I was asked to speak at church last week in a series called "My Story, His Story" sharing how God has come in to my life story. There will be an audio version at some point, until then, here is the text I prepared and spoke from....
Zack told me that I was finishing
out this series and, since Mother’s Day is the 3rd highest day for
church attendance each year, to not “blow it”. I do appreciate the faith that
he has put in me for this morning, hopefully I can live up to that, but I am
the mother of 4 kids ages 5 and under and time to prepare was hard to come by! I
do feel like I am coming in with an advantage of having heard the amazing
stories of others for the last few weeks.
As each person has started to speak they said they prayed and asked
their spouse to pray when Zack asked them to speak. I am just going to confess
that I didn’t do that! I just said YES! Then I felt really guilty as I sat there the last few weeks, did I just fail the
first test of speaking at church? But then I thought really I have been asking
God for the opportunity to share my story for several years, because even as I
was going through these struggles, I wanted God to use them to help others. So
here I am.
Mother’s Day
And its Mother’s Day, of all days,
to share my story. Just a couple warnings. One, I had a baby a little over a
month ago and my emotions are a little close to the surface this morning so I
may cry, and two, this isn’t your typical happy Mother’s Day story. Actually, I
have learned over the last several years that for many many people, in many
different walks of life, that Mother’s Day isn’t nearly as happy as Hallmark
would like us to believe.
In my case, it was the path to
motherhood itself that would lead me through some of the darkest days of my
life, where I was journeying right through the valley of the shadow of death
and clinging to the Lord when I couldn’t see the road in front of me. I learned
a lot about myself and the nature of God as I walked.
A journey of faith
Long before I was thinking
seriously about motherhood, God had already started me on a journey that would
challenge me and build up my faith, which looking back I can see I really
needed to be able to get through the last several years. Ralph Waldo Emerson
once said “all I have seen teaches me to
trust the creator for all I have not seen”. We can actually church up
that Emerson quote quite a bit with Hebrews 11:1 which says “Now faith is the
assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”. God uses
experiences in our lives to build up our faith and trust in him. So I will start with a journey of faith.
Spokane to Washington, DC
This journey starts just over the
mountains in Spokane, where I grew up, went to elementary, middle school, high
school, and college. At Eastern Washington University, I studied economics as a
social science, which is different (code for “not as useful”) than a business
economics degree. My dad, being very wise, questioned what I would do with this
degree. Well, graduate school, of course! And then I would probably teach.
During my senior year of college I was offered a full scholarship to WSU. I
took a class on leadership where we had to write about where we wanted to be in
10 years. When I wrote that paper, I could see myself living and working in
Washington, DC, a city I had loved since I was 14 and had visited with my
family. I also had loved local politics for years, had interned for a
Congressman, and wanted to experience life “inside the beltway”. Writing that paper, made me realize I didn’t
want to wait 10 years and a graduate degree to live that life, with God’s help
and faith, I realized there was a little voice in my heart saying I really
didn’t want to go to school anymore right then and I was to go get a job in
Washington, DC. That took a lot of faith to put in to words and share with
others. It was crazy for a girl with a full scholarship to a graduate program
to want to try for a job on the other side of the country. But I wasn’t just
crazy, I had faith that God was in this plan….so I prayed about what to do and
came back with the idea that I shouldn’t wait until I had a job, I should just
move there anyway because it would be easier to look for a job in person! I
should add here that my parents had moved to Florida by this time and my back
up plan was just to head south to their door step if this plan didn’t work out.
So I packed up my car, my cat, and a whole lot of courage and set out on a very
long drive. God was faithful. My phone rang as I was driving through Indiana on
a Thursday. It was someone from the United States Census Bureau calling to set
up a phone interview for Monday. I said “actually I can be there in person,
what’s the address?” I was hired 2 weeks later. It was a crazy plan, far from
the comfort and safety of home but it was where God asked me to go and my faith
grew watching His plan to give me the desires of my heart unfold.
Back to Graduate School
As I left Spokane and school
behind, I promised myself, though, that I would only work for 3 years and then
I would for sure go to graduate school. Living just inside the beltway I poured
myself in to my job, which I loved. It was lots of numbers, a surprising amount
of travel, and I was on the track to be a manager…but wait, I was supposed to
go back to school and I told everyone 3 years was my limit. At year 2 I started to work on my plan to go
back to school, but I wasn’t all that excited about it. I wanted to stay and
work. Work was fun. Work paid money! But I felt again that push that said “go,
do this new uncomfortable thing and see what will happen”. Well, this time I
had scholarships to choose from so I picked the one closest to my parents, and
started graduate school at the University of Florida. I was back on track to
that graduate degree.
