying, “Okay, two consecutive miscarriages are really rare. It’s probably not going to happen again.”

So when I got pregnant again, I had that balance of kind of fearful, like, it might happen again, but then I was really putting my trust in the statistics. And I thought, There’s no way this can happen twice. And so I held it with a little bit of a looser grip. Like, “Lord, I’m surrendering, but it’s probably going to work out okay.”

And then exactly six-and-one-half weeks to the day, I miscarried again. And that one was a little more devastating because I started bleeding, and then we went to the doctor. They did an ultrasound, and I saw the heartbeat. They said, “Oh, it’s really early, but we can see the little heartbeat.” And then that night, four hours later—miscarried.

And so, to see the heartbeat on the screen, to see that little baby, to have that app (you know, all the pregnancy apps), and then to go home and to know it’s all over again. Delete the app. Back to square one. That was so devastating again. But God is so faithful, and He drew us closer together. He helped us walk through that.

And then year two turned into year three. Year three turned into year four, year five. And by year five, hadn’t gotten pregnant again, and we were just wondering, Okay, something’s wrong. This isn’t normal.” We were very busy with ministry, very involved in our local church.

We decided to get testing, pursued a whole bunch of basic testing. They diagnosed me with unexplained infertility. And then, if I were to get pregnant, they said, “Well, those two early miscarriages, you may also suffer with recurrent miscarriage loss. And we don’t know why, but you struggle with two different things, and we’re not sure what’s connecting them.”

And so my husband and I started praying about: Should we pursue treatment? Should we pursue adoption? We honestly did not know what to do. Thankfully, we both have mentors in our lives that were speaking into this and helping us. One of the things that someone shared, which was so helpful, was, “Don’t just put a Band-Aid on the problem. Don’t chase after something just to get the solution. You have to be trusting God and seeking Him in this. Don’t chase after adoption, trying to fix a void in your heart that only God can fill.”

I had all of this wrestling in my heart, and I was struggling. And the answer that we kept coming back to was God’s just saying, “Be faithful. Take the next step. Don’t pursue anything specific yet—like adoption, fertility treatment—just stay on the course that I have you on.” (Which was ministry at our local church and a lot of things going on in our city.)

So year six rolls around. Year seven. We’re plugged in. We’re being faithful. Then I had a surgery to remove a fibroid that they found on the outside of my uterus. And I thought, Oh, maybe that’s the problem, even though the doctor said it could be or it couldn’t be. And that was this year, just this January.

Three months after that surgery, the month that the doctor said we could start trying this year, I got pregnant again. It honestly shocked us because we’ve had six years of silence. Six years of nothing. And so, to get pregnant after that, it totally caught us off guard. We weren’t expecting it. We weren’t anticipating it. It seemed like a really, really sweet gift from the Lord.

And I didn’t get on the app because I was struggling with fear and trusting God. I thought, I’m just not going to get on those pregnancy apps unless I make it past six-and-a-half weeks—because that was always the big hurdle for me.

And so week five, week six, and then we hit week seven. I’m like, “I’ve never made it past six-and-a-half weeks.” Then we hit week eight. We go and we get an appointment, and we have an ultrasound, “The heartbeat’s strong, everything’s measuring on track.” So I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to download the pregnancy app. I’m still going to surrender this and trust the Lord, but I’m going to try to kind of celebrate what’s happening right now.”

Bethany, my sister, encouraged me. She said, “Just live today. Don’t live in the fear of tomorrow. Just celebrate what God’s doing today.” And that was really helpful for me.

So I got that app. Week nine rolled around. Week ten, and everything seemed like it was going well. And then at eleven weeks, I started bleeding just a little bit. I was like, “I don’t know what this is. This doesn’t seem good. Bleeding’s never good, but it was just spotting. Sometimes that’s not a problem.”

And I just told Zack, “Let’s just go get an ultrasound just to see, just to see that everything’s okay, because my heart just needs to know.” And so we went in, eleven weeks. I’m like, “I’m almost out of my first trimester.” This was just this past May.

The doctor did the ultrasound, and so I’m glancing over, and then she just gets really quiet. I knew something was wrong. And she just looked over at us, and she said, “I’m so sorry. There’s no heartbeat.”

Hearing that news, laying back on that table, it was like a gut punch. In that moment I just felt like, “God, how can You be so cruel? We were doing fine. We were serving You. We were involved in ministry at our local church. Why would You even give me this pregnancy? And then allow it to go further than it’s ever gone? I’m getting my hopes up. I’m dreaming of our family. And then You just take it away?”

It was so hard. But what was even harder is that I hadn’t miscarried yet. I knew there was no heartbeat, so I had to go home and just wait for the miscarriage to happen.

