CHAPTER 2: THE END FROM THE BEGINNING

After giving my husband sufficient time to pray about this crazy new direction that our family might take, I asked him what he thought. During my time of silence, God had said everything to Bryan that He had said to me. 

God wanted to do something incredible in our family, or bonkers crazy, depending on how you look at it.

  

Those who look through eyes of faith will see the former.  

So I began to cry out in prayer like never before for this promised child to come. I commanded my body to come in alignment with God’s will. 

I had dreams of this child, and strangely of many obstacles that would come along the way. The dreams were filled with the number 5, which I did not understand, but I expected a very long and very difficult journey to get our son.

Curiously, though, the journey to receive our 4^th child wasn’t hard at all…

I told only my pastor and dear friend, Laura, what the Lord was saying to Bryan and me. She sensed the Holy Spirit’s clear direction and said,

“I feel that the Lord wants you to say these five words to Him, ‘I give you my womb’.”

I sincerely prayed those words from the depths of my heart, words I had never uttered before, and as I did… I felt something convulse in my womb. I don’t know what happened that day, but 6 weeks later I was pregnant. And the pregnancy was quite smooth, no complications. 

Except… I began having crazy dreams. Lots of them...

In one of those dreams, before we had our official 18-week sonogram to detect the sex of this child, I dreamed that I had delivered the baby and I asked the doctor if it was a girl. She said “No this is your son.” Then she mentioned something about another daughter.

In another dream, I literally woke up saying, “I have five children!”

Say what??? One child in your mid 40’s is a little wacky, but two? This was crazy. Insane! I didn’t want to be in a medical journal, or on the evening news, or approached to do a reality TV show. My last name is not Duggar, God love them. They are awesome, but that was not my goal in life. 

Nevertheless, the dreams kept coming, dreams of a baby girl...

A verse from Isaiah became very dear to me long after these dreams…

“I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times what is still to come. I say, my purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please… What I have said, that will I bring about. What I have planned, that will I do.” (Isaiah 46:10-11)

God was speaking to me about the end of this journey back to motherhood while I was still at the beginning.

I delivered our precious Stephen Weston on October 23, 2014 (on our pastor’s birthday) and our family seemed complete. Almost.

But the dreams kept coming. Dream after dream after dream that I was soon to be pregnant with a little girl. 

I looked at my son and was struck with the stark reality that...

So many gifts, so many promises, require us to shelve our comfort and our preconceived ideas of what our lives should be, of what is normal and expected and sane… and just trust Him.

  

Oh, what we miss when we don’t! Oh, what I would have missed if I hadn’t!!!

So I told the Lord,

“Ok, God. I never want to say ‘no’ to You again. So if you want us to do this thing again in our family, let’s do it. But let’s do it soon. I don’t want to be 45 and pregnant.”

I had a stigma about that. Crazy people get pregnant at 45. Crazy people and celebrities. (That was redundant.) Somehow 44 seemed way more sane to me. I should have known that it is pointless to give God a deadline. He doesn't cooperate with our schedules. We must learn to yield to His.

I shared my heart with Bryan, like I had before when God spoke to me about our 4th child. He was kind of freaked him out. Another child in our mid-40's is unconventional, to say the least. But he wasn’t resistant. Looking at the nearly missed blessing of our son, Bryan didn’t want to say ‘no’ to God either. 

So I began to pray fervently for our daughter to come.

CHAPTER 1: SWEET SURRENDER

Before I tell the tale of these sweet sisters, I must first tell how they ever came to be. Truly, had it been solely up to my husband, Bryan, and me, they never would have existed.

Just a few years ago, Bryan and I were very content and happy with our three beautiful children: Afton, Bennett, and Avonlea. We were past the napping and diaper-changing stages of child rearing. We could travel. We could go on errands without having to haul strollers and sippy cups and snacks. We could eat out in restaurants without the hassle of high chairs and trying to order food that looked like it had already been chewed. We were free from all that. Blissfully free.

But not long after my 42^nd birthday, God began to challenge me about our family. He posed a very pointed question to me. He said,

“Why do you call me Lord and yet I am not Lord of your family? Why do you call me Lord and yet I am not Lord of your womb?”