Except that I HATED school. It was
awful. I was sure I was in the very wrong place. Surely I must have misheard
God because my life had pretty much taken what I thought was a VERY wrong turn.
So much so that I left the University of Florida after one semester. I made
plans to return to Virginia and try a different school and if that didn’t work,
I was sure my job would be waiting at the Census Bureau.
I knew my job would be waiting
because it had actually kind of stayed with me. When I left the Census Bureau
they had a project they were willing to contract out. I was able to work part
time as a contractor while I was in graduate school. This was a huge provision
from God when school didn’t work out AND over the next several years as I would
continue to do contract work for the government which would support my family,
put my husband through college, and allow me to even have an employee for a few
years.
Getting Married
Life isn’t always a struggle of
faith, though, sometimes you pray and have a desire and it happens faster than
you could even imagine…faster than maybe even your parents think is a good
idea! And that is how I met my husband!!! The University of Florida is in a
smallish college town in the middle of pretty much swamp. If you are not in
school, there isn’t much to do. And I was not in school and waiting for my
lease to be up, so it seemed like a good time to try online dating. In January
of 2008, I saw the profile of a very good looking pilot and, as I would find
out as we emailed, talked, and met over the coming weeks he was also smart,
funny, and a man of God. It took me only weeks to tell my parents that this was
the man I was going to marry….We started out with a long distance relationship
of 200 miles. We would do a LOT of driving on the weekends. One very late night
I was driving the two hours home and a panther ran in front of my car, that
will tend to scare a person in the dark!! I swerved and rolled my car. I had a
lot of angels that night because I was able to crawl out of the car mostly
unharmed. It seemed like this was sign that long distance wasn’t going to be a
good idea. We knew God was the center of our relationship and we were meant to
be married so to keep everyone alive, after dating for 3 months, we were married
under a live oak tree outside the county clerks office (this is a fancy way to
say “we eloped”) . God had very quickly answered my prayers for a husband and
was showing me why I had felt that I needed to leave DC the year before…it
wasn’t for school, it was to be within the 200 mile search radius of the man he
had picked out for me, it was certainly a showing of following in faith to come
to the things “not yet seen”, really, at the time I had left DC, I wasn’t even
thinking of meeting my husband in Florida. God is just that good!
Wanting kids
We still had a wedding with family
and friends on the beach, but since we had already done the official part, my
dad could do the ceremony. It was 9
years ago last week that Mark and I stood
on a sunny beach and vowed again to love each other through all times.
We knew we wanted to have children right away, 4 of them. Mark was 32, I was 25 and we were ready to
jump right in to starting our family. I had some idea that getting pregnant
might not be super easy for me since I was diagnosed with endometriosis at age
19 so when a few months went by we were already checking in with a doctor.
Infertility treatments
For the next couple years we would
pursue infertility treatments that were progressively more aggressive. At
first, it was take some oral medications at certain times of the month. Then we
moved on to doing nightly shots, Mark worked out a system where he would get
the shots ready, hand me a cookie, and then give me the shot while I was
distracted. All of the treatments came invasive testing every few days or even
sometimes every day. We lived 2 hours from our infertility clinic, so I would
make the 4+hour trip many times in a week. I also had surgery twice to remove
endometriosis and ovarian cysts. I was also diagnosed with polycystic ovarian
syndrome during this time. It was taking a whole team of doctors, a LOT of
money, and so much patience with trial and error treatments to get me pregnant.
First miscarriage
But after a couple years, I finally
did get pregnant and we were so excited. For a short time, and then we learned
I would miscarry this baby we had prayed and worked so hard for. We were
devastated. I was sad. I felt let down by God. But we kept going because one
miscarriage isn’t that uncommon and we still really wanted a baby and we knew
that God was faithful. I had just spent the last 4 years on a pretty big cross
country journey teaching me quite a lot about how faithful God will be and I
would need all that faith. At this point we were praying for a baby however God
might provide one (Mark assured me that stealing wasn’t a God answer).
Second miscarriage
Another year went by and I got
pregnant again. And again we were excited, a little more cautious, but it was
hard to not be excited. This time I had gotten pregnant and we were not even
doing infertility treatments. Surely this would be the one. Until I woke up
bleeding on the 4th of July. It was a quiet ride to the hospital,
where thankfully my parents met us, and we learned I was miscarrying again. Two
weeks later, my grandfather died. Two weeks after that I found out my current
work contract that was supporting our family, would be cut to a third of its
size. I was diagnosed with depression at this time, but a large part of my
feelings was anger. I was just flat mad
and mostly at God because as I asked “why” over and over and over, I felt like
all I was hearing was silence. Which was
conflicting because I also still had this faith in God that said God is good
and God is faithful to us.