I know a lot of you have experienced a miscarriage. You know the pain. And you know it’s on every level—spiritually, emotionally, physically—it is so hard.

So I go home, and a week later, at twelve weeks, I miscarry. It was the hardest thing. More development. The baby’s bigger. It was just a lot more traumatic than the first two. My husband and I, we were just reeling. But we had seen God’s faithfulness. We had seen Him carry us through those trials—our family has gone through other hard things. We’ve seen God’s faithfulness.

And so in those darkest moments following that miscarriage that weekend, I just felt like I could barely think. I would just cry. We would go on a walk, and I would just cry the whole walk. I could hardly contain myself. But I knew God would pull us through that dark valley because He had time and time again.

And we as humans, we always want to ask, “Why?” in those moments. And I was asking, “Why? Why, God?” My husband and I had some really good conversations around that time, and he told me, “We don’t understand all the whys, and even if we had the answer to our why questions, it wouldn’t provide peace. Even if God said, ‘This is exactly what I’m doing,’ would it really provide the peace that our hearts are longing for?”

And then, as he’s holding me, he said, “If we’re honest, what we really want when asking God why is for Him to change our circumstances. That’s what we’re really wanting. We’re saying, ‘Why are You doing this, God? Can You change this? Can You just take this away?’ But we have to trust.”

Here I am today, still no children, no physical children. God is growing my understanding of what it means to be fruitful and to produce life in a lot of other ways. But it’s hard. I feel weary on this journey. I feel tired so often. I just want to be done. “God, can I have a different road, please?”

I’m from a big family. Eight kids. I never imagined this would be my story. I never imagined this would be the journey that God would have for me. But I have learned that He is so good, and He is so trustworthy.

I know that I’m not the only person in this room listening to this who faces unfulfilled longings. Every single one of us, in some season or another, faces an unfulfilled longing. Even right now you may have something in your life that’s disappointing, a longing that’s even good that God just has not chosen to fulfill in your life right now.

I have learned through the fire that how we choose to respond to these hard circumstances will either lead us down a path of sorrow and anxiety, or down a path of joy and contentment. And when we face that unfulfilled longing, that desire, we have a choice we have to make. It’s either going to take us down sorrow and anxiety or joy and contentment in Christ. And how we respond, how we look to the Lord, that’s going to determine the path that we walk on.

For me, right now my struggle, my unfulfilled longing, is for children and infertility. But for you, maybe it’s something else.I know some of you are suffering with ongoing physical health challenges, and you’re longing to be healed.

Maybe you’re watching a family member suffer with a life-altering disease, and you’re crying out to God for healing.

Maybe you’re longing for a wayward child or other family member to know Christ. And it’s so hard to watch them walk in darkness.

Maybe you’re desperate for God to restore your broken marriage. You’re crying out to Him to fulfill that longing.

Maybe you’re feeling lonely and wishing you had just one good, close friend. You’re saying, “God, please. Would You fulfill this?”

Maybe you’re struggling in singleness and longing for marriage. A good, beautiful thing, and God is saying, “Not yet. It’s not what I have for you yet.”

Maybe you have a job that you really want to get, and it’s just not happening.

Or longing to be more involved in ministry in some way, and that’s just not what God has for you right now.

I don’t know the journey that you’re on or what you’re facing, but I can assure you that God does. He knows. He sees. He loves you, and He cares about you so deeply. He is walking with you through that right now.

One of the big lies that the enemy wants us to believe, that he wants to trap us in—and I have seen this over and over again in my own life, in my own heart—is the crippling lie that I cannot be satisfied until I get ______(blank). I cannot be satisfied until I have children of my own. And that’s the lie that the enemy tells us, that unless I get that thing my heart is longing for, I can’t be fully satisfied.

Fill in the blank for whatever it is for you, but here is the truth: true joy and fulfillment doesn’t come from getting what you want but from surrendering your entire life to what God wants and trusting that His plan is truly good.

That has been the anthem for my life. True joy and fulfillment doesn’t come from getting what you want but from surrendering your entire life to what God wants and trusting that His plan is truly good.

I want you to open your Bibles, if you have them, to Psalm 138:8. And this verse has been a beacon of hope and light in my journey as I have walked this hard season of unfulfilled longing. It says in Psalm 138, verse 8:

The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me;
your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.

“The Lord will fulfill His purpose”—not my purpose, not what I want on this earth. “He will fulfill His purpose for me.”

And then my heart can respond to that truth and say, “Your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever.”

And that is a truth that my heart can cling to and is clinging to even right now. As I’m speaking, this verse has been such an anchor for me.

