INTRODUCTION

Sometimes things don’t turn out like we expect them to, but that does not mean that God is not involved in the situation. Often, it is those very times when God is trying to be the closest to you that he can be.

SENT FROM GOD PART III

I feel the need to begin this by saying that I was not going to write this post. The reason is that writing this brings back memories that are not pleasant. However, God is a big God and did something amazing through this pain and therefore I knew I had to share it. That said, here we go.

The fall of 1998 found me in my senior year at college. It was a tough time as my wife and I were doing our best to give a home to our children as I went to school and my wife worked. She worked at UPS at night loading trucks for hauling to other UPS stations. The reason she worked this job was because it was the only one that she could get medical insurance that we would need for our children. We didn’t qualify for any social services for really bizarre reasons that looking back I believe was the enemy because this job often caused strife in our marriage as my wife worked really hard to provide. This was coupled with the fact that we barely saw each other due to our schedules. But we survived this time in our lives.

Early September, we discovered that my wife was pregnant again. This was exciting and scary all at the same time. The reason was because things were so much of a struggle with just two children, we were not sure how we could add another child. But we trusted on God and rejoiced that my wife was pregnant.

Things had been going well through the first trimester until my wife noticed some bleeding at about ten weeks pregnant. Immediately we went to her doctor to see what was happening. The doctor explained that while blood in not a good sign, we will not speak anything but life over the child because our doctor was a Christian. However, for me, it seemed as if the world had stopped spinning and everything was holding its breath to wait and see what the outcome would be. I did my best to pray and speak life, but I more often found myself begging God that our child be alright.

Test after test was run and my wife’s condition was monitored. Things were not getting better but going from bad to worse. Our doctor keep trying to keep things positive with us, but it was getting increasingly difficult as time went on. We had the pastor of our church pray for us. We had elders pray. We had everyone we knew and could get in contact with praying that God would heal our child.

Early November, this was taking it’s effect on our other two children. They had been arguing over whether they wanted a brother or sister. Our oldest child wanted a baby brother because she had a baby sister. Our youngest child at the time wanted a sister because she didn’t have a baby sister. One night while we were praying and doing what we knew to do, we witnessed the most heart wrenching event. Our oldest child had gone and sat down at her little table and said a prayer to God that moved everyone in the house to tears. She said, “Dear God, it is alright, Abby can have a baby sister. Just don’t take the baby.” My wife and I lost it right there.

The next morning, we waited in our doctor’s office for the latest round of results. We knew things did not look good, but we had prayed and prayed. I felt like I had worn tear tracks down my face as many nights I fell asleep crying in prayer over my wife and for our unborn child. Even before the doctor spoke, we knew what the answer was. We had lost the baby and the baby was now in God’s hands. As hard as this was to take, we did our best to hold it together. We explained it to our two little girls who, in a twist that only God could orchestra, helped to minister to us. They were certain their baby brother or sister was in heaven and that we would see him or her one day and they were right.

When this happened, I felt inside me a well spring of anger and hate most of which was directed at my wife. I had actually believed for a time that it was all her fault and even hated her for a short time. I found myself progressing down a very dark path that would have resulted in the end of our marriage and for a time I was alright with that. The real problem was that I was mad at God. However, I could not bring myself to hate him because of his Spirit that is within. So, I took this all out on my wife and it is a testimony to God that she suffered through that to remain married to me.

Finally, an elder in the church helped to bring me back around and made me see the light by loving on me and thank God in time to save and not destroy my marriage. I repented to God and asked my wife for forgiveness. To my surprised, she asked me for forgiveness for having many of the same feelings. We cried that day, but for the first time in a while, we cried for joy for God had begun to restore our marriage.

Out of the acceptance of our third child seeing God face to face before we did, God brought my wife and together like we had never been before. Our marriage is stronger then ever and we know that there is a child that is up in heaven playing with my mom and just waiting for us to come and hug and love on him or her.

SCRIPTURE

The devil wanted the loss of our third child to steal our joy, destroy our hope and kill our marriage, but God had a different plan. And in God’s plan, we still lost a child to heaven and miss that child, but our marriage is stronger then ever and we have another thing to look forward to heaven for.