Emotions
One day I came up with this image…a
child sitting in her father’s lap screaming and beating against his chest with
her fists and her father’s arms wrapped around her. That child was so mad at
her father that she wanted to hit him. BUT she also knew her father loved her
so much that she knew the safest and best place to be was in her father’s arms.
That was the day I started to realize that God created emotions and God meets
us in our emotions. We don’t have to have only the “good” emotions with God, we
can share all our emotions and He can take it.
Adoption
Well, it was after that miscarriage
and a lot of testing that we learned I had a chromosome mix up that causes
repeated miscarriages. And we had to grieve all over again and struggle again
with God. I had wanted babies since I was little girl, this was a good desire,
it is a Biblical desire, and yet, in my mind, God wasn’t answering. But we had
asked him to lead our journey and we just wanted a baby however God would
provide one and at this point our journey started taking us towards adoption.
In adoption, God gave us an unusual charge…to adopted a child of a specific
race and gender. This is unusual because when you are in the process of
adopting through the U.S. private adoption system you are told to be as open as
possible to race and so that more birth mother’s would see our profile. I was
frustrated that God seemed to be telling us otherwise. But God met me in my
frustration and said “Be still for I am God”. Over and over I heard that in my
head even as it made no sense to be restrictive. Well, we were approved to
adopt on November 22nd and Isaac was born on February 22nd…we
have about the fastest adoption of anyone we have met! God asked us to be
faithful and was he ever faithful in return!! We finally had our baby, the
perfect baby meant for us. One more confirmation of that? The miscarriage I had
the year before? Isaac was born on my due date. God is good all the time.
There are lots of emotions in
adoption. God has sat with me in those emotions, too, and I pray that Isaac’s
birth mother knows today that God is with her as well. I think my favorite
quote to sum up the emotions of adoption is this “A child born to another woman
calls me mommy. The magnitude of that tragedy and the depth of that privilege
is not lost on me”. Even 5 years later, I am overwhelmed with emotions as I
watch Isaac play at times and it is all I can do to cry out to God for his
amazing goodness in adoption. As a side note on adoption, adoptive parents get
a very unique opportunity to understand the adoption of each of us in to God’s
family in a way that I truly believe can only be comprehended when you are told
by a judge that this child is now and forever yours, talk about emotions that
day!!
But the journey didn’t end there. I
would go on to get pregnant again. And miscarry again. It was a little
different because I had a baby to love and snuggle as I cried. But I was still
sad and God still sat with me as I cried because I wanted this baby, too.
Oklahoma City
At this point in the story, we took
another turn. Mark was finishing his engineering degree and looking for a job.
He told me about one in Oklahoma City and I said, “sure, go for it, you don’t
have to take it if they offer it to you, it will be good practice, but it isn’t
like we are going to just move from Florida to Oklahoma”. I think God laughed
right then. Mark ended up with 2 job offers. One in Oklahoma City and one in
Wichita, KS. There is nothing that makes Oklahoma City seem quite so appealing
as being told your other option is Wichita. But we decided to test God and make
sure this Oklahoma thing was really from him. Mark asked for a signing bonus to
help pay for our move, we were told they would probably say no…and they said
yes. Ok, God, thanks for the confirmation, I think. Two months later, Mark
finished school and we were moving to Oklahoma and Mark would begin working for
the Boeing Company. It was hard to leave my parents, and take their only
grandchild that they had also hoped and prayed for, and move halfway back
across the country. But again, God asked us to trust and be faithful and His
plan would be good.
Joel
When Isaac was a year old, I got
pregnant yet again (for the 4th time in 4 years) but this time would
be different. We prayed and hoped just as much as every other time. We had our
brand new small group in Oklahoma literally stand around us in a circle and
pray for this growing baby to be healthy. God said yes this time and we would
see a flickering heartbeat on an ultrasound and months later bring home Joel.
Miscarriages again
After Joel was born I miscarried
three more time. Each one brought a time of mourning, of questioning, of
thinking we were probably crazy for continuing to try for more children, and a
lot of sadness because now those babies had faces, after Joel was born I knew
what our babies would look like, and I was heartbroken even as I continued to
care for my sons. But God kept meeting me in those emotions and was still
whispering on my heart “I am not done with you. I am not done giving you
children. Watch and be faithful.”