So how do we find joy in the midst of unfulfilled longings? We all face them. We all know someone who’s facing one. So how do we, as Christian women, find joy? How do we balance that desire for something so much, a good thing, and at the same time walk in joy where God has us right now, in the midst of not giving us that desire?

And I just want to quickly share with you three things that God has taught me in the darkest days on this journey, the hardest times on this journey that I’m walking on. I hope they’re an encouragement to you.

This is how we as Christians can find true joy and fulfillment in the midst of our unfulfilled longings:

Number one: When we humbly submit to God’s story in our lives.

The friction in my heart often arises because I’m more passionate about getting my story for my life than God’s story for my life. When I focus on building my kingdom and what I want rather than what God wants, my focus gets way off.

Early on in this struggle, a friend very graciously, very kindly, asked me, “If God never gave you biological children of your own, would Christ be enough?”

And instantly I responded, “Well, of course. I love Jesus with all my heart, soul, and mind,” you know, just the instant Christian answer. Then I went away and thought about it. “If God never, ever gave me biological children of my own, would Christ be enough?”

And, ladies, we have to wrestle at that heart level. That exposes what is on the throne of our hearts? That exposes who the king of our heart is. It exposes our idols.

And for me, in that moment I could not honestly answer that Jesus would be enough. That exposed an area that I needed to grow in. God has used that question to push me to Christ and to show me that Jesus is enough.

Isaiah 46:9b says, “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me.”

Our God has a good story for our lives, but it may be a hard story, a challenging story, but it’s His story. He’s building His kingdom. When we humbly submit to that, then we can embrace what He has for us. We can embrace what’s in front of us.

Back to Psalm 138:8, “The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.”

That is our greatest purpose. It is to trust the Lord to build His kingdom. He gets to decide how we build it. That was a big thing I had to surrender. I don’t get to decide. I would have decided way differently than the journey I’m on. God gets to decide how we build His kingdom, and then it’s our job to humbly submit to His decisions.

So the first way that we find true joy and fulfillment as Christian women is to humbly submit to God’s story for our lives.

And number two: Trust that God’s plan is for our good. We have to trust that His plan is for our good at a heart level.

I think in our day and age, when we hear the word “good”—at least for me—we think happy, getting what we want, having everything go our way. We think of good as all of our dreams coming true. Right? The American dream, that’s what we think of.

But God’s version of good isn’t surface level like that. It is so much deeper because God knows that true satisfaction can only come from a thriving and genuine relationship with Christ. That’s how we’re satisfied. That is what’s truly good.

So if God, being all-knowing, is writing our life’s stories, He will sovereignly bring in trials and give us unfulfilled longings because they show us our need for Him. He knows that as we look to Him in those desires, He knows He will satisfy us in ways that those earthly desires never could. And that’s God’s good plan for us, and we can trust that. He is drawing us to Himself and helping us to become more like Christ.

Over the past eight years of this journey, I have had many family members get pregnant, many friends. My sister that I love so much found out she was pregnant a week after my miscarriage. And those are hard. You’re balancing celebration and sorrow at the same time. But God is good, and He helps us walk through that.

As I’ve been surrounded by so many wonderful moms and pregnant women, God is helping me to see that I can celebrate with others. As I trust that His plan is good for me, I can celebrate that His plan is good for them, too. He has us all in different seasons. We cannot compare our life story, what God is doing in our life, to someone else. We have to walk in our way faithfully and say, “Thank You, God, for what You’re doing in my life. Thank You, God, for what you’re doing in their life.”

He is good, and He has a unique story for each one of us. Psalm 119:68 reminds us of this. I’ve heard Nancy say this verse so many times, it’s become a theme in my own life.

You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.

That is a promise we can cling to that our God is good.

And then, again, Psalm 138:8:

The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me;
your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.

Last point: How can we as Christian women find joy and fulfillment in the midst of unfulfilled longing? We can find it by serving God wholeheartedly right now. Right now. Where He has us. Right now in the midst of that unfulfilled longing, when we choose to serve God wholeheartedly.

I think for many of us the struggle, the disappointment becomes so heavy that it can often become a barrier that keeps us from moving forward. It becomes the lens that we view all of life through. And then we forget that God has a plan and purpose for us right now. And then we get distracted, and we forget, “Oh, I could be serving God wholeheartedly right now.”

I saw myself falling into that pit when I would laser in on what I didn’t have—that unfulfilled longing. I laser focused on the fact that I don’t have children. But I was missing what was right in front of me, that God had a plan and purpose and wanted to use me to build His kingdom right now.

As I started to shift my focus to not be on what I didn’t have, but rather on what God had given me, it changed everything. And during that season, that’s when Bethany and I launched Girl Defined Ministries.

