My Story

(this is a LONG response ~ didn’t realize I had so much to say!  Bear with me, ok?  I think I’ve needed to see the whole progression of this for a long time…..)

I was raised in first a Methodist church, then United Church of Christ.  We did church and Sunday school every week, and I went through confirmation, but I really didn’t have a relationship with the Lord.  I then spent a year in a Muslim country as an exchange student and attended a liberal arts college, both experiences that led me to question the faith that I thought I had.

I was married briefly right after college, and joined the Catholic church to please that husband.  When we divorced, he told me “One day you’ll discover Jesus and come crawling back to me begging for forgiveness.”  It was at that point that I began a period of more severe falling away.

After a few years of finding unhappiness in the world, I married my current DH, who although a very good man, wasn’t a Christian.  At the time, that didn’t bother me.  Through little ways, God started calling to me, (my sister and her new husband were devout Christians),but I wasn’t ready to hear.

Then we decided to start a family.  We went into it with proud plans ~ we’d conceive in the summer, have a late spring baby, I’d take off the end of the school year, have summer vacation, and be ready to go back to teaching the next fall.  I read every pregnancy book the library had, I was READY.  Then we waited…….and waited.  And got a positive test ~ not the timing we had planned, but it was ok.  We miscarried a week later.  Small setback, we now knew we could get pregnant.  A few months later we did…..and miscarried again.  I rationalized, figuring twice in a row was a fluke, third time would surely be the charm.  After all, I’d never heard of anyone miscarrying three times in a row. Throughout all this God was working in subtle ways…..I read the Lost Behind series, I started reading a little in my Bible again, one of my students kept asking me if I went to church.   Six months went by and we became pregnant again, this time not miscarrying immediately.  But right before Christmas, we lost that baby, too.

I was devastated.  To the core.  Convinced that we were never going to have a child of our own.  Feeling like the world’s biggest failure as a woman.  And feeling so alone.  I had prayed for this baby, I had asked God for a child………and instead, I found myself staring at what had been our little one as it sank to the bottom of the bowl.  I knew that no one would ever understand.  We had only told one couple about our pregnancy, so no one at work knew, no one anywhere knew.

THEN….. the last day of school before Christmas break, just days after losing our baby, one of the 5th graders in my class came up and handed me a Christmas card.  I opened it and found a Christian sympathy card……It read “To comfort you in your time of sorrow…..may you find peace as you lean on God’s everlasting arms”, and it gave a Bible verse.
There was nothing Christmas-y that would have caused this girl to choose it.  She DIDN’T know about my pregnancy ~ no one at school had.

The ONLY explanation I could come up with was that God had guided her little hand to this card because he KNEW what I was going through.  He KNEW my sorrow and pain.  HE KNEW!!!!!  I showed all the adults at school the card in disbelief, telling them what was going on.  And in the process, found out I wasn’t as along as I had thought.  I had such a sense of peace and warmth ~ God cared about ME!!!  Even in the depths of my despair, He hadn’t forgotten.

Over Christmas break, I accepted Christ as my savior, found a church home, and was baptized.

God continued to work in our lives to get us to where we’re at today, but that will come next time E naps.