There are so many things to consider that are running through my head--who will I use for prenatal care? (I know most of the practices and hospitals in the area intimately, and the decision between home, birth center, and hospital is not an easy one for me.) Where will I deliver? How will we afford this? Suppose I make through the pregnancy--how am I supposed to know what to do with a child? How are we going to grow a person into an individual, competent to participate in society? When am I going to stop being scared that the baby might not make it? And why do we have to wait so long for everything... I want to feel pregnant, to see this baby, to watch him grow into a toddler and form his first sentences, to laugh with him and hold him and teach him about life, and it all still feels so very far away. Not as far as it felt last week, though.
And with all these questions, there's only one place I can go. We trusted God for this baby. Before we were married we prayed long and hard about children and when we would have them. We didn't think it would be Biblical to get married without being ready to accept children, so we said from the start that we would love to have them. We used NFP for the first two years, constantly re-evaluating when we thought we might actively try for children. Last year we began to wonder why we were still saying no, still avoiding children, and there were obvious answers. We still feel like kids ourselves. We can't afford for me to stay home with them yet, which we both want. We don't live close to our families, which is very important to me... but just the same, if we see our children as gifts, and we can't predict the future, why do we keep saying no? So, last January, we stopped saying no. Still praying, we decided to trust God to give us children in His own time, and not to try for or to avoid pregnancy. We stopped keeping track.
Trust is a funny thing. It's hard to grasp in practicality. When we decided to "trust" God with our family plans, we switched insurance companies. If we had become pregnant in January, the pregnancy would not have been covered by the new insurance, so we thought, just for one more month, we'll avoid getting pregnant, and after that, we just let it go. So, when it really mattered, even though we just said we'd trust Him, we went back to the same old method. Sound like anyone you've heard of before? I can't tell you how many times I've read stories in the Bible and thought, "Those idiots, can't they see what God just did? Why would they turn around and try to take care of things on their own again?" Well, as if in a great cosmic show of humor, I ovulated extremely early and with no warning that month. Needless to say, we didn't get pregnant, and we learned our lesson. When He says you can trust Him, He really means it. So, we trusted God to give us children in His timing.
During the past year, it has been difficult for me to reconcile my desire to have children and my desire for other things, like traveling to visit our friends who moved to Africa. The first few months were a huge roller coaster ride, half hoping and half terrified that we'd end up pregnant right away, and trying to ignore when I knew I was ovulating. Avoiding caffeine and alcohol just in case, and having a drink when I got my period. Up and down, up and down. And all the while, God laying on both our hearts that our desire to adopt might not be as far away as we had imagined. When we found out that adopting from Uganda is as inexpensive as $5,000 we started to wonder, what's stopping us from pursuing that as well? God can just as easily shut that door as the one to pregnancy, and I was getting used to the idea that it might have been several years yet before we were gifted with either biological or adopted children. We went to an informational meeting about international adoption, and found that we have to finish construction on our house before we can start the paperwork, and were encouraged that this too could come sooner than we had planned.
So all these things were going on, and we were trusting that one day we'll have a family, that we don't know when the best time to start that is, and that all we can do is be open for what God has for us, when this Thanksgiving we turned up pregnant. Why now do I feel I have to make decisions on my own? Why, when I've finally become ok with the idea that I can trust God for a baby in His own time, do I get the news of this baby and lean on my own understanding for the next step? Guess I'm a little slow =) So, now, I'm trusting Him through this pregnancy, to do things his way. Natural delivery at home, or planned C-section for a breech baby--either way it's going to be His pregnancy, not mine.
"And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." Matt 28:20
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