Jonathan Bellamy spoke with Sheridan Voysey about infertility, recovering from broken dreams and reconciling with a God who is sometimes silent but never absent.

Jon: I guess particularly when you see the pain for her with not being able to have a child.

Sheridan: Definitely. As the years went on and we tried all sorts of things to try and rectify the problem of infertility, there was a sense in which I am the cause of this in the end. Right down to my spiritual life, sometimes I actually wondered whether I had enough faith in God to bring a miracle, or if there was some sort of secret sin that was, you know, something that was a blockage that was stopping this from happening, or whether I just wasn't being faithful enough. There was definitely a bit of condemnation there for myself.

Jon: It really hit Merryn much more than that of course. My wife picked up on this phrase once, an infertility doctor said, "You have not seen hell until you've looked into the eyes of a woman who can't have children," which is a powerful, strong statement. As guys we don't necessarily know how to relate to that. Tell us a little bit about Merryn's journey because you share it in the book.

Sheridan: It sometimes caused problems for us actually because we started exploring the idea of doing IVF, in vitro fertilisation. As a person of faith I wanted to really think through the ethics of that, that we weren't in any way taking life, or just using life and throwing life away in the form of embryos that we didn't then implant later on. It took me a long time to work those ethics through. Merryn was a little bit more relaxed about that than I was and so there were times where I would just put it in the "too hard" basket for a period of time. Merryn felt like her whole life was on hold until I made the decision on the ethics. She would come to me and she would actually say, "Look I can't do anything until you've made this decision," and I would say, "Well, look, I can't be pressured into this decision." We understand now the pressure that can come into a couple's life as a result of infertility because of some of these decisions. It was a challenge for Merryn and it was a big challenge for her identity. If it comes to the fact that you can't have a child and you've really wanted one, there is an identity there. My wife wanted to be a mum, that's an identity statement and it was proving very difficult to become a mum.

Jon: This journey was ten years. Would you say that the sorts of questions that came up for you during that time were valuable questions for you and Merryn and for you as a couple?

Sheridan: They are very valuable questions, especially later on when we decided to move over here to the UK. I had to leave some significant things that were happening for me over in Australia. I had to really wrestle with that. My wife couldn't become a mum and that's the identity that she was struggling with. For me, I had another dream, so the book that I have written, the story in Resurrection Year, really tells the story of two ten-year dreams. One is the ten-year dream to have a family that didn't come to fruition. The other is a ten-year dream to have a particular kind of career, a radio career. That did come to fruition! But then I had to let it go because of the first dream, so that Merryn could start again. That's when I left all the success behind. That's when I left a significant radio show with quite a lot of listeners. I left book contracts and speaking engagements to come over to the UK where nobody knew me and nobody was interested in having me speak at a conference. Publishers were saying, "Well, nice book idea but, Sheridan, who are you?" That's when the identity thing really hit me. I think that was very valuable because I then had to say, "Who am I really, at my very core?" As a person of Christian faith you have to come back to that idea that you are a child of God and no matter what happens - success, failure, illness - that will never be taken away. It can take a little while, though, to come to a position where you really feel that emotionally and you are fulfilled within that emotionally and I think that takes time. That's why I think it actually is a very important question to work through.

Jon: For yourself being willing to lay down a very successful radio career with thousands of listeners to your show and for Merryn to take a step to say, "Ok, we let go looking for having a child", those are big cut-off points, aren't they? You could say, from a Christian point of view, it was a big step of faith, or you can feel you just felt forced into it and you didn't have any choice. How would you identify that moment for both of you? What was the decision in your heart?

Sheridan: Ten years trying to start a family included pretty much everything that you could think of to start a family, apart from surrogacy or donor sperm. We tried numerous rounds of IVF. We went through a year's preparation and then waited for two years to get the phone call from the adoption agency saying that your child is ready to be collected. We tried special diets. We had numerous healing prayer meetings held for us. You name it, we tried it!

The turning point came towards the end of 2010 when we had decided to try IVF for one more time, which actually turned out to be about two or three different rounds. Each round, if it's successful, you get a certain amount of successfully fertilised embryos and those embryos are implanted into the woman and you pray that one of those embryos is able to take and then grow into a baby. We were going through that towards the end of 2010 and Merryn and I had a little conversation and said, "Look, next year we're going to be turning 39, we're going to be approaching the age of 40 and statistically it just becomes harder and harder and harder from that point on to fall pregnant, whether it's with IVF or not and it's been ten years. I wonder whether we're going to need to call it a day?" So we decided that that would be the case and so this next round of IVF would be the final one. We got a phone call about a week or so before Christmas of 2010 and it's from Emily at the IVF clinic and she said, "Hi Merryn, it's Emily, I've got the results for the test," and she sounded quite happy and she said, "It's all looking good" and Merryn said, "What do you mean good, do you mean "good" good?" and she said, "It's all looking good." You can imagine the jubilation in our household as a result of that. Ten years of prayers, of trying everything to start a family and it looked like we were pregnant. We jumped in the car, went to Brisbane where our family was all congregated for Christmas - we lived in Sydney by this stage - and the jubilation in the households, both families, was really, really quite huge. Then we got a second phone call on Christmas Eve of 2010, that was Emily again and Emily said, "I'm so sorry, but we misread the signs, even the doctors were fooled." I'll never forget, Jon, that's when Merryn put the phone down and she went into our room and she curled up on the bed in the foetal position and that's really how that ten years came to an end.

