"Nightmare."

"We're pissed."

"Like cancer patients with only months to live."

What catastrophic life event, we might ask, could provoke language of such profound hostility and dread?

Pregnancy. Twins!

A Babble blogger, writing under the pen name Albert Garland, recently bemoaned his tragic fate as the soon-to-be father of twin boys. He and his wife, already parents of one son, tried for years to give him a sibling. Finally, at $10,000 a pop, they did in vitro fertilization. Hoping for one girl, they got two boys.

As the mother of young twin boys—plus three older children—I can relate to the initial shock of an unexpected twin pregnancy. I'd like to say I myself took the news as equitably as Mary, mother of God, who calmly responded in Luke 1:38, saying, "I am the servant of the LORD; let it be to me according to your word." Instead, for weeks I persisted in sullenness. I did not feel grateful and could not pray.

I don't blame Garland for his fear, even anger, nor do I want to minimize how dramatically a surprise pregnancy can alter the life of a family.

I initially struggled with the news, even though my case was unusually advantaged. Our house and car could reasonably accommodate the double-vision of high chairs and cribs and car seats. Because I was already at home with our three young children, the prospect of twins forced no threat of having to abandon career because of untenable childcare costs.

For many families though, a surprise pregnancy isn't so easily accommodated. The financial implications of bringing an "unplanned" child into the world—or two or three!—in addition to credit card debt, school loans, and mortgage payments can feel like a crushing burden. Moreover, marriages strained by other life circumstances, such as unemployment, health issues, and marital tensions, can lack capacity for welcoming the surprise gift of a baby.

As much as I would like to affirm that surprise pregnancies are a blessing, and that the surprise itself is normative for our faith, I want first to grant that we can and should meet our surprises authentically—as Garland has. As the books of Job and Psalms prove, God has enormous generosity for the sincerity of human expression, even when we feel sincerely angry and disappointed with him. Faced with the prospect of an ill-timed pregnancy, we can feel disappointed or afraid; it is even permissible for us to pray in our unresolved state of bitterness.

But as Christians, if we don't want to stay in that state—if we wish to replace our fears with Mary's placid surrender to divine providence—we're going to have to understand what drives our hostilities toward this "accident." For me, my surprise pregnancy forcibly exposed how closely I clung to the myth of self-sovereignty. In theory, I was theologically committed to the idea that God had the right to design and order my life according to his plans and purposes. In reality, I was more beholden to the notion that I was in control.

Control is what science seems to have wrangled for us in the area of human fertility. Once considered the mysterious purview of the gods, human conception is now something we (almost) successfully manage. I am not here to defend or accuse our technological achievements in the area of human fertility, only to say that they have the potential for driving deeper our will for sovereignty. We want to decide when to have children. We want to decide how many to have. When pregnancy (or conversely, the inability to have children) comes as a surprise, we respond not only with incredulity, but with anger. It shatters the notion of human control.

The good news is that a surprise pregnancy—even infertility—can be a terrific boon to faith. Faith forces the relinquishment of our notions of control and grows in us a patient trust, where we begin believing that God's providence is good and kind. Indeed, faith of this kind can only develop when life takes an extemporaneous turn. Certainly, divine surprise isn't limited to matters of fertility. All of us will meet moments where we're handed a part we haven't intended to play in this drama.

What then? Rail against the heavens? Curse God and die? Maybe at first. But in the company of men and women who can believe on our behalf at the moments we cannot, we can tether ourselves to the important truths we do not hold to be self-evident in a life of faith: God is good. We are loved—even when life does not go as we have planned or wanted.

Five and a half years ago, I welcomed twin boys into our family. Just recently, I watched them from the window on the first spring day, pedaling hard on their bikes, which my husband had recently outfitted with training wheels. These two boys have been my greatest surprise. I had never planned on becoming a mother of five. But my extended lease on motherhood, in ways too many to articulate here, has been a source of unexpected joy.

"Sometimes God seems to be killing us when he's actually saving us," writes Tim Keller in Counterfeit Gods. I think I know what he means.

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