A Child of & for Community

Elijah & I have been married almost 11 years.  Three months before we married I started birth control at the age of 22.  My doctor didn’t believe I was a virgin until the exam.  I’ve learned not to care for cynicism so I switched doctors.  We used oral contraceptives for 8 years.  In our anniversary years two through seven I was the sole breadwinner as Elijah focused on graduate work, so I never considered another alternative.  My maternal clock must be quite delayed as it failed to occur to us we were getting older.

A year after we moved to Marshall, Elijah’s job felt more stable so we decided it was time & May 2010 was our last month hindering this God-given natural process.

One and a half years later we still hadn’t conceived, or at least that’s what we thought as we prepared to take a ten day mission trip to Ethiopia.  It wasn’t until after I received vaccinations for measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis A & live typhoid that I missed my first period.  We were pregnant & I’d just proffered our unborn one month old many of the worst communicable diseases in the world.  We miscarried from Dubai to Addis Ababa.

Again it never occurred to me that pregnancy post-pregnancy is an easier phenomenon & within 2 months we were pregnant again.  I was recovering from our first grief, subsequent pneumonia and treatment & was still on anti-malarials.  This child too, left as quickly as it came.

Another year passed & Elijah asked to begin seeking medical answers regarding our infertility.  It didn’t take a physician long to identify our major problem & for the first time I realized I may never hear the word ‘mama’ personally.  How much greater the earlier losses became.  The news brought a sudden grief, but also a release from hope.  “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”  My sick heart found healing in the ‘possible’ being disclosed as practically impossible.  God is enough; he always has been.  I needed to feel myself confess that again.  We stopped ‘trying’.

And as God would see fit, within weeks we were pregnant.

He told me to share with Elijah we were ‘Expecting the Unexpected’.  Yes, he knows our hearts so intimately; he speaks a language of personal significance.  I recognized his grace & love over all of it, the sorrows & the sunshine.

Long before we were seeking to start a family, my only prayer regarding children had been a prayer God himself gave me, “Let us conceive as you’ve chosen the child.”  Others have prayed for us.  I am astounded and humbled to discover, many others.  My husband prayed for the lives of our first 2 children when we knew they were in danger & before they were lost.  I did not.  I was present with them in their brief lives and in their deaths.  Death is a part of life & I embrace it without reticence.  Though I grieved, I still did not ask God for a child.

Since this conception God has given me a dream where I saw the child truly is Elijah’s & mine, but also is his.  As we share our news I know in a greater capacity this is also the child of a caring believing community of Christ followers for it is the church in our lives, not I, who can & have confessed, “I prayed for this child, & the Lord granted my request.”

Thank you friends and family for demonstrating to us the incarnation of Christ through the church.  We are blessed by your love.  Just as you’ve born our sorrows, so also you share our joys.