CONCLUSION

The enemy will do whatever he can to steal, kill and destroy whatever he can in your life, but it does not have to be that way. We can take authority over him and rebuke him as the scriptures declare and see him flee from us.

Until Next Time,

I want to thank the great guys over at My Life Ministries (http://mylifeministries.org/) for encouraging me and hosting this blog. If you haven’t done so yet, hop over to http://mylifeministries.org/ and take a look around. Join the forums and become part of the family.

Also, if you have a testimony, email it to me at testify {at} fireknights {dot} net. I would love to hear it and I may just post it here on the blog.

INTRODUCTION

God works in wonderful and exciting ways. One of those ways is the joy of having children. For my wife and I, we were fortunate to have had one child (read about that Sent From God Part I) and then we were told we could not have more, which was until God moved.

SENT FROM GOD PART II

After we had our first child, the doctor’s hope that my wife’s body would realign and sort of fix itself did not happen. The doctor told us that we would have a great ordeal getting pregnant again (trying fertility drugs and charting temperatures, etc). Because of this, we decided that we would be happy with the one child that God had blessed us with even though our heart was to have more.

Labor day weekend in 1995, we were over a friend’s house celebrating the holiday. While we were there, my wife spent a bunch of time in the bathroom (the first trimester for my wife is tough as she gets all-day sickness). Our friends conjectured that my wife was acting pregnant. They, of course, knew what the doctor had told us and that we were not even trying, but decided almost as a ruse to get a pregnancy test and at least rule out pregnancy as a reason she was sick. You can imagine our surprise when the test came back stating that my wife was pregnant.

Since we had a great doctor for my wife who delivered our first child, we returned to him when the holiday was over to check on our results of the home test. To that date, a home test had not been wrong, but it was definitely not what we were expecting to discover. It was what we wanted, but not what we were expecting given what we had been told. The doctor confirmed that my wife was indeed pregnant which was a pleasant shock even to our doctor. He really was a cool doctor.

Like the first, this pregnancy progressed really well and before long we were reaching the end. This time, as my wife was not dilating early, we were able to attend the full lamas class and learn how to have a baby, even though this was our second child.

Well, our due date came and went and my wife was a bit upset. Remember that our first child was three weeks early and this one was one day late and she was disappointed. Fortunately, I had been through having a pregnant wife and knew to just agree and nod.

On April 24th, my wife had a sonogram to determine the size of the baby. The doctor had informed my wife that usually the second child is smaller since our first was eight pounds. However, the sonogram had estimated the baby to be about nine and a half pounds with a one pound degree of accuracy. My wife took this information and yelled back at the doctor, “You LIED to me.” The doctor, experienced at handling pregnant women, just smiled.

On April 25th, the doctor had us walking to kick start the contractions and it was working my wife was indeed having contractions. We were walking in the local mall because it was climate controlled. I, under the doctor’s instructions, was forcing my wife to continue to walk even though she was in some pain. I can’t tell you what the looks I was getting was like as I forced this pregnant woman in pain continue to walk. Eventually, we got our contractions about five minutes apart and went to the hospital. However, once we arrived the contractions stopped.

Having experienced almost completely natural childbirth for the first child, we decided that we would receive the epidural.

After the epidural was in, my wife pulled a transition from Mr. Hyde back to Dr. Jekyll. She was able to sit up, carry intelligent conversations and just enjoy everyone pampering her. This is one of the reasons that we now highly recommend the epidural to all of our friends whether they are having a baby or not.

Finally, the time had come. The doctor had checked my wife and she was ready to begin pushing to get the baby out. Typically this is a thirty minute plus event where the baby is pushed out the birth canal and having its first moments of life outside the womb. In my wife’s case, the doctor stepped out as the nurse and I instructed my wife to begin. With almost a screech of horror, the nurse shouted to my wife to stop and hollered for the doctor to return. The baby was crowning, a term which means that the head of the baby was at the end of the birth canal and showing. From this point, birth is moments away. The doctor rushed back in and proceeded with birthing the baby.

The baby was birthed very easily especially when compared to our first child. As an experienced new father, I had a much more active role in the delivery room. I think this was due in part to having not fainted or had issue with watching our first child born and because we had a great doctor. I greatly enjoyed being more involved in the birthing process, which included the cutting of the cord.

