Set Apart

I Knew You

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.” (Jeremiah 1:5 NIV)

She’s laying face down, with her legs bent at the knee and tucked under her belly.  Her arms are folded neatly under her chin.  It doesn’t look like a very comfortable sleeping position to me, but whatever works.  With a few gentle nudges, she’s back to wiggling and stretching.  She seems to default to crossing her ankles, just like her older siblings, though she hasn’t mastered the patented, Womack, left hand by the ear move just yet.  It may seem mean to wake someone so small, but we need her to roll around a little bit so that we can take stock.  Ten fingers, ten toes, no fluid being retained in the kidneys; her heart is fluttering along at about 130 beats per minute.  The nurse running the sonogram pops a few lines up on the screen and tells us that her tiny head is measuring at just shy of twenty weeks, right on schedule.  It’s just fine with her mother if she’s our family’s first child with a normal sized head.

Even in this grainy black and white, x-ray-aided haze, we’re able to get a few good still shots of her facial profile.  She’s beautiful.  She looks like her sister.  This is the fiftyleventh time I’ve seen a sonogram video, but I’m still just as amazed as I was the first time.  I can’t help but think about Jeremiah 1:5.  As small as she is, God already has a plan for Lila Jane; he knows how he made her, and he knows why.  And one day her mother and father will know more about all of that, but for now we’ll have to settle for wiggles and kicks.

We wrap up the ultrasound session and they post the statistic screen.  I see Andrea’s name, DOB, and LMP date, followed by the information on little miss wiggles.  She’s about ten inches tall, weighs roughly twelve ounces, and is due to arrive on July 24th.  It’s all smiles in the sonogram room at OBGYN Specialists in Memphis.  Everything looks good with Lila Jane; we are able to breathe that little sigh of relief in recognition of her apparent good health.  All signs point to me having the fourth iteration of the best day of my life sometime in mid to late July.  I’m so happy and so incredibly grateful.  I bow my head and thank God for what he has done for me, for my family.  And, I thank him for guiding us through the hardest thing we’ve ever faced. All of the stats are still listed up on the screen, and I notice off to the right some medical terminology; a little bullet-point style list that reads: “Gravida: 5; Para: 3; Aborta: 1”.

Obviously I’m not a doctor, but I’ve stayed enough nights at a Holiday Inn Express to know what those numbers mean.  Gravida and Para describe the number of times a woman has been pregnant (gravidity) and the number of times she’s carried those pregnancies to a viable term (parity).  Aborta is the worst word on that list, and you can probably guess why.  If an expectant mother had intentionally aborted a baby, it would go in this column, but so would any other pregnancies lost for any reason before 20 weeks of gestation.  This is our fifth pregnancy and LJ will make the fourth of those to go to term.  As much as I want to be happy for all of the good news we received during the sonogram, I can’t help but remember back to August, when the difference in those two numbers came about.

After Jake (our third) was born, on March 31st, 2012, we were pretty sure that he was it.  By the Spring of 2013, I actually had a vasectomy appointment set up, until Andrea prayerfully persuaded me to hold off on taking permanent measures.  On the internet, manufacturers of IUDs (intra-uterin devices, in case a dude is reading this) will tell you that they are more than 99% effective at preventing conception.  The IUD that the OBGYN implanted in Andrea was 100% effective… until it wasn’t.  It’s important at this point for me to share a little bit of context.

Wait Upon the Lord

“Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.” (Psalm 27:14 NIV)

Andrea and I wanted to have a fourth child, God willing.  Late in the Summer of 2013, when we started to actively discuss our expansion plans, we began to feel burdened by something outside of ourselves.  Over the next few months we began to pray for direction, and realized that we were being called to adopt.  Our problem at that point was trying to figure out what the next step would be.  You see, you can’t really move off of the starting block toward adoption until you have decided which route you want to take.  Basically, you have three choices: domestic newborn adoption, domestic foster adoption, and international adoption, and you cannot proceed until you choose one of those three paths. We knew we felt called to adopt, but we didn’t have any sort of preference on what the child looked like or where it came from.  Again, we began to pray earnestly, this time for guidance and discernment.

In one of our more recent small group Bible studies (The Battle Plan for Prayer) there was a section in which we discussed waiting on God, and how it’s an active and not a passive experience.  There’s a great deal of truth in that.  There we were, trying so hard to submit to God’s will, but we needed a nudge in the right direction.  And we weren’t just sitting on the couch waiting on an adoption commercial to appear before us and give us a sign. Instead, we were actively waiting, in daily prayer for the slightest bit of discernment, asking that His will, not ours, be done.  What we have to realize about waiting on God is that our timetable doesn’t really matter to Him.  We were getting frustrated by the whole process because it was taking longer than we thought it should.  In reality, we had to be made to wait in order for His purpose to be made clear to us.

After two or three months of this, we decided that it might be best for us to each tag along on one of our Church’s (Getwell Road United Methodist’s) mission trips to the Good Shepherd Children’s Home in Honduras.  It wasn’t so much an idea to go down to Central America and find a child to adopt as much as it was to give us a little clarity of purpose.  Be careful what you wish for when you ask for discernment in the wake of surrender.  It just might be that God has a plan for you after all.

