My dear little son,
I sit here and write this, and you are lying stretched out on the bed beside me fast asleep. You’re only five days old. The love I have for you is so huge, and yet so undeserved. It has been causing me to reflect on how it is possible for God to have had so much love for us, even before we acknowledge Him. How we don’t earn His love in any way. You haven’t given me anything yet. To bring you into the world brought me certain amounts of pain, and these first few days haven’t been comfortable. My breasts ache and everytime you feed I’m pretty much in agony, but it’s all worth it. It’s worth it just to have you exist. Nathan is at an age where he has just started announcing, I love you when we say it to him. He is helping me out and he is obedient, and all of those things bring a smile to my face. But I have the same love for you as I do for him. God’s love for every single human being is even more unthinkable than that. Both for those that love Him and for those who don’t yet acknowledge Him.
I feel like we have been on a huge journey with you my boy. I’m sure could write a novel about your story this far. My faith has been increased more than I thought possible through all of the events of your life, starting at the very beginning. Your daddy and I desperately wanted you to join us. I wanted Nathan to have a sibling close in age to him. God had been challenging me throughout my previous pregnancy about trusting Him with my family. With the timing of my family. Nathan was a joyful, unexpected surprise. The concept of ‘unplanned’ had begun to bug me. God is in absolute control of our bodies, and of our lives. We had given Him over everything, and I was led to think that should probably include our family as well.
But there was a big question in my heart about timing. It was more a doubt I guess. Seriously, if we just throw our trust into God’s ability to plan our family, then of course we will have another baby straight away. I definitely doubted God’s ability to space our children out. But I felt very strongly led to put that into God’s hands. So we did. After Nathan was born, we didn’t try to stop falling pregnant. I was happy to have two children close together, so it wasn’t as strong a faith thing for me. But month after month went by and we didn’t fall pregnant. And I was in shock to be honest. God could actually space these kids out!
At one point, just before Nathan turned one, we thought we may be pregnant again. We had an early ultrasound, and instead of the little baby that we expected, they found cysts on my ovaries. After more tests, I was diagnosed with PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome). It explained a lot and looking back I could see symptoms from many years back. It is also one of the biggest causes of infertility in women. It suddenly made me think twice about the unacknowledged miracle that Nathan was, and threw my doubting God into a completely different direction. Now it became about whether God COULD bring us another child.
Looking at it now, I can see that it just may be a tool that God is using to space our family. Or that God called us to put our faith in Him regarding our family knowing that there would only be a limited number of times a year that we could be blessed with another child.
More months passed and my doctor raised the possibility of using drugs to try and conceive. I had spoken to many women who had the same condition, one in particular who had fallen pregnant with her first unexpectedly, and then conceived her second after some time with this medication. Her story was very similar to mine. I felt torn. I know that God works through the medical system. But I also knew that He had specifically led us to trust in His timing. So I battled it through, talking it out with Tim, and made the decision to leave it in God’s hands. That was not an easy decision to make, sadly. I wish that it had been easier, and I had been more willing to completely abandon myself and trust Him.
God always comes through. It was only about a week after I had made this firm decision that we went on a church camp. During one service, I prayed for healing over my body. I prayed for God’s will to be done concerning our family, and I got a strong sense of peace. I was convinced that I was well.
You were conceived either on that camp, or a few days after. I don’t think that was a mistake. That was God stretching me and increasing my faith. That was God’s timing.
During the first few weeks of my pregnancy, I was very anxious. Statistically my rates of miscarriage were higher, and the devil wasn’t allowing me to forget it. I had painful cramping for weeks and weeks, and it felt like an eternity, but we finally got through that stage.
You are staring up at me right now, with your hand on your ear looking blissfully content. I am so blessed to be your mum!
When I was six months pregnant with you we went as leaders to a youth conference. It was a great time, and I spent a lot of it praying about you, and the little champion you will one day become. Dedicating your life to God and just beginning to sow some prayer time into you. I got a strong sense that the spirit of God would be upon your life. During that time, your daddy and I started talking about Aunty Rosy and her death, and we made a decision to start looking at it and dealing with it again.
At one stage while I was driving home with a car full of youth girls, I got teary thinking about Rosy. It had been a while since I had cried like that. No more than ten minutes afterwards, we had to stop to help with an accident. It was God’s incredible timing. I stayed with a teenage girl, a similar age to Rosy, while she struggled to hold onto life. I prayed like crazy and I begged God to intervene. It wasn’t His will. She died while I was holding her hand. I prayed for God to raise her from the dead. He didn’t. Not this time. But I felt like it was a privilege to have been there. To have had that opportunity.
One day, when I pray, the dead will rise. Because the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead lives in me. And you my son, shall have a double blessing of that. You too, will see the dead rise. I believe it. That’s why I called you Elisha. It’s what God has been doing in my heart over the time I was pregnant with you.
The pregnancy progressed, and my tummy was still pretty small. A few weeks of reduced measurements, and my general uneasiness over your growth caused us to have a growth ultrasound done. It wasn’t good. Most of your measurements were normal, but your stomach showed reduced growth. Essentially your belly was sacrificing itself for your head to try and maintain normal brain function. At the same time, my health looked like it was deteriorating. My blood pressure was high and my blood tests weren’t normal. My midwife put me on a high protein diet and we tried hard to try and correct the issue, or at least make it not so severe. I had to be at the hospital every few days to have monitoring done. On one trip I had the CD player up, and I was singing ‘My God is Able.’
God is with us.
He will go before.
He will never fail us.
And I just felt such a peace about everything.
We had another scan just over a week later, and miraculously it showed that everything was fine. There was no way that the first scan could have been that wrong, but also no way that you could have fixed yourself that quickly. God’s hand was all over it. It was yet another miracle to add to the growing list surrounding your existence. My health slowly improved, though I didn’t feel one hundred percent until after you were born.
Your Grammy has said that it feels like the devil is trying all of his tricks to stop your life before you even get a chance, and it definitely feels like that.
My pregnancy neared my due date, and we expected you to come. Nathan was a week early, and looked very over cooked. But it came and went, and there was no sign of you coming any time soon.
We had a fire on the block that Grammy & Grampy had just bought. It threatened the house and burnt through several of the paddocks. I was helping them, along with daddy, try to put the fire out, but it was a lost cause. At one point I found myself trapped in the smoke and I couldn’t get fresh air. It was actually really scary. I had a cough from all of the smoke that was around and the fire brigade called a paramedic to take me to Laidley Hospital just to check your heart rate and make sure you weren’t affected. God proved His faithfulness again. The fire came right up to the house, but the house wasn’t burnt and none of us were hurt. It was a rather stressful event and I was quite surprised that it wasn’t enough to send me into labour.
Nathan is sitting here playing over your head with a rattle. He has so much love for you!
We approached the two week overdue mark, and I definitely didn’t want an induction. I balanced the risks of an induction versus the risks of being overdue, and decided very strongly that the risks of induction were stronger. There is no increased risk until the 42 week mark anyway, so I was praying that you would come before then and I wouldn’t have to worry about what to do if I went over that. I had an appointment booked for Tuesday, 13 days over, at the hospital to have an ultrasound and discuss the options with an obstetrician. I didn’t make that appointment. You were born instead! But that’s a whole other story.
I love you my son. I’ve loved you before you were born, before you were conceived. But your God loves you more.