Becoming a Lady in Waiting

This morning I was blessed to be able to share a bit of my life's journey with the women of The Crossing Church.  Below is the transcript of my talk.  I know I've shared some of these details in bits and pieces in various blog posts over time, but here is a bit more details of the story God has been writing with my life.

I first joined Women’s Bible Study at The Crossing in September 2005. To this day, I can still recount many of the Hearts of Women who have spoken before me. I can’t tell you in words what a blessing it has been in my life to hear so many of your stories and how they have touched and impacted me over the years. This truly is one of my favorite things about Women’s Bible Study. So, what a privilege I feel it is now to be able to share some of what God has done as He has written and continues to write the story of my life.


I was born in Louisville, KY and was raised by a loving mom and dad who tried to teach me morals although I wasn’t raised in a Christian home. We attended church sporadically and during one brief spurt of churchgoing when I was a junior in High School, I was baptized because I had never been and thought it might be a good thing to check off the list, if you know what I mean. But I never really knew Jesus and what it truly meant to follow Him and am sad to say that my life really didn’t change very much. The terms Sin and Grace and Holy Spirit just seemed like words to me and I never understood much about any of it. I never really met any Christians I thought were any fun and none of the churches I attended ever made being a Christian seem very attractive to me. So I chose to make my own plan for my life with little regard for what God wanted for me. In fact I can’t remember once ever asking Him.

To give you more perspective on my personality, I’ve always been what could be described as Type A…a go-getter…driven…goal oriented…a do-er. God blessed me academically as well as professionally but I took way too much credit for my life. As soon as I had accomplished one aspect of my plan I was on to the next. There were very few things I set out to achieve that I was not successful at. I graduated from the University of Louisville with a degree in Marketing at 22, bought my first house all by myself, got engaged and married within a year of graduating. My plans were moving right along according to schedule. When it came time to have children, no children would come. Four years later, it would have been convenient to blame the failure of my marriage on the lack of children we produced. A more accurate explanation was that our marriage was not centered on God, we were not attending church, I was young and selfish, felt that I was entitled to happiness, wasn’t willing to even try to make things work and figured basically that if I wasn’t going to be a mom, why should I bother with staying married? So I checked out. I’m not proud of that. I dealt with guilt from that decision for quite a while...but God has still been able to use that part of my story for His Glory.

Not long after my 27th birthday in 2000, during the time when I was probably farthest from God, I was still living in Louisville and traveled to Joplin for work where I met Jeremy in a bar. God’s hand was on me that night and I thank him every day that Jeremy is the kind of man that he is because that chance meeting could have just as easily ended in disaster. I was a prime target for disaster. But God protected me, He already knew this man He would have for me and as He would have it, we began dating. After about a year of a long distance relationship, I moved to Joplin. We were engaged at Christmas 2001 and married March 24th 2002. Although we met under less than ideal circumstances, God was working in our lives to draw us closer to Him. Jeremy was raised by a family deeply rooted in their faith. He had a quiet, not in your face, faith about him that I loved right away although he wasn’t active with any church at the time. I began developing a relationship with his family and over time began to feel God pulling me to learn more about him and what it really meant to have a relationship with the Lord. I was growing some in Him through bible studies with Jeremy’s mom but it wasn’t until the 3rd year of our marriage when Jeremy and I moved to Columbia and started attending the Crossing in 2005 that we found a church home to call our own. We started attending regularly, went through the Discovery Class and became members that fall. Little did I know that was just the tip of the iceberg of what my walk with the Lord would become. We, and more definitely I, was about to embark on the pilgrimage of a lifetime…personally and spiritually. The relationship I was building with the Lord, as well as the relationships I was building with many of you, would be what would sustain me over the next three years.

Around the same time we joined the Crossing we began to get more serious about our desire to become parents. Because of my previous marriage and lack of pregnancy, I knew it would be difficult getting pregnant. I had seen doctors in the past about irregular and lack of cycles and other reproductive issues but in the beginning Jeremy and I were not really ready for kids anyway. When we did decide we were ready we were pretty haphazard with seeking help from physicians. And although I had grown closer to the Lord I still had not really turned to Him much in this area of my life. I finally scheduled an appointment with a fertility specialist in May 2006.

After 4 years of marriage and no children, I was starting to really feel “infertile”. What does that feel like? It feels sad; heartbreaking even. It feels like failing as a woman and a wife. It feels like being out of total control. It feels like you’re “sick” even when you feel fine, like your body doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. It feels like being an outsider when your friends are all talking about mommy stuff. It feels like giving up on a dream…dysfunctional...disappointing.