On April 25th, God provided us with our second child and we praise him every day for this blessing.

SCRIPTURE

We are so fortunate and bless to have any children and we thank God for that everyday.

CONCLUSION

God is awesome. Creation of life in a woman’s womb is amazing and a total blessing from God. We are truly thankful to God for giving us a second child.

Until Next Time,

I want to thank the great guys over at My Life Ministries (http://mylifeministries.org/) for encouraging me and hosting this blog. If you haven’t done so yet, hop over to http://mylifeministries.org/ and take a look around. Join the forums and become part of the family.

Also, if you have a testimony, email it to me at testify {at} fireknights {dot} net. I would love to hear it and I may just post it here on the blog.

INTRODUCTION

God works in wonderful and exciting ways. One of those ways is the joy of having children. For my wife and I, this was one area that had brought us discouragement until God moved in our situation.

SENT FROM GOD PART I

My wife and I met on a college campus in a computer class that at the time my wife had no idea why her adviser had made her take. Of course, today we can look back and see the hand of God to bring us together. Once she asked me out and we began dating, we knew that we were the one for each other. We began to plan and talk about the future and the way our family would grow. We talked about having kids and how many we would have and even speculated as to what sex each of the children would be. We were as happy as two young children in love could be.

Our happiness began to fade in late 1992 when my wife was diagnosed with PolyCystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), which is a hormonal disorder that affects less the seven percent of all women and is the leading cause of infertility (PCOS Wikipedia Entry). People with PCOS usually don’t have children and if they do, they usually only have one because of the many issues related with PCOS and the reproductive systems. We were young and had been married just over a year and had been walking with Christ for about four months when this discovery occurred. And I think that actually helped us rather then hurt us because to be honest we were too young and na?ve to understand the full gravity of this situation. We just continued with our plans for a future as if there was nothing wrong with my wife.

Our doctor decided the best course of action for us was to actually attempt to get pregnant because in his many years he had seen the wonder of the women’s body correct many problems through having a child and hoped this would be the case with us. As with many PCOS sufferers, my wife had a severe lack of ovulation and that means a severe lack of chances to get pregnant. However, we began with optimism that some how God would give us our hearts desire and provide for us a child. That was the end of 1992.

Throughout most of 1993, we continued to work at trying to get pregnant. We had tried several methods including fertility drugs with no success. Our doctor was informing us that we were running out of options due largely in part to my wife’s lack of ovulation response from our previous attempts. By December 1993, our doctor was on his last concept for helping us get pregnant. If this had failed, then his suggestion was adoption which we were beginning to serious consider.

Before I go on, you need to understand that working with infertility is a very frustrating situation. You are constantly under a microscope and despite everyone’s attempts to make you not feel bad because you can’t get pregnant, you still feel like a strange freak of nature. By the end of a year of trying to get pregnant, we had almost lost hope and were tired of all the procedures. As disheartening as it was that we might not be able to have children, we had gotten to the end of our own rope with the subject and were looking forward to having an end even if it was not the one we wanted.

Add to this struggle the fact that one of the elders in our church was a doctor. In fact, the husband was a family doctor and the wife was a pediatrician and they had been trying for years to have children (like twelve years) and had no success. Today they have three children, but at the time, they were more a picture of the direction we were heading then a testimony to the power and love of God.

Desperate to even understand why this was happen to us, we turned to God. We were very young in the Lord, but we got together as a couple and prayed to God that if this was his will we would accept it, but that we wanted to have children. We prayed about the desire that burned in our hearts to have children and how we knew that God himself had placed that desire there. We prayed that God move on our behalf.

December 23, 1993, my wife and I were making one of our many appointments with the doctor. We had our temperature chart in hand, and to be honest, we dragged ourselves in exhausted at everything we were doing and at this point we were just looking for ovulation not pregnancy. The doctor had taken the chart and all the information from the pre-visit tests that the office would run and had entered our room and the following conversation took place.

“Well, it is iffy,” declared the doctor.

“Ok,” I replied as we had hoped that the spike in temperature was indeed an ovulation, but it was hard to tell. “What do we do now?”

“We take a blood test.”