Fifteen months after Andrea’s first trip to GSCH (and 3 months after my first) we started the process of becoming international missionaries.  In lieu of adopting a child, we were going to sell our house, move our family to Honduras, and semi-adopt about one hundred of them.  He had a plan for us all along, and if we had rushed into the adoption process (like WE wanted to), it never would have happened.

The Heaviest Burden

“Cast your burdens on the Lord and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous be shaken.” (Psalm 55:22 NIV)

So, now back to the part about that pregnancy test last August.  There we were, fully committed and approved missionaries, ready to begin long range planning for our move, only now it was going to be a party of six instead of five.  If Andrea and I were both being honest, we’d tell you that those first few days were spent more in a state of fear and shock than in a spirit of celebration.  We were scared; simple as that.  Scared about the added expense, scared about all of the interruptive aspects of having a newborn, scared about how the pregnancy fit into OUR timing.  It took us about a week to come around from shock to happiness, from wondering why God would want this to celebrating and thanking Him for his abundant faithfulness, and by the time we did… something wasn’t right.

I’ve spent nearly every day of my life with Andrea since February of 2004, and I never have before or since seen a look on her face like that, not even in the face of the deaths of three of her Grandparents.  Emotionally, spiritually, and mentally, she’s the strongest person I know… and she was overcome.  I’ll spare you the details, but things were happening in her body that had not happened during any of the three previous pregnancies.  I tried to do everything I could to encourage her; maybe everything was fine, she couldn’t be sure about anything until we got her to the doctor.  But, I knew.  I knew because I could see in her eyes that she knew.

One of the worst things in life is waiting for bad news to be confirmed, when you already know for sure and certain that it will be.  That’s where we were, waiting on test results.  I didn’t sleep the next two nights, and the only reason Andrea did was because she was completely and utterly exhausted.  I spent most of those nighttime hours crying, because it was the only time I really could.  I couldn’t let the kids see me like that, because they’re smart, and that would lead to a conversation we were not prepared to have with them.  I couldn’t cry in front of her, because I couldn’t risk putting her through any more emotional stress than she was already under.  She got the final report back from the OBGYN, confirming what we already knew.  The levels of particular hormones that become elevated during pregnancy had dropped far below what was expected.  We lost the baby.

According to published statistics, about 15-20% of recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage, with about 85% of those occurring in the first trimester.  It’s a common thing, though it’s not commonly, openly discussed.  It’s not discussed because nobody who’s actively trying to have kids wants to hear about that kind of thing happening to someone they know and love.  It’s the worst thing a family hoping to expand can ever hear.  I know I never wanted to hear about it.  I would say a prayer, or several, in private for couples I knew who were going through problems with miscarriages or general fertility issues, but there was no way on God’s green earth I was bringing it up.  It’s just too real, too close, too much.

Even attempting to comfort a couple going through this is a dicey proposition, because they might not want to talk about it at all.  It’s such a painful and isolating event… maybe because it needs to be.  After we got the call, I don’t think either of us knew what to do.  We did not experience shock as much as a state of numbness, because in reality the grieving process had already begun days earlier. As hard as it was for me, and I can safely say it was the worst day of my life, it was worse for Andrea.  “I’m so sorry” just doesn’t really do it at that point, but I said it several times anyway, because that’s what you do.

As would be the case with anyone else when troubles like these arise, after the initial shock, we began to look for closure.  I defaulted to asking questions, because of course I did.  But, I wasn’t asking the selfish why’s (why me?, why us?, why did you let this happen?), I was just looking for a lesson in the loss.  What do we take from this?  Where do we go from here?  How do we best move on?

 

What Great Love

“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!” (1 John 3:1 NIV)

These days, I do a pretty good job of focusing on what I can control, and turning over to God that which I cannot.  But, I’m still perfectly capable of failing via hubris.  When I sometimes allow my own shortcomings to get the better of me, and take my eyes off of God, I can get distressed to the point where I can no longer make sense of things.  I have found that the best way to refocus in such situations is to start with the basics.

On my first visit to the Children’s Home in Honduras, our team put together a week-long devotional study on Finding Identity in Christ for the kids at the home.  The one, huge bedrock principal that the entire week was based on is that we are all, every single one of us, first and foremost, children of God.  We are His before we are even in the world.  We belong to him more so than even our own parents.  That’s about as basic as it gets.  It’s this very simple truth that gave me all of the closure I needed in the wake of the loss.

As much as I wanted to see our child come into the world, it wasn’t meant to be.  But, as sad as that is, and as hard as it is for the more self-centered part of me to cope with, the end of the story is still so incredibly full of joy.  If you believe what I believe, then that baby IS a child of God, just the same as the guy typing this sentence, no more, no less.  From the moment of conception, that child was set apart to enter God’s eternal rest.  What Great Love indeed that He would make a way for us to meet one day and be together forever, overcoming even death.  What Great Love indeed.

My heart goes out to those of you who are reading this after experiencing something similar.  I hope that you can take solace it that same simple truth that has guided me through.  With each passing day, I think about the loss a little less, and the day we will finally meet a little more.  Until then, we will focus on little Lila Jane and her three older siblings.  And, when they’re older, we will be able to tell them that they have another sibling, and that through God’s Great Love, one day, they will be able to meet. Because, we are all, every single one of us, first and foremost, children of God.