Yesterday I started to share about the birth of my twins in 2017. Today I want to take us back to when I found out I was pregnant with my first.
I couldn’t have asked for a better pregnancy than the one I had with our oldest, Thomas, in 2013. He had been a surprise—a happy surprise. After experiencing infertility for a time, we had given up hoping for pregnancy to happen on its own, and we were looking into both adoption and simple fertility treatments. We had also decided that since pregnancy wasn’t happening, it’d be a good idea to go to Brazil for a year to spend time with my husband Mauricio’s family, so we rented out our house and quit our jobs. A week before we were to leave after we’d already moved out of our house, I found out I was pregnant. Talk about timing! This was most certainly an unplanned pregnancy.
At first we were hit with fear—what were we going to do? With a baby coming, the last thing we should do is go to Brazil, right? Shouldn’t we try to get our jobs back, ensure our financial stability, and prepare for our baby’s birth? That would be the responsible thing to do, right? But God had other plans. What seemed at first to be terrible timing in our finite understanding, turned out to be a greater blessing than we ever could have imagined. God certainly had a plan for us, a good plan, a plan to prosper us and not to harm us.
After some time seeking the Lord, we felt him guiding us to go to Brazil as planned. While there we found out that we were expecting a beautiful boy! Because our house was rented out in our hometown of Calgary for a year, we decided that we would stay six months with Mauricio’s parents and fly back to Canada no later than my 32nd week of pregnancy, to stay with my parents in the city I’d grown up in, Edmonton, for the remainder of the time. This meant that both families were able to experience the expectant joy of a precious
new grandchild, and my family had the added benefit of our newborn living there for the first couple of months after he was born.
The Lord was showing us that we can trust in his plan, that even though we can only see one or two steps ahead, he sees the whole picture, that even when we can’t understand why something we so long for isn’t happening, his holding it back is not to hurt us. No, it’s for our good. Like a loving dad who tells his child to wait until after supper to eat the cookie—though the child might complain or cry, not understanding why she can’t have what she wants now—the dad doesn’t relent because he knows it’s for her good.
God was teaching us these lessons, preparing us for greater challenges to come, teaching us to trust both when it makes sense and when it doesn’t, to trust that his plans for us are good. We didn't realize at the time that the following pregnancy would be anything but normal, that it would shake us to our core, but we knew that the Lord was taking care of us and would continue to do so.
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