“You mean we can tell from a blood test,” I almost shouted at the doctor. After all, why wake every morning at the same time to take my wife’s temperature if we could discover that she was ovulating by a blood test.

“It is the best way to know for sure,” replied the doctor a little taken back by my response.

“If after all this you could tell from a blood test then why were we taking her temperature?” I protested completely upset that they would put my wife through this ordeal.

“What are you talking about?!?” Loudly questioned the doctor.

“Her ovulating,” I declare with authority and anger concerning my wife.

The doctor smiled while still replying loudly, “I’m checking to see if she is pregnant!!”

Well, you could have heard a pin drop at that moment as I stood there mouth hanging wide and scraping the floor. You see we had gotten so caught up in just watching her temperature and seeing if she ovulated that I had completely disconnected from the thought of her getting pregnant. After all, it was a near impossible task and we needed to take step one first, but God worked a miracle and my wife got pregnant with PCOS. We were happy and excited.

The pregnancy progressed well and before we knew it, we were approaching our due date. At six weeks out, we discovered at one of the almost daily doctor’s visits that my wife started dilating.

My wife’s water had not broken and she had not had a contraction, but she dilated up to two centimeters. Being six weeks out, there were many potential complications to our child being born at this time and therefore the doctor placed my wife on bed rest. She was not to move except to go to the bathroom. Well, you can imagine what it must be like telling a pregnant woman who can’t get comfortable or sit still to begin with that she needs to be on constant bed rest. It was an uphill battle, but my wife, the trooper that she is, did very well.

August 9th, 1994, we returned to the doctor’s office after two weeks of bed rest and about four weeks until our due date. The doctor discovered that my wife was now six centimeters dilated and performed a sonogram finding that the baby was face up. This was not a major problem, but was something that he would need to address when the baby was born. He then told us to go and walk and see what we could get started.

So, we walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and, well you get the picture. Eventually, we went home and, remember we just walked, my wife after having two weeks of bed rest had energy to spare. She set up the entire baby’s room and cleaned the house. She later said that she knew the baby was coming and instinctively had energy to get all these things done.

The doctor told us to continue to walk. Eventually, we were admitted to the hospital. The doctor broke the water and we were in for the long haul. The doctor was augmenting (with pitocin) to make the contractions come faster.

Several hours later, my wife was pushing with all her might. The doctor was becoming concerned because she had been pushing for over ninety minutes and the baby could be having issues. However, the head began to pop out and then from my standpoint everything went into slow motion. The doctor looked at the nurse who immediately shoved me out of the way while leaping up on to the delivery bed. When she straddled my wife, she began to push down on her stomach. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I knew well enough and had enough trust in the doctor to stand back and watch. Several minutes later, our daughter was born.

What had happened was that in the twenty four hours since the sonogram, our child decided that she needed to turn and got half way. You see a woman’s pelvic bone is designed to stretch and move left to right, but not forward or backward (up or down when laying on a bed). Since our child was face up the day before and she only made it half way around, her shoulder was caught on my wife’s pelvic bone creating a potentially dangerous situation for both. Thank God that the doctor and nurses reacted quick enough with the help of God to birth our daughter without complications to either the mother or the baby.

The doctor and I looked at each other and then my daughter and then back to each other. My wife was asking what was wrong, and there was nothing it was just that both of us were shocked and happy that it was a girl. After a moment, the doctor finally turned to my wife and told her that she had a girl. They wrapped my daughter and presented her to my wife. A moment that will surely never be forgotten.

On August 10th, 1994, God provided us with a child and we praise him every day for this blessing.

SCRIPTURES

We delighted ourselves in the Lord and he gave us a daughter when all the odds were stacked against us. Trust in him and give him your life and he will bless you beyond what you can think or imagine.

CONCLUSION

God is truly awesome to create life in a woman’s womb and truly awesome to bless us with the joys of parenthood. We are truly thankful to God for giving us a child.

Until Next Time,

I want to thank the great guys over at My Life Ministries (http://mylifeministries.org/) for encouraging me and hosting this blog. If you haven’t done so yet, hop over to http://mylifeministries.org/ and take a look around. Join the forums and become part of the family.

Also, if you have a testimony, email it to me at testify {at} fireknights {dot} net. I would love to hear it and I may just post it here on the blog.