Our children were not "planned"

(this is part 1...I wrote so much it needed three separate posts!)

No, in fact, they were wonderful answers to prayer.

 Before I go any further, let me say this…..this is our journey, our faith story, our convictions, our struggles, our wrestled with thoughts.  Please hear it as such, and not as anything else.

 When I walked down the aisle almost three years ago, my soon to be husband and I were in agreement that we would start thinking about trying for a baby when we celebrated our two year anniversary.  He would finish Seminary while I continued to work full time.  We would save as much money as we could and we would hopefully be in a house by that point.  While we knew we wanted a large family, we also wanted to enjoy married life without being burdened with children yet.

 About a month later we were driving home from a wedding of some dear friends.  I had been struggling a lot with feeling as though God was tugging at my heart.  I began to share these struggles with my husband.  Imagine my surprise when God had been nudging him about the exact same things!  We both felt trapped.  We felt as though we were so certain of how the next 2.5 years of our marriage would work out that we were leaving very little room to truly trust God to work in our marriage and lay the foundation of our future.  We felt convicted about our attitude towards not wanting children…yet.  We felt uncertain about our future career plans…(this would later be made QUITE clear that this was not an intended direction after all.)  We felt….we felt we needed to surrender one particular area of our lives to God.

I went off the pill….almost as quickly as I had went on it.  Honestly, it was making me sick and causing a whole host of other problems.  We believed our doctor when she said it could take several months.  We were not trying, nor were we preventing.  We were trusting.

Two sweet pink lines showed up on the same day America elected Barack Obama to office.  I was shocked, scared & delighted….all at the same time.  We were starting a family, and yet, we had barely unpacked from our Honeymoon. 

Thoughts of “what will people think” flooded my heart before the test was even dry.  I knew what they would think….because I’ve been on the opposite side as well.  And we had to answer questions…the worst was/is “was she planned?”  There were several times that I cried to my husband that people would always think our daughter was an “accident.”  In our minds, she was just the beginning stage of a deep faith journey God was about to take us on. 

She was planned by Him…a gift to us….to know Him more…..

stay tuned for parts 2 & 3