\"I Trust You\"

I am so grateful for this conversation with Erin Price. What she shared was raw, honest, and deeply faith-filled — and I know it is going to reach the hearts of so many women who are quietly carrying something similar. Infertility is one of those burdens that often stays hidden, tucked behind a smile on Sunday morning while everyone around you seems to be living the life you have been praying for. If that is you, or if you love someone walking that road, this episode is for you.

In this episode:

• How a shocking spiritual prompting early in Erin's marriage set the stage for everything that followed

• The sacred temple experience that gave her the courage to keep going when she wanted to quit

• The three words God spoke to her heart after her most devastating miscarriage

• How embryo adoption became an unexpected and deeply sacred part of her journey

• What Erin would say to anyone who is suffering and wondering if God even sees them

Erin Price lives in the Northern Virginia and Washington DC area with her husband. She works in publishing licensing for the American Psychiatric Association, does advocacy work for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, helps lead a family support group, and is a writer — articles, fiction, and everything in between. She has a full and beautiful life. She also has a story that took years, tears, surgeries, miscarriages, and an unwavering decision to keep trusting God to write.

Erin has lived with PCOS — polycystic ovary syndrome — since she was diagnosed at twenty-three. It is a hormonal endocrine disorder that affects one in eight women and makes natural ovulation difficult or impossible. She knew going in that infertility might be part of her story. What she did not know was just how long, how winding, and how deeply sacred that road would become.

When Erin and her husband began trying to get pregnant about a year after their marriage, things did not go well. The medications weren't working. The stress was mounting. And then — in the middle of all of it — Erin received a spiritual impression she never saw coming.

She felt clearly prompted to stop trying to have children and instead focus on her writing and her career.

This was not what she expected God to say. Everything she had grown up believing pointed to motherhood as her central calling. Her friends were having babies. Her siblings were having babies. And here was God telling her to go a different direction — at least for now.

Looking back, she can see exactly why. Her husband got very sick shortly after, and it took five years to get his illness figured out and stabilized. Then Erin's own anxiety, which had been a lifelong struggle, intensified during all of those crisis moments and required its own season of therapy and medication to get under control. Had they pushed forward with fertility treatments during that time, the weight of it all would have been crushing.

God was not withholding. He was preparing.

By the time Erin and her husband were finally ready to pursue fertility treatments, she was already exhausted. The preliminary tests, the painful procedures, the surgery just to get to the starting line — it was a lot. And there were moments where she genuinely questioned whether God was paying attention.

One of those moments brought her to the temple. She knelt and prayed honestly — I do not know how we are going to become parents. I do not know how we are going to be effective parents with everything we are dealing with. I just do not see how this is possible. Show me the way.

She looked up. Directly across from her was a painting — Christ and the Young Child by Karl Bloch. In it, Christ has his arm around a small child, almost as if he is presenting the child to the world.

What came to her in that moment was not words exactly — it was deeper than that. Spirit to spirit. But if she were to put it into words it was something like: this is my child, I am sending you my child, and I will help you. Don't you believe that I can help you?

She left that temple with the courage to keep going.

Erin and her husband decided to pursue embryo adoption — a process she had never heard of until she began fertility treatments. Couples who have unused embryos from IVF can choose to donate them to other families. Erin and her husband received a grant from a nonprofit organization that made it financially possible, and then they went through the deeply sacred process of selecting an embryo from a database of donor profiles.

They found a couple they felt genuinely good about. They felt connected to the embryo before the transfer even happened. The transfer itself was special — full of gratitude for the donor family, full of reverence for what was happening.

And then she got pregnant. After all of it — the years of waiting, the treatments, the faith, the prayers — she was pregnant. They told their family. Everyone celebrated. They went to the temple to thank God for their miracle.

About five to ten minutes after they left the temple, the bleeding started. She miscarried.

I remember sitting with that part of her story for a moment because I could not imagine the pain of that timing. She said it herself: Really, God? I just thanked you for this miracle and then you allowed it to be taken away. This seems very cruel.

She prayed and asked why. She asked the question most of us would ask in that moment — why me? I have tried so hard to follow your path. I have done everything you asked. Why me?

Three words came clearly into her mind: I trust you.

She felt the weight of that in two directions at once. God trusted her — trusted that she would walk through this experience and come out the other side with her faith intact. And she needed to trust Him — that He could see more than she could and that it was going to be okay.

She chose to hold onto those three words even when she did not fully understand them. And two years later, she finally got the rest of the answer.

After her first miscarriage, Erin had another. And another failed procedure. And another. Her fertility doctors kept telling her this was normal, to just keep trying. But she felt — deeply and persistently — that something was being missed.

A friend had mentioned endometriosis years earlier. It kept coming up. So Erin finally asked her fertility doctor if they could try a medication used to treat endometriosis before her next transfer. When that didn't result in a pregnancy either, she decided to see a specialist.

She did not want another surgery. But she was desperate. And the specialist — unlike every doctor before him — finally listened. He listed her symptoms. She checked off every single one. Some of them she had brought up to other doctors for years and had been told they were normal. He told her clearly: this is endometriosis. And extensive endometriosis at that — between stage three and four, the most severe classification.

Suddenly everything made sense. Why she couldn't stay pregnant. Why her body had been sending signals for years that no one caught. Why God had kept prompting her to keep looking instead of giving up.

She had to get pregnant to discover she could get pregnant — but couldn't stay pregnant. And that distinction led her to the diagnosis that finally gave her answers and a path forward. The miscarriage that felt so cruel was actually the moment that changed everything.

I trust you finally had a full answer.

One of the things Erin said that I have not stopped thinking about is this: God does not want us to suffer endlessly. That is not His plan. He wants us to find relief. And if we keep turning to Him, He will lead us there — even when the path is longer and more winding than anyone around us thinks it should be.

She also had something important to say to the friends and family members on the outside of someone else's infertility journey. The hardest thing people said to her was that she needed to accept God's will that she was not going to have children. Their intentions were kind — they did not want to watch her suffer. But it was not helpful because it was not the revelation she was receiving.

What is helpful is simple. Mourn with those who mourn. Sit with them. Say I can see how hard this is. I am here. Trust that they are receiving revelation for the path God has them on — even if it is longer and more twisty than you would choose for them.

We do not always know what someone else is carrying. But we can choose to show up the way Christ would — without judgment, without fixing, without rushing them to an answer they are not ready for.

I want to close with the words of Elder Jeffrey R. Holland from his October 2020 talk Waiting on the Lord: "Faith means trusting God in good times and bad, even if that includes some suffering until we see his arm revealed in our behalf."

And I love the quote Erin shared from Elder Holland that has stayed with her through all of it: "Some blessings come soon, some come late, and some don't come until heaven. But for those who embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ, they come."

Erin's story is not finished. She is still walking forward. But she walks with something she did not have before — a clear and settled knowledge that God sees her, that He trusts her, and that He is leading her somewhere good.

Whatever you are waiting on, whatever diagnosis you have just received, whatever loss you are still grieving — He sees you too. Keep turning to Him. Keep asking specifically for what you need. Keep recording the tender mercies. The puzzle pieces will come together. They always do.

If this episode helped you or someone you love, please share it. You can also find Erin's writing and advocacy work — she is someone worth following. And if you would like to be a guest on Becoming the Oak Rooted in Christ, reach out to me at kendra@becomingtheoak.com.

Until next time — be still, believe, become.