Detour

I have always loved children. I love their laughter and adventure. How imagination rules over logic, creating worlds with boundless possibilities. The way they cover glass doors in tiny fingerprints. At a young age, I often became the big sister of younger cousins, taking care of them and nurturing as best I could. I recall one time that my baby cousin was handed to me after fits of screaming. He had been passed around between relatives without successful quieting. I lulled him to sleep within minutes. This is not prideful bragging. I praise God that He simply gave me a mothering nature, a spirit that desires to nurture and comfort. The devil has often times twisted this, and I instead become controlling, demanding, and sometimes judgemental. God works every day to purifying my intentions. I’m thankful for His never-ending patience for me, His own screaming, fitful child.

The typical formula in our American culture is to begin having kids shortly after marriage. It’s so funny that we think we can automatically obtain this pattern of living. We think that God will just bow down to it as if to say “oh, alright” because it’s a noble cause. After all, it says in Genesis, His holy, anointed Word, to be fruitful and multiply! Surely if you have pure intentions and a heart after children, God will bless you the moment you feel it’s “time” to have a houseful of little ones!

On my path to fulfill said Biblical prophecy, I found myself one year in and no baby in my womb. Negative test after negative test, I became more and more discouraged. Things weren’t working out how I’d planned. As I sat in the windowed office at the fertility clinic, I just kept asking myself “Why me?” (I am after all, a glutton for the question). The medications they gave me made me depressed and anxious, not to mention nauseous. Initially, I had some frustrating obstacles that might prevent me from ever having children. I became unsatisfied with the options that were laid before me. I wasn’t interested in making this baby-making scientific or technical. I just wanted it to be easy. I felt it was my life’s calling to be a mother, and that would be a little hard to accomplish if I couldn’t produce a child.

I took a break from the medical route, and I began to pray healing over my body. I can remember so many nights when I would lie in bed, my hands on my womb, praying and believing for complete healing. A month later, one of the fertility issues I had for a year was completely resolved. I then found out there was actually only one thing that would prevent my fertility, and that could be easily corrected with minor medication. Having found this out, it seemed all systems were go to begin trying again. God healed me! And then, He changed my plans.

If there’s one thing God has taught me, it’s that He wants us to DREAM BIGGER! PLAN WIDER! We are often times satisfied with just getting by. “Lord, if you will just help me make it through this month so that I can pay all the bills”… “Lord, just give me one child…” God is JUST, and He’s not interested in our “justs”! I was too busy praying for that one child of my own that I couldn’t hear the Lord’s voice telling me, “my daughter, my princess, I will give you dozens of children to love!” I was so focused on populating my own little family, but God had His sights set on the BIG picture. He called me to a mission journey with Revolutionary Life International, a trip that would undoubtedly put me in contact with groups upon groups of beautiful, laughing, loving children. I would not have had this opportunity if I had stayed in the States, continuing in my pregnancy pursuits. Sure, through God, perhaps I would have been successful. Perhaps I would be pregnant by now, with a cute little baby bump. Maybe I would’ve found out by now whether my child was a boy or a girl. But these are not two separate paths. I know that God will bless me with my own biological children in His timing. He has promised me in His Word and in my heart. But now, He is blessing me with more than I could have ever imagined for myself. I have the opportunity to love on children the world has forgotten about. I can nurture these sweet ones into a relationship with their heavenly Father. I can tenderly lull them into the arms of the Lord. And that is worth so much more than my original plan.