My patron saint and me

Today I received my patron saint for the year from yourpatronsaint.blogspot.com. I read about the site on another blog and was immediately intrigued. All you have to do is email someone through the site and they match you up with a saint. I'm not sure how they actually do the matches, but they say the saint chooses you. So, of course, I emailed the woman to ask for my saint for the year with the hope that it would provide some insight into my infertility and whether I'd soon get pregnant (everything with me revolves around possibly gaining some hint from God as to whether I'll ever have a baby. Probably not a good thing).

Well I received my saint today via email and it's (drumroll please).........

Saint Isidore the Farmer.

That's right, Farmer. As in one who works on a FARM. Well, if St. Isidore chose me, there must be a reason so I immediately googled him. Turns out there is a connection, and an initially depressing one at that.

Here's a quick synopsis: St. Isidore and his wife had one son who died unexpectedly as a child. They were in such grief that they decided God did not will for them to have children (ya, that's right). They decided to live a chaste life (yes, they lived together without having sex for the rest of their lives) doing good works.

Wow! My immediate reaction was easy: A childless saint chose me therefore I will be childless. Plain and simple. It took me a little while to get past this, at which time I realized I should probably look more into it; I at least owed that to St. Isidore.

What I came up with is that St. Isidore choosing me may not be a sign that I will be childless, but it may be a sign that he knows what I'm going through. Sometimes I like to picture the saints watching us and feeling sad for us. I'm not sure there even is sadness in heaven, but thinking that they feel sorry for me makes me feel a little better. I'm not sure why, but it does. So maybe St. Isidore feels my pain and wants to comfort me.

We obviously don't share the death of a child, but then my mind immediately went to miscarriage. Will I suffer a miscarriage this year? But I realized that I don't think God is trying to give me hints. God doesn't send us cryptic messages to decipher and find hidden meaning in. He also doesn't want us to worry all day about something possibly happening. So I don't think that was the intention.

I also started thinking I could probably learn a lot from St. Isidore's reaction to his childlessness, which was vastly different from my own. He started going to daily Mass and decided to take the quite drastic step of living a chaste married life. I don't think God wants that of me (the chaste part at least.. I should go to daily Mass) or for us to give up trying for children, but I'm not even in the same stratosphere as St. Isidore when it comes to our reactions. He embraced God in a radical way, while I am fighting God's will tooth and nail.

So I think I'll start asking St. Isidore for his intercession. When I feel like no one understands, maybe St. Isidore will. His grief moved him to change his life for the better and to focus on his true calling - worshipping God. All I'm doing in my grief is feeling sorry for myself. I guess there's a lot I could learn from this farmer.