A little while before that, Adrian Plass, a very well-known British poet, author and humorist, he and I had been talking off-air after I'd interviewed him on my radio show and he asked me how I was. Adrian's a very caring fellow as you probably know and I just started sharing some of this stuff with him - this is before those phone calls; this is about November of 2010 - and I said, "You know what, I don't know what's going to happen, but I know that next year it's got to be a better year than this year has been." And Adrian said this to me, "In the Christian life, new life follows the death of something, just like Jesus' resurrection follows his crucifixion. Wouldn't it be wonderful if after the death that you've had and in the silence of the Easter Saturday, if you like, wouldn't it be wonderful if next year was your resurrection year?" Do you know what, he hadn't even thought through that phrase in terms of anything specific, other than just this phrase, and there's something about that phrase that just caught with me and I went home to Merryn and I said, "Adrian said, wouldn't it be great if we had a resurrection year," and she burst into tears and these were tears of joy. She said, "That's exactly what I want; if we don't have a child I want a resurrection year, I want to start again." So we made the decision from that point on that 2011 would be a different year. That was going to be a very difficult year for me, but it was going to be the resurrection year's beginning.

Jon: Tell us a little bit about that resurrection year, because you did quite a bit of travelling in Europe. What would you identify was resurrecting in that process?

Sheridan: Merryn had wanted to be a mum and the only other thing that she ever wanted to be, apart from a mum, was just to have an opportunity to live and work overseas. That was really what she wanted and what she in many ways needed. So when the phone call on Christmas Eve came, it was decided, ok, we are going to start the process of looking to move overseas. Initially we were thinking about Switzerland, but that was proving to be very difficult to get a visa to go into and, long story short, Merryn was later offered an opportunity at Oxford University, to go and work there. It was a pretty good gig to get, so we took that opportunity and on the way over we stopped in Italy and we just had a bit of a holiday. We hadn't had a holiday for a while because life had been very busy in Sydney and we were able to see beauty again. You see, when you're going through a broken dream, or you're pursuing a dream with all of your heart, your life can start to revolve around the same four walls in many ways. For somebody who has got a dream to see their little child healed of cancer, their life very quickly revolves around a cancer ward, a little room in a hospital. It's the same thing for anybody who is suffering; somebody, maybe a loved one or a family member or a best friend who's going through some sort of illness, your life starts to revolve around the same four walls. If you're single and you want to be married, sometimes your life revolves around the - quote unquote - four walls of a singles site and you are just hoping that your dream is going to be fulfilled there somehow.

The thing that starting again did for us - and Italy was a part of that - is that it opened our eyes back to the world again. We were no longer confined to those same four walls. We could look broader than that and be able to see the big wide world that God actually has out there for us. We were able to see beauty again and Italy has so much natural beauty. We were able to rest and we needed rest. We were able to see art, created beauty, which all, for me, goes back to the character of God that humans were created into. You see a beautiful piece of work and somehow that reflects the nature of God, because we operate as creative people reflecting the creativity of God. We were able to see things like that.

We stopped in a very well-known retreat centre called L'Abri in Switzerland, which some of our listeners will know, started by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1950s. He basically just opened up his lounge room to students from around the world who wanted to talk about life and faith and philosophy and all sorts of things. It still continues to this day. We went there to wrestle with the big questions about God. Why had God said no to us? Why had God remained silent to us? We had been in prayer meetings where people would share very specific things that they thought God had laid on their heart, which turned out to be uncannily correct, about issues that they never knew about! Then when it came to specifically asking God about this area of family - and we would have been happy with a no at one stage by the way - if God had actually said, "No this is not for you, you are not going to have a family, you are not going to have a child, move on," that would have been hard, but at least we could have stopped trying; we could have stopped the dreaming process, the raised hopes and the dashed hopes, the horrible pattern that you go through for years. We could have then grieved and moved on! But we didn't even get a no! At one stage Merryn said God feels like an old friend who no longer returns my phone calls and so she had to really wrestle with God and, I guess, restore her relationship with God. So that's what that trip over here started to do for us. It opened us up to beauty, opened us up to play, to rest and help us wrestle with the big questions about whether God is good or not.