It’s fluctuating between feeling like you deserve this punishment from God because of sinful pasts and then turning around to question God in self-righteousness because every day another woman who you deem as undeserving of having a child is pregnant. It feels like doubting God’s promises…that they might not apply for me. I could hold it together in public and even with my closest friends and family but in the private corners of my mind and heart I would go through almost all of these feelings daily. It was a time filled with fear that if my life didn’t play out the way I wanted; if I didn’t become a mom, then my life would always be filled with sadness. That I might never be truly happy.

One of the most descriptive words I can think of is waiting. Waiting on Dr’s visits. Waiting until another ovulation cycle. Waiting for 2 weeks to take yet another pregnancy test. Waiting when it feels like time is running out, month after month, birthday after birthday. Waiting when you’re yearning for something that you don’t know you’ll ever have. Waiting for the next chapter of your life to start, and just feeling like life is on hold for you while everyone else is moving on with theirs. Waiting when you are feeling very impatient with God’s timing.

Becoming a Lady in Waiting was the hardest part, and the part that I felt God most used to shape my character to become more like Jesus. Maybe you’ve heard the term Lady in Waiting in historical contexts. Technically speaking, a Lady-in-Waiting is a servant; most commonly found tending to the English Monarchies; a female personal assistant to a noble court, attending to a queen, a princess or other noblewoman. She was of lower rank than the one she attended too. In present day England, there’s an Infertility Support group called Ladies in Waiting. When I first learned about this support group I felt like it described me perfectly, but only from the standpoint of how I was waiting for my prayers to be answered. When would God come through for me? How many more weeks and months would I wait to become a mom? How many more treatment cycles and pregnancy tests would I take? Over time, after much prayer, I began to see myself in a different way. Not only could I directly relate to the “waiting” roller-coaster but I also started thinking about myself as a servant to the Lord. I began to seek ways I could serve Him and use this Wait in my life for his Glory. I was becoming a Lady-in-waiting to our Lord.

Whether or not any of you have struggled with infertility, maybe at some point in life you’ve struggled with at least one or more of these emotions. I’ve come to realize that my personal struggle just happens to be infertility. Yours might be something totally different but it all comes back to the same thing. We all have struggles. Being able to trust God’s plan for your life, turning your life over to him, and then waiting patiently for Him to reveal His plan is the key to getting through them.

“But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”   Romans 8:24-25 (NIV)

While all these feelings were raging around inside me God was blessing me with the support I needed to grow as a believer but He was also surrounding me with the very thing that was hardest for me to deal with. Almost all of the ladies in my social circles were either pregnant or already had infants or toddlers. My small group had to have been the most fertile group in the church, save one couple…us. The hardest times were when the pregnancy announcements came. While we were joyful for our friends and family, it always reminded us of our own personal longing. My personal low point, while I’m ashamed to admit it, was the pregnancy announcement from my sister-in-law. But still, I tried to allow God to use me. I served Him. I made meals, bought gifts, put together showers…I made cupcakes. I started consulting the bible and reading everything I could find in it about infertility. I was introduced to Hannah, Sarah and Rachel.

In 2007 I was blessed to be able to co-lead a group of women through the book Hannah’s Hope which I felt had been written just for me. The cover spoke of “Finding God’s Heart in the Midst of Infertility, Miscarriage and Adoption Loss.” God used that semester of bible study with 7 wonderful ladies to build a support system around me of other women who knew how I felt and were going through the same things I was.

Something else began happening. I began praying not just for a baby as I had been for years (aka. “my plan”) but to seek after what God wanted for my life. I had to ask myself whether or not that included a baby would I still be fulfilled by God’s plan? At first I honestly couldn’t say yes. I was so overwhelmed with fear of what I might never have that I couldn’t focus on what God really did have in store for me. Thoughts of never being able to experience the joy of seeing that pregnancy test turn positive, being able to see Jeremy’s face when I told him we were going to have a baby; or the faces of my parents and Jeremy’s parents. Being able to carry a baby inside and have that time of bonding. All those things haunted me. I didn’t trust that God’s plan would ultimately make me happier than the dreams I had for myself. And that hurt. But with time and prayer God revealed more of himself and I felt a certainty growing within me.

“I am still confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the LORD
in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the LORD.
-Psalm 27: 13-14

This verse became my mantra. I would tell myself every day, that yes I would see God’s goodness in my life. My faith grew based on that promise. I held tighter and tighter to that truth as I began to allow my grasp on my future family to loosen. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. It came with kicking and screaming and tears and pain. It wasn’t as graceful as I had hoped but peace was coming. I began to know without doubt that whether or not I ever became a mom, my story would have a happy ending. It may not be the ending I would have written, or even an earthly one, but I trusted the Lord with my life and the path he would have me walk. I knew that he would write an ending that only He could and that it would be far better than anything I could dream of on my own.

