I have a photo from when I was 3 years old, on a beach somewhere in Connecticut, wearing a striped bathing suit. Standing next to me is my best friend, Ami, only 15 days younger than me. We’re holding shovels and sand pails. In the photo, we’re both happy. To look at it, you’d never know that Ami spent much of our childhood either in the hospital or receiving medical treatments at home. You wouldn’t know that she missed many, many days of high school. That we took a road trip in our senior year and she mostly stayed in the back of the station wagon, lying in a nest of pillows, working hard to breathe.

Ami died when we were 21.

She had cystic fibrosis, a genetic condition with better treatments these days and also one that can now be screened in embryos. Ami’s parents were believers, and they received her as a gift and her diagnosis as a hard providence from the hand of a good God. Increasingly, however, parents have the option of refusing such gifts and the lessons of trust in suffering that they bring.

As Rachel Roth Aldhizer writes in her recent article about the embryo-screening company, Orchid:

What companies like Orchid are really selling to parents is the illusion of control repackaged as responsibility. But parenting is fundamentally a project that upends control. This is a feature, not a bug, of forming families. Companies like Orchid prey on real fears: that welcoming children will also, by turn, lead to pain and suffering.

In the future, it may be rare for a girl to spend her childhood visiting her best friend in the hospital, pausing their games of princess dress-up for breathing treatments. If you could engineer a girlhood friendship, you’d be unlikely to design that one; companies like Orchid certainly won’t. But friendship (and parenting) is never ours to control, and idyllic moments together on the beach are no more valuable than ones in the pediatric ER. Ultimately, Ami taught me that the good life is the one the Lord gives—because in it, we learn to trust him.