The following reflection was written by Forsythia. 

This story contains spoilers for the film and/or graphic novel V for Vendetta.

I am a Christian. At the heart of my chosen doctrine is the foundational belief in a sovereign God who is crazy in love with me, to the point of great personal sacrifice—his beloved son Jesus. This belief undergirds all other aspects of being a Christian, and so when it is in question, all things are in question.

How can a good, a loving God withhold from me something as natural and beautiful as motherhood? It wasn’t long into trying to get pregnant that this question sprouted in my mind. Years later, its roots were firmly about my worldview. This question—an unresolved doubt about my God and his character—became spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually paralyzing. I found myself either struggling to believe what the Bible said about God’s goodness, or what it said about his power. For how could suffering exist of both of these things were true? It was causing me to abandon the thing that most gave my life purpose, hope, and meaning, at a time when I needed those things the most.

About 5 years into infertility, I was just starting to read the Bible again, and found myself stuck on a chapter in Galatians that spoke about the gift of suffering. I happened to be wrestling with this idea in a lull at work, texting with my best friend as I tried to reason it out, to understand, to make sense of my suffering.

“Is it possible that what feels like torture could actually be love?” I processed with her.  

And then in the room next door, a professor started up a film his class had begun earlier: V for Vendetta. I am so familiar with the film that I could picture its exact images as I listened to the dialogue, sound effects, score. It’s one of my favorites, but I hadn’t thought of it in a while.

There’s a part in the film when the principal character is in prison being tortured for information. She endures this for days, though she has nothing to offer them, until finally, she is told she will be executed. But what happens next is that her cell is left open and unguarded. She ventures out of the prison to discover it was not a prison after all. It was a charade, designed by a man named V.

“You tortured me? Why!” She screams. “Leave me alone! I hate you!”

V explains that it was the only way to free her from the fear that enslaved her—to subject her to what she most feared so that she could face and overcome it. “I wish there was another way,” he says.

Disbelief, rage, grief, betrayal, relief, and pain converge and she begins to hyperventilate. V takes her to the roof. There, she stands in the rain, breathing in the fresh air and feeling it all as though for the first time. She realizes that V has actually accomplished what he set out to do. The absence of fear has made her world big and vibrant, full of possibility and beauty. Fear was being used to take her life from her. Overcoming it allowed her to reclaim it.

It’s difficult to express how much this moment in my life—exposure to this scene as I was grappling with the question of suffering—impacted my relationship with God, and how much it shifted my attitude towards my circumstances and renewed hope in my heart. Not only did it open my mind to a new way of seeing my story, but it represented my pain, disbelief, confusion and heartache in a cathartic way. The scene in that film gave real emotional teeth to a concept that I was just barely able to consider intellectually at the time: that it could be possible for the hardest thing in my life to be the only way for me to reach a place in life that I was meant to reach.

This new perspective was life-altering. It helped me to see beauty and possibility in my story where before I had only seen punishment, anguish, pain, and meaninglessness. And it showed me anew the possibility of the God of the Bible that I had so fallen in love with: personal, loving, powerful.

I can’t claim to fully understand the mystery of suffering and God’s place in that reality. It’s not a new question, and one that has no easy answer (perhaps not even an answer the human mind will ever be able to comprehend). But I do know for my husband and I that if we had not been made to die to our dream of biological children, we would not have opened our hearts to adoption. My adopted son is not just a child. He is a specific, unique human being. I cannot comprehend a world without him in it. Yet, he was not what I yearned after for so many years–not the face I pictured, not the reality I prayed for. I couldn’t see the future , didn’t know to wish for this special little one who would become my little one. But I believe in a divine Someone who sees past, present and future at once. He witnessed our every grief and loss, and he also knew the unspeakable joy that this exact child would bring into our hurting hearts.

Was the suffering of infertility the only way we could have received this incomprehensibly precious gift? It’s hard to hear. It’s hard to explain. It’s hard to comprehend. But I believe the answer is yes.