While the emotional and spiritual growth was occurring, we were continuing on our infertility medical treatment journey, still trying to conceive a biological child. We progressed down a road of increasingly aggressive treatments. Think “shots, surgeries, turkey basters, lots of pokes, prods, blood work, pelvic exams, ultrasounds, etc.” After two pretty intense years of this without even the faintest “+” on a pee stick…in 2008 we were nearing our last resort. In-Vitro Fertilization. Considering this option came with no small amount of grief itself and giving up yet another dream of how my children would be conceived. On one hand, God was opening doors to make us feel like this was a path he was leading us down. I was blessed with health insurance that covered the majority of the $10,000+ procedure. But with the elimination of financial barriers came a new set of spiritual questions. Just because it was possible for us to proceed, was it really what we   wanted? Was it really what God wanted for us? Were we playing ”God?” Were we forcing a baby into our family that maybe God never intended us to have? What if we were punished and the baby didn’t make it, wasn’t healthy? And question upon question compiled. The day we were to start our IVF cycle, our 6 year wedding anniversary, March 24, 2008 we actually almost didn’t proceed. Maybe it was the final fear of failure. What if we pursued this last option and it too failed. What would that mean for me as a mother? What would that mean for our marriage, our future family? How long would I grieve before I could begin to allow God to build the life for me He intended? While I had a growing faith that the life would be good, I still had fear of how much pain I would endure getting there.

I found this verse:
“If the Lord delights in a man’s way, he makes his steps firm;
Though he stumble, he will not fall, for the Lord upholds him with his hand”
Psalm 37: 23-24

Only after about 6 straight hours of prayer and meditation did I finally hear what God was trying to tell me that day.
1) HE had opened the doors for us financially and otherwise for IVF
2) HE was still in control of all things.
3) No amount of medical intervention would conceive a child that God had not already intended to join our family.
4) I was giving myself, my doctors and medicine way too much credit to the ultimate design and outcome for our family.

And that night, after a date night dinner to celebrate 6 years of marriage…I took my first shot of Lupron…another cycle, our first and last IVF cycle began.

On April 14, 2008 the Lord gave us eight babies. Eight little embryos were created from surgically retrieving eggs from my ovaries and fertilizing them with Jeremy’s sperm in a Petri dish. 5 days later, we had lost three of them but five of them had reached the blastocyst stage and could either be transferred back to my uterus or frozen. We transferred these two…

We had no guarantees that either of them would actually implant and survive so yet another period of waiting began.
This is what love and life looks like in its earliest stages.
This is what hope looks like microscopically.
9 days later I had the first of two positive blood tests and then more waiting until we could have our first ultrasound to see if there would be one or two babies.
This is the earliest picture I have of my two year old twins, Chance and Luci.

Pregnancy was a breeze in the beginning. No morning sickness. Jeremy and I even traveled to Italy knowing that it would be a long time before we would ever have the opportunity to travel anywhere after the babies came. I did at one point have some minor bleeding around 11 weeks that was scary, but while I was waiting for Jeremy to come home from work and take me to the Doctor I felt a very distinct peace come over me and heard the Lord very clearly say…”This is not to be your trial…”. I interpreted that to mean that I would not lose the babies that day and sure enough we went to the Dr. and both little hearts were still beating away. I was the happy, non-complaining, pregnant little lady I always knew I would be for the next 10 weeks. I was convinced God had used the one thing that would make me feel totally out of control, infertility, to realize truly how awesome he is. And I had realized it. So I felt sure the trial of my life was behind me. I was so grateful for this undeserved blessing of two little babies. I was going to be a mommy, finally! Yet at the same time, as ashamed as I am to admit it, I realized I was drawing more into myself and our new life changes and relying less on the Lord day by day. Life was moving on. The Lord had other plans for me. I was about to find out what He meant when He said “THIS is not to be your trial…” that day I had started bleeding. For a different trial was planned for me instead.

At 21 weeks I went on bed rest for a shortened cervix and premature labor. My babies were not even yet at the stage where they could be considered viable. Jeremy made me scrambled eggs with ham and cheese for breakfast every morning before he left for work and Dr. Grant started meds to help control the contractions. The pre-term labor was only the beginning of the journey. At 22 weeks, I started having severe panic and anxiety attacks. Irrational fears would grab hold of me at the most unexpected moments. I had trouble breathing; I feared I was going to die. I feared my babies were going to die. I felt Satan lurking in every corner. I was claustrophobic. I was in bad shape and it was putting my babies in deeper jeopardy.

