Dental Floss Part 5 - The Faith Perspective

In Faith All Things Are Possible

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This is part 5 of my blog series on the road to having our child
Introduction: Right Here
Part 1 can be found: Right Here
Part 2 can be found: Right Here
Part 3 can be found: Right Here
Part 4 can be found: Right Here
Part 5: *YOU ARE HERE*
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So there's a major part to our story that I've not mentioned up until this point.  It wasn't for a lack of importance that it wasn't mentioned but rather a careful choice.  While our religious belief is a vitally important piece of our puzzle in navigating this situation I did not want our experiences this far to be written off by anyone who may not believe the same things we do.  However, I'd also be remiss if I did not mention the strength we've received through faith in this ordeal.  So the intention of this post is to highlight some of the key low points of this journey and how we allowed ourselves to be carried through the storm.  While the nature of this post is obviously religiously driven my hope is that anyone with or without faith will spare me a moment of their time.

If God is so good then why.....

Why not start things off with the single most repeated phrase you'll be asking yourself a midst such a trying time.  I consider myself to be of strong faith and yet the very thought seemed endlessly persistent, "Why is God doing this to us?".  I've found it's a very natural thought and oddly enough I'd wager large sums of money it's a question anyone, of any stance on faith, asks themselves a midst impossible circumstances.  The phrasing and attitude behind the question may vary depending on where you stand but when you boil the colorful language away the core of the question is exactly the same.  The question is also much easier to answer when you're just observing into someone else's life.  It's so much easier to say "Oh, don't worry God has a plan for your life." and then go about your business which is not in such a state of distress as those whom you've cast promises of good will on.  It's when your personally facing the largest of challenges that it becomes so difficult to eat your own words.  Insert foot in mouth.  Does God have a plan for MY life too?  Because, I had a plan for my life and let me tell you this was not in it at all.  I can remember time and time again, while we were in the infertility stages, and seeing my wife's almost desperate plea to be a mother as it was just about mirrored by my own desires to be a father.  Yet there we were, two people of well intentions and good standing completely unable to achieve an act of nature, completely messing up "our" plans.  In what I hope to be many years from now, as I lay an old old man looking back on my life, I am confident I will find that nothing in my life has fueled my search for God more than this experience.  If he's there I need a sign.  I need him to explain himself.  If he's such a magnificent and caring God why has he put us through what he has?

Doesn't that always seem to be the case?  Why is it that in moments of distress or tragedy we call out for a sign, some miraculous signal that God's got this under control?  We stop looking down at the words He's already spoken for us and look up in confrontational anger and decry His grace and mercy.

"In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told youI am going there to prepare a place for you.  And if I go and prepare a place for you,I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.You know the way to the place where I am going."  John 14:2-4

Nowhere in the Bible does God take time to talk about how perfect He plans to make life on earth and how easy it will be for us to get along here.  God has promised me Heaven, not Heaven on earth.  I feel like that is one of the significant ways we fail to understand what has been promised to us.  Just as we have been given the opportunities to make our own choices in life, so too we have been given the abilities to weather situations that are out of our control.  Accepting that it is our responsibility in this life to make the best out of every situation by putting others first and ourselves last is a very powerful realization in the face of great uncertainty.

So in the face of infertility and subsequent diagnosis for our child I forced myself to realize these are things that are out of my control and it is my calling to accept that what's meant to be will be and however the road turns I cannot abandon my trust in God's planning.  I also took it upon myself to more feverishly seek Him and every time I did I would find exactly what I needed to find to put me at ease.  I won't bother getting into examples of what was found in those moments because honestly most of them won't mean a thing to anyone reading this.  Nor are they significant events providing proof of the existence of God.  The point is that instead of giving up and letting life beat me down I called out for reassurance and with an open mind to how the answer would be received I was able to always find exactly what I needed.  So often we cry out for God's help and immediately follow it with conditions, "God, I really need you right now, so if you're there please give us a baby." and in one fell swoop I've reached out AND tried to control the answer.  I hope I am not the first to inform you that this is simply not how it works.  If you reach out to God in prayer and keep Him on your mind I promise you He will find a way to speak to you but you simply can't make the qualification on exactly how you'll be listening for Him.  Answers can come in the form of songs, other peoples situations, random people that cross your path, dreams, the possibilities are infinite but when it happens it's unmistakable.

Can you hear me now?

Ok, I lied.  I am going to share one specific example of how God spoke very clearly, and directly to me.  Hopefully anyone reading this has read through the whole story of our journey thus far and therefore knows the very real choice we had to make regarding whether or not to continue the pregnancy.  In hindsight this became an easy choice because we gave up control of the situation to faith so many times through infertility that it simply didn't make sense to try and take control of the situation now.  If God planned for our child not to make it then that was His call entirely, not ours.

So, shortly after making this decision to continue the pregnancy and while the clouds of uncertainty were thick and heavy we were both obviously extremely scared at the future.  What would this kid be like?  Will she be able to function?  Will we be able to handle this?  How much does this alter "our" preconceived plans of what having a kid will be like?  Is she going to be able to do all the other things kids do and will we be able to have those moments of parental joy seeing her do them?  All these thoughts racing through our minds and we, as well as many friends and family, were praying over the situation when I received what I now am realizing was a direct message from God.

As of this writing I have slept exactly 206 nights since finding out about my wife being pregnant.  Of those 206 nights, despite all the emotional highs and very low lows, I have had exactly 1 dream about my daughter.  I had this dream just a couple weeks after we decided to continue the pregnancy and had all the aforementioned concerns of uncertainty.  The dream was very specific while being nondescript.  Meaning, the situation was extremely clear but faces were almost purposefully missing from my memory of the dream.  The dream took place in a hospital on delivery day for B.B. and in the dream we had a c-section delivery and our daughter was born and I was able to hold her.  The most memorable thing about this dream was not the realism of the scene that unfolded but it was the incredibly intense emotion that I was filled with, both during the dream and for the rest of the day when I woke up.  The emotion of inexplicable happiness and love for my child.  The feeling of how absolutely nothing else mattered about her other than I was holding her and she was perfect.  The feeling and word "perfect" was very much at the forefront of every emotion I had about this dream.  When I woke up I felt changed, my entire body felt like it had been renewed and all of a sudden I simply could not wait to meet my daughter and relive that dream in real life.  That's how intense it was.  Without exaggeration it brought the most satisfying of smiles to my face for the rest of the day and my only regret was that I couldn't have dreams like that on demand.  It wasn't until a week or so later, reflecting back on it that it occurred to me how clearly that was a message from God to me, reassuring me that the only thing that matters is this kid will be perfectly beautiful and exactly as she needs to be.  Reassuring me that the unknown will become known soon enough and all that will matter is that her parents love her so deeply.

As I mentioned, none of this is intended to be evidence of God's existence by any means but rather my testament to how immeasurably important our faith has been to getting us through this extremely trying time in our life and how a little faith can go a long way.