Saturday, May 6, 2017

Next Sunday is Mother's Day. I have been asked to give my testimony at church this day. I am totally freaking out. I know that many people do not like public speaking, but I feel like I might have a severe fear of it. I don't really understand my deep fear, I stand up every day and talk all day in front of my students. I work with 4 year olds and they are the most judgmental audience I will ever face. You know those kids tell you exactly what they think of you 😊.  I have been giving myself a pep talk since I was asked to do this. I also know that friends are praying for me, but I feel like any moment I could call the Pastor up and tell him I cannot do it. I have given my testimony a few times in front of a larger audience, I have always been nervous but those times I focused more on my spiritual walk or how my testimony led me to be a teacher. I have never told my motherhood journey in front of a crowd before. All the other testimonies I have given I mention cancer and I mention the blessing of our kids, but I have never talked specifically about their journey. You wanna know why? Because my emotions get the best of me and crying (lots of crying) takes place. When I talk about my kids and their stories I get so overwhelmed by the details that God worked out to make them mine. Even in the testimony I am sharing next week I am only scratching the surface of the miracle of each of their stories and when I share about them all those details wash over my heart and mind and I cannot contain the tears. I know I have a story to share and my prayer is that my story encourages someone. I am asking that those that read this post will pray for my anxiety. Pray that I can keep my emotions in check next Sunday morning. I have already asked my friends to please take me off the stage if I start to ugly cry and one of them can finish reading my testimony for me 😌.

I decided that I would post my testimony to this blog. Maybe some read my blog and know bits and pieces of my story. Maybe getting it out for people to read will help relieve my anxiety. Maybe someone needs to read it this week with Mother's Day approaching. Maybe it will inspire you to share your story.

I know all too well that Mother’s Day is not an easy day for many women. For many women it is a reminder of broken girlhood dreams and shattered expectations.  For many this day reminds us that our lives did not turn out anything like we had imagined. Shattered expectations of our own relationship with our mom, or maybe relationships with children, unexpected motherhood, and grief over a loss, infertility or in my case barrenness.

My earliest girlhood dream was to be a mother. Even as a young elementary student I was a natural with children and I wanted to be a mother more than anything else in this world when I grew up. In junior high I would learn the terrible truth that some women could not have children or that some would walk a terrible road of pain and despair before they would become a mother. This truth became one of my biggest fears and I would often pray that God would not choose me to be one of these women that could not have children.

I would go to college and meet Jeremy. I would graduate and we would get married. I had finally arrived to adulthood and now being married my dream of being a mom was finally in reach. We were married about a year and we decided that we wanted to add to our family. It would take a few months to realize that there was a problem. I would visit my doctor every few months and each time I would be told that I was young and that my body just needed to work itself out, no need to panic. This would go on for about six months. We moved to SC and I would find a new doctor who would tell me the same thing. After almost two years of waiting for my body to “work itself out”, my doctor would discover a problem but with an outpatient surgery it should take care of the problem I was having. A week after that surgery I would sit in my doctor’s office and be told that I had a type of uterine cancer. This type of cancer is most common in women over the age of 60.  This cancer was so rare in women under the age of 60 that there wasn’t even a percentage of women to document having it, I was 25. I had just been told that I had a deadly disease living in my body, yet I wept because it meant I would never have children.

I would endure 11 months of treatments, doctors, and biopsies. My oncologist had hoped that they could kill the cancer cells without surgery and maybe still give me a chance at having a baby. I just knew that God was going to heal me and give me a child and against all odds we would have our miracle baby. After the 11 months there was not any change in the cancer cells. So at the age of 26 years old I would have a complete hysterectomy. I would leave the hospital 100% cancer free. Physically I would be completely healed from cancer, but the healing came with a price that I wasn’t ready to make. I was broken. I was angry at God. I could not wrap my heart around the fact that a loving God, the Creator of life, the One who opens and closes the womb had done this to me. I was convinced that my heart would be forever broken and my arms forever empty.

