Anniversary of a miracle
Today marks five years since we brought Henry home from the hospital. I realize this may sound like a fairly ordinary occasion to note, but to us, it is the anniversary of an experience that split my life in Christ into a before and after.
It’s a strange thing to be told two months before your due date that you and your soon-to-be-born child would likely not survive if you go into labor, but that is exactly what the high-risk OB told me as she explained why my one-in-ten-thousand placenta was nourishing my son’s life, but could also be the cause of his death.
After a confirmation ultrasound, I packed my bags that same day, hugged Matt and our two small boys, and moved into the hospital where I lived until Henry was born at 35 weeks.
Those days felt impossibly hard at times, but, oh, God was so tender toward me in it. Friends and family visited every day, and they usually brought the surest thing to cheer my spirits: food from the outside. I distinctly remember eating the entire container of puppy chow my sister-in-law made for me in one very delightful sitting. I know, I know…but your life being in danger has to have some perks, right?!
A dear deacon at our church who had a low-grade fear of hospitals came to see me each week so I could receive communion. My beloved church family prayed for me on Sundays during the Prayers of the People and brought Matt and the boys so many meals that he didn’t have to cook once while I was in the hospital.
Friends lended their favorite books, and I had ample time to read them. I read a novel about a Russian aristocrat who was placed under house arrest by the Soviets in a fancy hotel in Moscow. I felt a certain kinship with him during my time in the maternity ward—which I was not allowed to leave—in my room with a window that had an amazing view of…an interior courtyard (though I am in no way comparing my nurses to communists. They were the best.).
In previous pregnancies I dreamed of time to just lay down and rest, and boy, did I get it.
They strapped a monitor to me three times a day, and I got to sit and listen to Henry’s beautiful little heartbeat while I watched the jagged lines of my pesky Braxton-Hicks contractions rise and fall.
Miraculously, thankfully, the real contractions—the life-threatening ones—never came, and I delivered Henry safe and sound via c-section. We steeled ourselves for what we were warned could be an up to five-week NICU stay, with trips back and forth between the hospital and our precious ones at home.
Then, three days after Henry was born, to our complete astonishment, we both got to come home. This was something I wanted so badly, so impossibly, that I could barely utter more than a few words in prayer about it while I anticipated Henry’s birth from my hospital bed. But the Spirit heard my groanings too deep for words, and he moved in a way that he did not have to, but did anyway. Even after five years, my eyes are still brimming as I write this.
When reflecting on these kinds of experiences, you often hear people say something to the effect of, “That experience was so hard, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything, because of what I learned from it and the ways I know God because of it.”
I am blown away by this kind of faith, but I’m not sure I’m ready to say that I wouldn’t trade that pregnancy experience. It came with some crushing realities: missing a beloved cousin’s wedding, losing the chance to visit a special aunt and uncle whose health has taken a sharp decline since that time, seeing my two young boys’ experience Christmas morning via FaceTime and being absent for all the day-to-day moments with them that were so precious to me, a constant and heightened sense of impending danger throughout my pregnancy with Jane that my body and mind are still healing from in some ways.
But I can say this with confidence:
That experience was so hard. Though time and grace and a “happy ending” by all counts have taken the edge off, I still wish it would not have happened. But it did. And because it did I know the presence of Jesus differently than I would have otherwise. And for that gift, I cannot help but praise him. God has shown time and again—in those weeks of uncertainty and in the five years since bringing Henry home—that no hard or unwanted experience is beyond the reach of his redemption. And even now, Jesus is transforming the pain and fear of that pregnancy, uniting it to his own suffering, into something deeply good that will last into eternity.
We can take on the posture of receiving our lives as a gift from God, and in mine I have had some experiences I did not want and would not choose. And yet in in all of these experiences, in all the losses big and small, I find that in the end, somehow, to my astonishment, I get…him.
Not for a moment have I been forsaken.