I was shocked by this question. I was utterly floored by it. The implications were far reaching. Both Bryan and I had been in church all of our lives. I taught a women’s Bible study at my church. We led a small group in our home. But there was a major part of my life that I had never given to my heavenly Father. This question cut to the deepest part of me. Every bit of it was true, and I knew it…

God had never been Lord of my family, not in that way. I had planned out each of our family’s expansions meticulously. For our second child, I had even calculated the day that it was most advantageous to have a boy, since we already had our girl. (Ahem.) And it worked! I was in control and I never bothered to ask God whatt He thought. Thankfully, He liked my plan and seemed to agree with what I wanted.

Soon after giving birth to our 3^rd child, I turned 39. We had two young ones in diapers and I figured it was time to close up shop. It was time to move on from that part of our lives. I didn’t pray about it, really. Why would I? Only strange people had babies in their 40’s, or people who married very late in life and didn’t already have young children. Bryan and I had been married for 15 years. We had surpassed the national average in terms of offspring. We had our hands full. It was time to move on.

And we did move on… we were finally free.

But then came those probing questions. Again and again. 

“Why do you call me Lord and yet I am not Lord of your family? Why do you call me Lord and yet I am not Lord of your womb?” 

Those questions hung in my spirit like a heavy fog that just wouldn’t lift.

I’ve come to realize that God doesn’t ask questions because He needs the answer. He asks questions because we do. And the answer to His question was this this:

I didn’t really trust that God knew what was best for me. I didn’t believe that He knew what was best for my future. I’d never even asked Him what He wanted for our family, and yet I called Him Lord.

He wasn’t really Lord then, was He? That broke my heart.

But as I have come to learn with our loving Father, after He convicts, He inspires. He doesn’t leave us in a broken state any longer than He has to. I sensed that the Lord was dangling the most amazing carrot before me, the most beautiful dream. He whispered to me in prayer, 

“What if I wanted to do something powerful in your family through you, would you say ‘no’ to Me? What if I wanted to do something incredible in My kingdom through you, would you say ‘no’ to Me?” 

How could I refuse? Why would I?

Still, through the course of many months, I wrestled privately with the implications of this surrender, of what it would mean for my husband, for my future, for my aging body. This was no small thing. Seriously. Many of my friends were having grandchildren, and I would be schooling my own kids until I was a senior citizen. My kids would be applying for college while I was applying for social security.

Finally, on the way home from my 20-year college reunion, where we caught up with friends who were preparing their children to go to college, I shared with Bryan what God had spoken to my heart. I told him that I thought the Lord wanted to give us another child.

(Me with my college chums: Brad, Kevin, & Jessica, at my 20 year reunion.)

Bryan was shocked, to say the least. I probably could have said, 

“Hey honey, I think the Lord is calling us to be missionaries to Mars,” 

and he would not have been more surprised. But I shared my heart and wisely left the subject alone. For five whole weeks, I said nothing more about it. (That is very hard for a woman to do, btw.) I knew that God would have to speak to my husband himself. I certainly couldn’t lead him to that spiritual destination. I could hardly believe that I was there myself.

Meanwhile, I began to see a child as I prayed. A little boy. I knew that the Lord was promising us a son.

…And at that sweet place of surrender, I discovered that what I had never wanted, I now wanted more than anything.

.

INTRODUCTION:

The past few years, our family has been on the most profound spiritual journey of our lives... taking us from that secret place of sweet surrender, to the depths of loss and despair, to the heights of unsurpassed joy where impossible HOPE has yielded the most profound gift of FAITH. 

Some experiences in life just cannot be summarized in a quick Facebook status. Anything you can say in a sentence or two is wholly inadequate. It falls painfully short of reality. The last few years of our lives have been just that. So I haven’t chronicled our journey for public consumption because I couldn’t condense it. And something in me didn’t want to tell the story until I could tell the whole story. The story isn't complete yet, but in faith, I am compelled to start telling it now. I pray that it blesses someone. I pray that it blesses many someones.

A gift from my oldest daughter, Afton, for Christmas (2016).