Ladies, if you are not aware of the support and love and prayer and hugs and food that is available to you in this room when you need it, let me just share with you a little about the women who came to my rescue during the weeks I was on bed rest. After one email, ladies lined up every day to come into my home and talk with me, pray with me, pray for me. These weren’t just any ladies. These were women I had looked up to over the years in bible study. Women I felt could stand in the shoes of my own mom, in her absence, since she lived out of town. Not because of their ages specifically, most of them aren’t old enough to actually be my mom, but because of their life experiences and the peace of God that I always had felt when I had spent time with them in the past. These are ladies you know. Anita, Brenda, Kristin, Jeannette, Dee Dee, Dari and many others from our prayer ministry here at The Crossing.

I dug into scripture like I had never dug before. It was the only thing that calmed me during that time. Reading scripture, praying, journaling. God had systematically removed all the other mindless entertainment and clutter from my life. All the things you would think you would do if you were confined to bed for an extended period of time, had no attraction to me and in fact made my anxiety worse. Movies, books, music, TV…they were all unsafe. I couldn’t predict what might set me into panic mode. The more I dug into scripture the better and safer I felt. The more I felt God’s presence in my life, holding me, as I never had before…even through all those years of infertility.

“I raise my eyes toward the mountains,
Where will my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord.
The Maker of Heaven and Earth”
Psalm 121: 1-2

“He tends his flock like a shepherd
He gathers the lambs in his arms and holds them close to his heart
He gently leads those who have young.”
Isaiah 40: 11

Through these verses, among many others that were brought to me by those wonderful ladies, I found comfort. I meditated on them day and night. I began to rely on the Lord like I had never relied on him before and I slowly calmed down, my labor started to subside and things were stabilizing with the pregnancy. This support continued for the next 9 weeks. At 30 weeks after a routine appointment showing the babies were doing great and I was holding steady, some lab work came back and I found myself in shock as my Dr. told me he suspected I was becoming pre-ecclamptic and sent me immediately to labor and delivery for more labs. The on-call OB came in and instead of giving me my results said she was ordering steroid shots. That’s when I knew I was about to meet my babies for the first time.

We were told not to expect to hear our babies cry upon delivery but that they would get them on their vents right away. October 30, 2008, at 30 weeks 3 days at 12:07 pm I heard a baby crying. It happened so fast and was so surreal I couldn’t register what I was hearing. I thought maybe there was another delivery taking place right beside me or something. I had to ask Jeremy, “Is that MY baby?” It was. Chance Michael was born defying the odds and screaming with everything he could muster from his 3 pound 8 ounce body. It was the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. At 12:08, another cry when his sister Luci Bella entered the world. She weighed 2 pounds 13 ounces. 5 ½ weeks later, after more waiting, Chance and Luci left the NICU and joined us at home at 36-weeks gestational age. Finally our home was full of babies!

It’s hard to go into much detail in so little time about what life was like as a mother of preemie twins. While I remained thankful to God for all he had carried us through, I was finding no time to spend with him in those days. The less time I spent with Him, the more I realized that while I was so incredibly grateful for my babies and I loved them more than I could have ever imagined…they weren’t going to be the fulfillment of my life’s dream. I was in the mommy club, I was happy, but still there was something missing. I knew I needed God in my life more than ever. Only he was going to fill that remaining place in my heart, only he would truly ever make my life complete and allow me to be truly content.

Today Chance and Luci are like any other healthy, growing, mischievous 2 year olds. They are all caught up from their preemie days. We are so blessed.

This past March, we transferred two of our remaining three frozen embryos back to my uterus. March 11 we were again blessed with a positive pregnancy test. Unfortunately, at our 6 and 7 week ultrasound there was only one gestational sac, and no yolk or heartbeat seen within. I miscarried Easter weekend. August 12 we transferred our last remaining embryo, conceived on the same day as Chance and Luci. We are thrilled to be expecting another daughter on April 30. I’m 29 weeks pregnant, no bed rest in sight, no panic, no anxiety, and no premature labor. It really does make a difference when there’s only 1 baby in there! This baby has come with joy and celebration but also with some tears. Knowing after all these years that our family is finally going to be complete is bittersweet. I was reminded recently of a verse my sweet sister-in-law Heather sent to encourage me, in December 2006, after I had just finished another fertility cycle and taken yet another negative pregnancy test.

"Though the fig tree does not bud...
Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.
The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to go on the heights. "
-Habakkuk 3:17-19

We began our journey with waiting and counting and numbers. Over time I learned to wait with a bit more grace, God made me into a Lady, His lady in waiting. There were many hurdles along the way. The hurdles were high and not spaced by inches and feet but weeks, months...days. Surely more hurdles will come. But I’m trusting in God and know that He will give me feet like a deer, that I may jump these hurdles in leaps of joy.