I started to see that I could be fruitful as a woman in so many other ways. I could produce life in so many other ways than just physically. I could do that by mentoring younger women. Pouring into younger women, discipling them, pursuing Titus 2. I could see that, “Wow! God can give me spiritual children. I can still be fruitful even if He never gives me children of my own.”

And that was a radical transformation for me. That enabled me to serve God wholeheartedly, right where He had me. It was a huge deal in my life.

Matthew 6:20–21 reminds us, 

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

If we are treasuring that desire so much where it becomes an idol, that’s where our heart’s going to be. And it’s going to be so hard to see what God is trying to do in our lives and how He wants us to serve Him.

But when our hearts are focused on Christ, we’re focusing on building His kingdom, and we’re focused on laying up treasures for God’s kingdom. Then the season we’re in, in the midst of unfulfilled longings, becomes a beautiful thing because we can serve God right there. We can pour our lives into what’s right in front of us.

I think that God wants us to lay our desires, strong, even good desires, at the foot of His altar and offer them as a sacrifice of worship to Him, to say, “God, You are enough. I surrender this desire to You. I entrust it to You. Do with it what You will.”

In closing, I just want to remind all of us that God doesn’t promise us an easy life on this earth. But He does promise us complete and total satisfaction in our relationship with Him. And that is something we can count on. In and out of every season, in and out of every unfulfilled longing, every heartache, we can count on the fact that in Christ we can be 100% satisfied.

I want to encourage you, as I’m encouraging my own heart, don’t allow your unfulfilled longings to consume your life and wreck your joy. That’s what the enemy wants. That’s not what God wants for you. Instead, choose to trust Christ and find joy by humbly submitting to God’s story for your life by trusting that God’s plan for you is good and then by serving God wholeheartedly right now, right where He has you.

We don’t know what the future holds, but we know the One who holds our future. And in Him our hearts can find peace and rest.

As we strive to be women who build God’s kingdom in the midst of our unfulfilled longings, will our hearts echo the words of Psalm 138? “The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.”

Amen.

Nancy: That’s Kristen Clark who spoke to a group of womenduring the Sisters in Ministry Summit, hosted by Revive Our Hearts.

Now, at that time, Kristen had no way of knowing how God was at work fulfilling His purposes for her life. Over the last few years, since Kristen shared that story, God has grown her family in a way that she never expected—through adoption.

While Kristen was learning how to trust God’s plan in the midst of her struggles with infertility, there were two precious little boys living in an orphanage in Eastern Ukraine who were waiting for a family. Today those boys are no longer orphans. They are Kristen’s and Zack’s sons.

Wow! Doesn’t God write the best stories? Kristen didn’t know how her journey with infertility would end. It didn’t end up the way she would have scripted it, but God knew. And He was scripting it in accordance with His purposes.

That’s why it’s so important for us to remember that He can be trusted even when we don’t know how our story will turn out.

Before we close, I want to read again the passage that Kristen shared at the end of her message. You might want to look it up yourself. Psalm 138, verse 8. What a powerful verse! And you know, when we affirm God’s truth and counsel our hearts according to His Word, even when we don’t feel like it’s true, well, what happens then is we experience an infusion of God’s grace. So I want that for you right now.

Let me just take a moment to read that verse one more time. And I want you to repeat these words out loud, wherever you are—whether you’re in your car with some littles in the back seat, or walking on your treadmill, or getting dressed for the day. Don’t just nod your head as you listen. Affirm this truth with your heart and with your mouth. Let me read the verse.

Psalm 138, verse 8: “The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.”

Now let me say it just one phrase at a time, and would you repeat that after me?

“The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me.” Just say that.

And then, “Your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.” Say it: “Your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.”

Okay, what more could we need than that?

Now we have to ask ourselves: Do I really believe that? Do I believe that God has a purpose for me and that He will fulfill that purpose? Sometimes we believe it’s true, sometimes we don’t. But it really doesn’t matter, because it’s still true. Even when we don’t feel like it’s the case, that’s the time to go on record and to stand on the promises of God. “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.” Amen.

Dannah: What precious promises. I don’t know about you, but I want to be a good listener of the Word. I want to continue growing in how I respond to God’s truth.

If this is an area where you want to continue to improve, we have a brand new resource by Nancy that you’ll want to check out. It’s called, “Let’s Go to Church!” Inside, you’ll find a section with questions that will help you examine just how well you hear and respond to the Word of God.

You can get a copy of this booklet when you make a donation of any amount to the ministry of Revive Our Hearts. Ask for it when you contact us with your donation. To do so, just visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Do you ever feel like the church is so broken that you should just give up and not go back? Tomorrow Mark Vroegop will share why staying in the church is a good idea. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is calling you to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV.

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