Bashert at the Integra Dinner: Hearing Two Women, Hearing God
Tonight I attended the annual Integra Pregnancy Service fund raising dinner. Two women gave testimony about the struggles with deciding how to handle their unplanned pregnancy. As I listened to them a Yiddish word from another world began to echo in my mind. The word was "bashert."
Bashert (pronounced buh-SHARET) is a Yiddish word. In Jewish vernacular it means: "destiny," "fate," "meant to be" or "given." It specifically refers to a divinely destined soulmate or a profoundly "meant to be" occurrence. It represents the idea that God orchestrates crucial life matches and circumstances, though it often requires personal effort to realize.
“For sure” and the ache for certainty:
One woman told her story of discovering she was pregnant and facing the real possibility of abortion. She didn’t sanitize the struggle. She spoke about fear, pressure, and uncertainty. She ached to know “for sure” that her baby was meant to be. Both women yearned to believe the baby growing in them was not just an accident or a mistake.
That little phrase, “for sure,” carried more than logic. It carried the ache for assurance: the desire to know that her pregnancy would somehow be inside God’s purposes and not outside of them.
As I listened, I realized: this is the emotional terrain where "bashert" usually lives. In colloquial Jewish speech, calling something bashert is basically saying, “This is from God,” that the invisible Hand was intimately involved in its coming about. The woman never used that word, but everything in her testimony was circling that same yearning: Is God in this moment, and in this decision, or am I alone with a random event and an impossible choice?
The sense that God is “in” the decision:
We often talk about God’s will as if it were only a plan written in heaven—some hidden blueprint we are supposed to discover. What struck me in this testimony was something different: a sense that God was not just over the situation, but in the moment itself.
She described a growing awareness that God was present in her wrestling, not just in the outcome. “Meant to be” for her did not sound like fatalism—as if she had no real choice—but something deeper: that her choice mattered precisely because God was there, listening, accompanying, and caring about both her and the child.
That, to me, is the heart of bashert at its best: not a denial of human responsibility, but the awesome awareness that my life is taking shape inside a larger, loving Providence. It is the sense that God is not absent while I decide, but mysteriously present in the very act of deciding.
Sonograms and being known in the womb:
I’ve heard more than once that when a mother first sees her unborn child on a sonogram, something shifts. The abstract becomes particular. A “pregnancy” becomes a "child." And with that recognition often comes a powerful sense: this child is meant to be.
That moment of seeing is more than biology. It’s an unveiling. It is as if the curtain lifts and the mother steps into a knowing that, biblically speaking, God has had all along. Reflection on Scripture regularly points to verses that describe God’s knowing and calling of a person even in the womb, emphasizing that the unborn are not anonymous to Him. One of the clearest examples is Jeremiah 1:5:
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
Here, God does the knowing first. Before anyone else sees the child, before any ultrasound, before any mother feels a kick, God says: "I knew you. I formed you. I set you apart." The verb “knew” implies a profound, intimate personal knowledge and intention, not bare awareness.
So when a mother looks at that grainy image on the screen and suddenly realizes, “This is my child; this one is meant to be,” she is, in a small and creaturely way, entering into God’s own prior knowing. Her recognition is catching up to God’s recognition. That is a kind of maternal bashert: the child as given, bestowed, not just statistically possible but personally intended.
Like God, who knows us in the womb:
This is where my observation from the Integra Dinner crystallized.
We, who are made in God’s image, are allowed to share in God’s way of seeing. God sees the hidden person in the womb; we see the fuzzy outline on the screen. God knows the full story from before the first cell divides; we only glimpse the smallest beginning. Yet in that moment, our seeing aligns with His. We begin to know the child as God has always known the child—personally, not abstractly.
So the sonogram becomes a sacrament of sorts. It acts as a visible sign of an inward, divine grace and spiritual reality. It does not create the child’s worth, but it awakens our awareness of it. Seeing one's baby growing in the womb lets us feel that bashert‑ness in our bones.
The primary Hebrew word for womb is rechum (רֶחֶם). The root is racham, which relates to compassion, mercy, and tender love, highlighting the womb as a place of protection. The womb also has the compassion to know when the fetus is not viable. Who are we to decide? Wow!
Holding together destiny and responsibility:
Of course, language like “meant to be” can be dangerous if it slips into fatalism. It can be used to excuse our choices rather than to dignify them. Bashert, at its worst, can sound like: “I had no choice; it was destined.” Some Jewish thinkers and teachers explicitly warn against using bashert that way, insisting that divine providence must not erase human freedom and moral responsibility.
The woman’s testimony at the Integra Dinner refused that shortcut. She did not pretend the decision was automatic. She agonized. She weighed. She feared. And then she chose life. Her sense that the baby was “meant to be” did not obliterate her responsibility; it intensified it. If this child is truly given by God, then my response to that gift is morally and spiritually significant.
That, I think, is where a more mature understanding of bashert belongs: not in cancelling human agency, but in framing it. I am not a puppet. But I am not abandoned, either. My choices are real, and they unfold before a God who knows me, knows this child, and holds both of us in a providence deeper than my understanding.
A word to women and men in this place:
If you find yourself where those Integra testimonies began—staring at a positive test, or a sonogram, or a complicated relationship—and you are asking whether this is “for sure,” whether this is “meant to be,” I want to speak gently to both women and men.
First, you are not crazy for wanting more than biology or statistics. The desire to know whether this child is “meant to be” is really a desire to know whether you are still held in the hands of a God who knows you, who has not lost track of you, who is not indifferent to what you choose.
For women, that may mean hearing that you are not just a “situation” to be managed. You are a person known by God, carrying a person known by God. Your fears, limits, and questions matter to Him as much as the tiny unseen one within you. The God who forms children in the womb also promises to be near to the brokenhearted and to supply wisdom when we lack it.
For men, it means you are not a spectator or a ghost in the story. You, too, are called to look at this life—at mother and child together—with something of God’s own way of seeing. You are invited away from disappearance, blame, or passivity and into a costly, faithful presence that says, “If this child is given, then I will stand here as one given as well—given to protect, provide, and love.”
I won’t tell you, in a neat slogan, “Everything happens for a reason,” because in the middle of crisis, those words can feel cheap. What I will say is this: you are not standing in a godless void. The God who knew Jeremiah in the womb, who knits together every unseen life, is also present—right here, right now—as you wrestle. Your decision is real. And you do not make it alone.
I encourage you to support a woman who is scared and unsure by supporting Integra Pregnancy Services.
