Celebrating our daughter’s first birthday came quicker than I thought it would! I know I know…. it was a year on the calendar BUT it still snuck up on us! This past year, time went by slowly and quickly all at the same time.  While we were decorating for the party my mom said “just think about what you were doing this time a year ago!” and I said “naaaaah” …. See… This time last year I spent 6 uncomfortable,painful, exhausting, and honestly…. traumatizing days in the hospital. 70 hours of labor. 3 hours of pushing. I plan on sharing my birth story soon. Once I can gather the words together.

During our stay I had several… ummm…. unpleasant procedures done. Unpleasant is putting it very lightly. I won’t go into those details here… I’ll save that for my birth story post.  One of the procedures was so painful that I told all the nurses and doctors that I was not having anymore kids. The procedure was supposed to happen every 6 hours and from the moment it happened I started dreading the next time! After about 3 hours I got a new doctor (because our stay was so long we had a new one each day) and I explained to her how painful it was and how it made me not want to have anymore kids and she said “well, we can’t have that!” and she changed my orders and the procedure was not done again! I am pretty sure I said “Thank You Jesus!” when she did that!

However, that moment had planted a seed of fear. The pain from a few more procedures to come would water that seed. The coming days, weeks, and months of motherhood and all the challenges that brought would also feed the seed of fear. Motherhood was not what I had imagined. It was a shock to my system I didn’t know how to control. And the truth is I couldn’t control it but I was trying to anyways and I wore myself out.  I did not know fear had been planted until I got a text from a friend that she had had a dream that I was pregnant and was due in September! At the time that would have meant I was pregnant…. right then! The text made fear show its ugly head and I finally recognized that I was scared of being pregnant again.

The Lord used my friends dream to reveal to me that I was living in fear of one of His gifts. I did not want to fear a gift from the Lord. I wanted to be a grateful daughter. If I was pregnant I wanted to praise the Lord instead of allow the enemy to shackle me with fear. I wanted to be free enough to accept this gift if it was being given.

 Children are a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from him. Psalm 127:3

See… since my friend shared her dream with me it made a big part of me think I was pregnant and just didn’t know it yet.  That thought made me face the possibility and I had to deal with it. I shared all of this with my Bible Study ladies when we met one week and of course they reminded me how God had already used my experiences for good. They helped me talk it out a bit… I usually don’t even know I need to “talk something out” until I go to group! (PLUG: Find a Bible Study group and start going this week! 😀 )

They also prayed for me and reminded me that God is the redeemer of all things. And that if I had been pregnant God would use it to redeem my last experience.

You came near when I called on you; you said, ‘Do not fear!’ “You have taken up my cause, O Lord; you have redeemed my life. Lamentations 3:57-58

Over the next couple of weeks God did a work in me. One of the moments where things really started to shift in my heart as well as my mind was at church one Sunday. Our Pastor’s wife was sharing and was about to pray for people with fear. She listed several things …. but the one that hit me was when she said I want to pray for “anyone with fear of a baby”… I thought to myself “what did she just say? who says that? fear… of a baby?!” BUT then it hit me that that was for me…that that was me. Sitting next to my sweet hubby holding our almost one year old baby girl I was reminded of God’s faithfulness over the last year… I wanted to trust God. So I laid down that fear in order to be able to pick up trust instead… to be free… I purposefully traded in my fear for trust. Trust that God’s timing would be best. Trust that He would always work things out for my good. Trust that He would deliver me from all my fears and be with me if I ever had to deliver a baby again.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28