We moved back to TN to be closer to family and try to figure out how to live in this new reality. We started the adoption process just a few months after my surgery. We were so heartbroken and we had to do something. I got really good at pretending that I was okay. I knew the right words to say, like “God has a plan” and “He’s still good”, but inside my heart I was holding tight to a bag of all the broken pieces of my life. The tighter I held that bag the thicker the wall of my heart became. My life would begin to be filled with anger, bitterness, jealously, and even hate. I convinced myself that I had a right to hang onto this brokenness because God had done this to me. Even in my hardness to God He continued to pursue me and fight for my heart. In my darkest hour the Lord broke through the darkness and told me that He had something amazing planned for my life, but I needed to give Him the broken pieces. It would only be through the broken pieces could the true beauty of His plan be revealed. So I handed him all the broken pieces of my life and slowly started seeing Hope being restored.

A few weeks would go by and we had hit a standstill with the adoption process. Most adoption agencies have a list of waiting children that are considered special needs. Some of these children have severe medical needs and some are minor issues like they were premature or had a low birth weight. Jeremy called our agency in April of 2005 to see if they had any waiting children. Our social worker told us that just that morning the paperwork for a little boy from Korea had come across her desk. He was six months old and if we were interested she would send us the information on him. Of course we were interested! A week later we would be sitting in a room at our adoption agency and I would have my first sonogram moment. I would see the picture of the most precious boy I had every laid eyes on. In that moment I fell in love with my son. The moment that I knew his life was now more important than my own. The supernatural moment that I was his and he was mine. We would fly to Detroit on June 14, 2005 to get our son. We were waiting at the International gate in the airport and a Korean man walked out the door carrying a tiny baby boy in a carrier on his chest. In an unbelievable gesture this baby boy saw my face and reached for me, as his little hand reached for me the Lord whispered to my heart that healing had come. I would take that baby in my arms and know that God had given me my heart’s desire and forever making our life a testimony of what is means to be adopted into God’s family. That moment of trusting Jesus, reaching for Him and He takes us into His arms and He is ours and we are His.

 We would bring Samuel home and the verse that would continue to be in my heart was Isaiah 43:19 “For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun! Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.” We had been in the wilderness for a long time, but God was making a way and restoring our life.

God was not yet finished with our story. In 2007, we started the adoption process again to adopt a little girl. Just a few months after we started our paperwork we got a call that there was a little girl that would be a perfect match for our family. The next day we would see the face of our precious daughter and we quickly made plans to bring her home. Emma’s journey home is a story within itself. It was a long and agonizing journey as we fought to bring our daughter home after some of her paperwork was misplaced by the immigration office. There were moments on her journey that made us believe that we would never get her home. The pain in my heart only confirmed the fact that she was my daughter and that I was her mother and I would fight as long as I had to to bring her home. We had been in the heat of this battle to get Emma home for about 5 months when we got an unexpected call from our adoption agency. They had a baby come into the system that had some special circumstances and that we would have the first opportunity to adopt this baby. We were in a tough place fighting to get Emma home and financially it seemed absolutely impossible, but from that phone call I knew three things about this baby; I knew that the baby was a girl, the special circumstances as to why they were calling, and that in my heart she was already mine.

Finally, in February 2008 Jeremy and I would fly to Korea to get our daughter Emma. It would become clear to us while in Korea why God had delayed Emma’s homecoming. Since the phone call about the other baby some unexpected things had happened and we were not quite sure if we were going to be able to adopt the second baby girl. The morning we were going to meet Emma we were able to plead our case for the second baby with the Korean agency. We shared our desire to add this little girl to our family. We left Korea with one daughter and we were pretty certain that we would never meet the other daughter that we already loved in our heart.  Emma had been home three months and our social worker sat in our living room, closed Emma’s file and opened another file and said, “Ok, let’s talk about the other baby.”  In November of 2008 God would complete our family and we would bring our Chloe home. I would go from zero children to three children in three years, arms that were empty to arms that were overflowing. Biological children are not random, and my children are not random. Every detail in their life, in my life, point to a Father that orchestrated that our hearts would come together as a family and against all odds I would be given three miracle babies. One of my favorite quotes is by the late missionary and author Elizabeth Elliot, “Of one thing I am perfectly sure: God's story never ends with 'ashes.” Every day I have three amazing reminders of the beauty that came from the ashes of my brokenness. Every day I am humbled and want to give God all the glory for the beautiful, broken story that He is continuing to write.  With all my heart I want my story to point to a Father who loves us and has amazing plans for our life, but we must let Him write the story.