Fourth pregnancy after Joel
The fourth time I got pregnant
after Joel was born, I was not excited at all. I mostly ignored the fact. I was
tired of this. And I told that to God. A lot. God I am TIRED of this cycle!!
And God said “no, my grace is sufficient for you and all you have to do is hold
on. I know you are tired, but I will carry you.” We went to the doctor again,
and finally saw another flickering heart beat and Peter would be joining our
family, but not in Oklahoma.
Leaving Oklahoma
See we really didn’t like Oklahoma
all that much for a pretty good reason. Tornados are terrible weather events
and we just happened to move to Moore, Oklahoma 5 months before it would be
ravaged by an F5 tornado we could see from our front window. We didn’t know
when we entered the shelter if our home would be standing when we came out. It
was, but I think that was the day we started praying to God to help us move
from Oklahoma. Later that year Mark was asked to start working for a program
based in Seattle. Another year and a half later, we were still praying we could
move to Seattle but our prayers were getting really intense…because by this
time we had outrun a tornado in our car one evening, and other day had a
tornado come straight at our house, lift back off the ground to go over it and
come back down a few blocks away. While we were very thankful God was keeping
us safe, we were not enjoying this way of life! Finally, after much much prayer
(and hard work by Mark) we were granted the opportunity to move to Seattle.
Since my parents had moved here the year before, this was an amazing chance to
have our boys closer to their grandparents, and get extra help now that we had
a third child on the way. Peter was born 4 months later.
Peter, Special needs
God has special plans for Peter, I
know he does, because God made Peter extra special. When Peter was a month old
we realized his eyes moved all the time back and forth but he didn’t look at
anyone or anything. Over the next few months our hearts grew heavy as it became
more evident that Peter couldn’t really see much. At his 6 month well baby
check up, he failed every developmental milestone test. We already had an
appointment with a pediatric ophthalmologist scheduled and we found out that
his eyes were very weak. The rapid eye movement, called a nystagmus, could indicate
he had a neurological defect and he needed an MRI. I cried as I watched him get
put to sleep, I cried through the entire test, I prayed that he would be just
fine. God heard all that, I know he did, but the answer was not what I wanted.
Peter has a rare brain defect, Optic Nerve Hypoplasia, that not only means his
optic nerve bundle is small, but that other parts of his brain are also
underdeveloped. This condition occurs in utero and cannot be fix. It is a whole
different kind of sadness and heartbreak that comes when you learn your child
will potentially face a lifetime of difficulties you just can’t fix for him. I
had to struggle again to remember the goodness of God. The God who made Peter,
who could have made Peter whole but did not. I have to trust that God has a
plan for Peter, but I don’t know what it is yet. In the meantime, I have been
reminded that even on the days that I am tired of going to one more appointment
at the Children’s Hospital, that I am tired of having therapists in our home 3
days a week, that I am tired of making sure Peter doesn’t hurt himself because
of his low vision and lack of depth perception, that I can do all things
through Christ who strengthens me.
Eloise
Mark said this next part of the
story is where God just shows off and I have to agree with him. When Peter was
8 months old, I got pregnant again and we DIDN’T continue the trend of
miscarrying between viable pregnancies. God, in his mercies, allowed that pregnancy
to be our daughter Eloise. We finally
have those 4 children we wanted so long ago…not at all the journey I would have
planned or expected but it was the one where I would grow the most. I have been
asked more than once how I endured all those losses and I often say “by God’s
grace” because there is just no part of my human strength that could have done
it alone. I believe it was also the grace of God that allowed me to have Eloise
without having a miscarriage first. I can stand here today and say that God now
has me on a journey of healing and God is still very good.
Challenge
I just want to give a challenge
today to let God meet you in your emotions. Whatever journey you are on,
whatever you are feeling, let God join you there. I want to especially talk to
women for a minute. There are a lot of expectations on women, in the world it
is to be “Pintrest worthy”, in the church it is to be the Proverbs 31 woman.
Well, the Bible doesn’t say this, but since she was female, I am going to
theorize that the Proverbs 31 woman broke down and cried more than one. But she
is still in the Bible! It is ok to cry, it is ok to be angry, it is ok to just
feel your feelings, but know this…God can take it. Invite him to meet you in
your emotions and you will find out he is already there waiting.
Waiting mothers
And for anyone among us that is still
waiting for their baby. I will be praying for you. I am super impressed you
came to church on Mother’s Day. You are brave. You are showing faithfulness to
God. I don’t know how your journey will go, I can’t promise you a baby (as much
as I desperately want to), but I can promise that God is here, God is
listening, God wants the very best for you, and God is good. All the time.
Thank you.
