Manna in the Desert

Forward from Me: Below is a testimony from a personal close friend who I used to room with in college. She was always a rock for me in some of my darker times and had the patience to listen to my never ending deep questions in that season of my life. She taught me how to love better and the importance of community and investing in others. She is beautiful inside and out and has a genuine love for God. Here is her testimony of God’s goodness.

Written by Hannah Wright

“If you ask a little girl what she wants to be when she grows up, the chances are it's something fabulous - like a doctor, or President of the United States, or even a fairy princess. From my earliest memories, I, too, knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, but it wasn’t something viewed as glitzy or romantic. All of my life, I have wanted to be a mom. Throughout my teenage years, I would dream about what it would be like to carry a child in my body and hold him or her in my arms. Even as I grew up and began a career that I loved, it wasn’t the thing that I hungered for. I wanted to be a mother. I felt made to be a mother. It was a desire I knew the Lord had placed in my heart. 

And yet, my body just wouldn’t cooperate.  

 A large part of my story is a decade long struggle with disordered eating and body image - a season born of both sin and wounding that took an immense toll on my heart, mind, and body. In an act of grace, the Lord allowed this struggle to worsen until, in my mid-20s, it was completely out of control, making it impossible for my body to produce what it needed in order to conceive a child. It was this wake up call that provided me with the extrinsic motivation I needed to repent and pursue healing.  

Through beautiful tools such as confession, community, therapy, Scripture, and time, Jesus truly freed me from that bondage, and I can gratefully and confidently say that disordered eating is no longer part of my life, and although He is constantly renewing my mind, I live from a place of victory. However, even though my mind was healing, and a lot of my health problems were disappearing, the thing I wanted most restored, my reproductive system, still wasn’t. 

The Lord was doing amazing things in my life. My struggle had kept pretty much every part of me subdued and chained, but as I found freedom, abundance began to overflow in the most beautiful places. He increased my ministry in my work as a high school teacher in ways I never dreamed possible. He was teaching me so much about how to hear His voice and the blessing that follows obedience. But my body still wasn’t healed. 

In the midst of this journey, the Lord spoke to me clearly. It was the first day of the year, and my husband and I were reading at a coffee shop when the Holy Spirit just…came. One minute, I was reading, and the next it was like Jesus grabbed my face and turned me towards him. As clear as day, He said in my Spirit, “Let me do it,” and He asked me to stop obsessively tracking all of the different fertility signs I was monitoring. 

A Scripture from the book I was reading lept off the page and lodged itself in my heart: 

“He humbled you, causing you to hunger, and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 8:3).

I left the coffee shop that day full of hope and confident expectation. In my mind, I had already hungered, so surely the manna was on its way!

The very next week, three different friends told me that they were pregnant. Each time, I smiled through tears. 

Months passed, and although I obeyed and stopped tracking, nothing was changing. 

Around that time, a sweet friend received a revelation in prayer that Jesus would heal my mind, and then my heart, and then my body. I knew that He had already healed my mind, and was renewing it more each day, but I didn’t understand what needed healing in my heart. 

I started playing these silly games with God, like if I figured out the magic formula of surrender and faith, He would give me the desire of my heart. I knew that I was wrong - theologically for sure, but also relationally - but I couldn’t stop myself. As the months passed and nothing changed, I began to doubt what I had heard from Him at the start of the year…I was trying to create my own manna, instead of living on His Word.

And yet, I had never been more aware of His compassion. Even in my mind games, His posture towards me was only grace. As I hungered, He taught me new depths of His love. I learned the beauty of community at a level I never dreamed possible. So many people faithfully prayed for me, encouraged me, gently corrected my misguided thinking, laid hands on me, and even worshiped over me. I was so hungry, and at the same time, found that I had never known what it was like to be that full. 

Gradually, as the months passed and the new year approached, Jesus lovingly loosened my grip on my dream, healing my heart until I truly got to the place where I could say, “This is not the path that I want, but even if I never get to carry a child in my body, I trust you. Your will be done.”

“Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

November came, and our doctor told us we wouldn’t be able to stay on the medicine we were on for much longer and would have to start pursuing IVF. We spent the month fasting and asked our community to boldly pray that November would be the month we finally conceived.

It wasn’t.

“Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

And then…365 days after the Spirit spoke to me in that coffee shop…on the very last day of the year…my dream became my reality. 

Miraculously, and just like He said He would, Jesus healed my body and opened my womb. Not because I had hit the magic surrender button, but because He was keeping the promise He had already made.

And because our Father goes beyond what we could ever ask or imagine, it is not one child, but two little girls who play next to me even as I write. 

Scripture is clear that the thoughts of the Lord are beyond our thoughts and that His ways are not our ways. It would be wrong to try and assign motives to God that are clearly beyond my finite understanding. He is God, and I am not. I’m not implying that He caused my season of infertility in order to birth trust in me, nor am I saying that every dream finds fulfillment on this side of the new earth, but I am confident that He is able to take the wrongs of this world, be they eating disorders, closed wombs, or broken dreams, and redeem them for His glory. 

 Where do you hunger today? What promises has the Lord given you in His Word? No matter the form of hunger, He promises to feed His children with manna, the very Bread of Life, Himself, and He is a man of His word.”

-Hannah Wright

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Know someone who needs to hear this testimony? Forward to a friend and testify of God’s goodness again