Caleb's story

I have mentioned here before my sweet son Caleb. Caleb turned 3 about 2 weeks ago and his birthday combined with the frantic gathering of information associated with completing a home study and dossier has caused me to reflect on all the frantic scurrying Steven and I did trying to have Caleb in the first place.

You see, it took Steven and I about 2 and a half years of trying, failing, fertility treatments and doctors before Caleb came to be. The funny part of that is that all of our scurrying and doctor's intervention had nothing at all to do with us finally becoming pregnant. Here's what happened:

When we had been married a little over a year, we decided it was time for us to start our family. (Notice I said WE decided...this had nothing at all to do with the Lord's leading which isn't all surprising since I didn't know the Lord much less what it would feel like to be lead by Him.) I stopped taking my birth control, and away we go. After about 4 months, I went to my annual gyn appointment and told her that we were trying, and when she found out it had been 4 months and my body hadn't yet regulated from being off the birth control, she ran some tests and discovered that I have PCOS which is fancy for I don't ovulate regularly. She prescribed clomid, and, again, away we go. We used the clomid for about a year with no result. At this point my doctor told us that, since she is not a specialist, we were past her ability to help us. She refered us to a fertility clinic. Now, I just want to stop right here and say that from the first mention of the words "fertility clinic" I knew deep in my heart that I would not have invitro fertilization (IVF). Not because it is inherantly evil, or anything, I just knew it wasn't the path I was going to walk down.

When we went to the fertility clinic they explained the process. We would first have 3 rounds of artificial insemination (AI) and if that didn't work, we would move on to IVF (or not). Each round of AI would take one month and have to be timed perfectly. We did all three rounds by July of '04.

About the time we were completeing our last AI, we went to visit my dad and his wife in Alabama. We went to church with them on Sunday morning and we were BLOWN AWAY. Steven and I had been attending the same church together since before we were married, but we had never heard teaching like this, or been to a church that used contemporary worship music. We decided when we left to drive home that afternoon that we needed to find a church like that at home because we'd been talking for awhile about how something just seemed to be missing from our old church...I now know it was real teaching from the Word of God combined with pastors that challenge us to stretch ourselves and give our lives away for Christ.

The following week, we went in to the clinic for a pregnancy test which turned out to be negative. Since this was the 3rd time, they explained to us that our next step would be either another AI, but this time with the injectable medication that is used for IVF and could easily cause high order multiples (you know, triplets, quadruplets, or further crazy numbers that would break my small frame in half), or we could skip straight to IVF. I was devastated. I knew in my heart that IVF wasn't for me, but neither was triplets, etc. Steven wasn't as convinced as I was, so we talked about it...a lot. I felt called to adopt, but I didn't know if the time was now or not and Steven felt pretty sure that it wasn't. He was still holding on tightly to the dream of a biological child in addition to an adopted child. To tell the truth so was I.

So that Sunday we went to church at Fellowship Bible Church for the first time, where we now attend. We were again blown away. At the end of the service, there was an announcement that the "learn more about this church" class called Discovery One that meets monthly was that evening. Yep, you guessed it, we came back! We couldn't stay away. The teaching was line by line, verse by verse, book by book (I later learned that is called "expository teaching". That day I just knew I was learning what God had to say, not what someone else had to say about God). At the end of the class, I went up and asked the teaching pastor if there was anything in the bible about the principles of IVF that would help me understand why I was so uncomfortable with the idea of taking that route to build our family. The things he told me and showed me struck so deeply in my heart that I knew I was hearing the truth that I could not verbalize, but that was driving my hesitation.

The next night, I went to a gathering with some friends, two of which are very godly women. They knew that we were supposed to find something out about our fertility process the week before so after the meeting they pulled me aside and asked me about it. I started crying because I had begun to feel that pregnancy was not going to be part of my life experience. They listened patiently and then one of them said, "Can we pray for you?" Now, I don't know if you've ever said yes to that question expecting the person to pray...you know...LATER, but that is what I fully expected. After all, they did say "pray FOR you" not "pray WITH you" I had never in my life had anyone pray over me much less lay hands on me to do so, but that is exactly what they did. As they prayed and I wept, I began to open my heart to the Lord.

Okay, so, I guess I should tell you that I grew up in Alabama, so like a lot of Southerners, I thought I was a Christian by heritage. In other words, I grew up in and around church, so I thought (when I gave it any thought, which was rare) that I was "saved". The only problem with that is that I had never asked Jesus to SAVE ME. I had never asked him to FORGIVE ME. I had never REPENTED. I had never in my life had a "Romans moment" when I BELIEVED in my HEART and CONFESSED with my MOUTH. Because of this, I had heard a lot of what some people call "Christian-ese" phrases like "Talked to God", "Heard from God", or "Turned it over to God" and I had never had a clue what in the world those words meant...until those women prayed.

In that moment, I understood the meaning of the phrase "Turn it over to God" because in that moment I fully understood that I could not make myself pregnant, and neither could Steven make me pregnant. Only the good Lord, God, could do such a thing because He forms our bodies and knits us together in our mother's wombs. In that moment, I turned my pain, my feelings of loss, my grief, my desire to be a mother, and most of all my attempts to control the situation over to God.

Don't ask me how I know (this is a family-friendly blog), but Caleb was concieved the following Saturday. GOD IS GOOD and HIS MERCY ENDURES FOREVER!!

More on when I actually came to know MY GOOD GOD, in my next post.