God Healed our Son!

I have been telling myself that I haven’t shared this publicly yet, because it is so hard to articulate everything that transpired. However, if I am really honest it probably has more with my fear of how some people will react and doubt. At the end of the day though I don’t need to worry about protecting God from these people. God is God and he doesn’t need me to defend Him but He does need me to give Him the GLORY!

After several weeks of having difficulty and pain walking I finally was in labor! It was a very long and rough day with what should have been a fairly uneventful third delivery. However, everything about it was off. They had issues finding my veins, issues with epidural and even breaking my water. Not to mention that our little one just didn’t seem to be coming down correctly. After almost 18hours of labor and our first attempt to push we were told that I had one more chance to push. If this failed we would be going in for a c-section. My amazing midwives helped me pull myself together and I rallied with everything I had.

Elijah was born March 29th at 1:20am. I was beyond exhausted and overjoyed as they laid him on my chest. Over his cries though I could hear and feel that something was wrong. I couldn’t tell from my angle but Elijah’s head was not shaped normal. JT immediately asked our midwife to be honest and straightforward with us. She calmly, told us that she had only seen this one other time and it would require surgery. Surgery?! Ha! We are leaving for our overseas mission trip in 8weeks … we don’t have time or money for surgeries! I don’t believe that God has brought us all this way for us to be stopped by surgeries! All of these thoughts were flooding my head. In that moment, we stopped. We laid hands on our son and prayed for God to move his bones. I wish I could remember our exact prayer but to be honest this isn’t about our words. It is about our obedience and faith.

The midwife called the pediatrician to inform him of the condition. It was decided that staff would monitor him and that the DR would be in first thing to exam and get a plan of action together. Elijah was on me for an hour after birth and then we had him go the nursery for a few hours so we could get some rest before his next feeding. Two hours later they brought our son back to us. We removed his stocking cap to see how his head was doing … only to reveal HE WAS HEALED!

When the DR came in around 6am he took a look at Elijah baffled, and asked why he was called in?! I pulled up my phone to show him Elijah’s picture after birth and he said, “That doesn’t make any sense!” Which we responded, “Yes, it does! Our God healed him!” Not only did he confirm but our midwifes and the nurses all were speechless and dumbfounded when they came back to see his head. What an amazing testimony for our son. Elijah was named before he was born but for those who do not know his name means “ My God is Yahweh!” I don’t know why God chose to heal our son but I want to do my best to ensure that HE gets ALL THE GLORY!

When God called us to be missionaries we said yes BEFORE we even knew that we were pregnant again. To be honest there was some fear initially but we knew God was leading us to GO and to GO now! This meant that we would complete our Discipleship Training School (DTS) lecture phase, have our baby and then go overseas with a different team. A longer timeline but we knew this is what and when we were being called to go. After completing the DTS & overseas outreach we would then be able to go on staff full-time. Several weeks after bringing our son “home” I remember holding him and just thinking “What IF?!” What if we had said, No!?? What if we had waited for a “better time?” Elijah was already growing in my womb, his life was already on trajectory. But I strongly, and firmly believe that IF we had said “No” I know that we would never have prayed over our son with the same faith that we did. Our time in DTS deepened our faith and broadened our understanding of who God is in ways we never imagined. It is scary to think about “what IF?!” But I am so thankful that we are looking at it from “what if we had said no” instead of “what if we had said yes!”

“And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received[a] it, and it will be yours. Mark 11:22-24 (ESV)