We were married. That’s the beginning. December 7, 2002. Prior to that, I was a goofy teenager. I didn’t know where I was going, or who I was going nowhere with. Until Tim came along.
We married at nineteen and twenty. Freaking babies. We look at wedding pictures and wonder what our parents must’ve been thinking…for children to get married.
Yet, it was the best decision of our mortal lives. (Tim would say the same.) I was twelve when I started thinking about my wedding. I prayed nightly that I would get married young. It was the desire of my heart. Come to find out, Tim was praying the same.
Once married, living in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, we decided we wanted to go to Bible college. More specifically, Charis Bible College in Colorado. At the time, we didn’t have much money. Actually, we didn’t have any money. Our apartment was more than we could afford and I’d relocated to a different department store within the same chain, making less. We had more money outgoing than coming in, so it was miraculous how we paid bills. We still tithed every single week, because we knew Who our source was even as kids. Nonetheless, we started mapping Bible school out in our minds, looking at apartments…planning the how.
But, we didn’t go. Tim wanted to honor his dad by staying to help with the business. So we did. In the midst of the staying, we rented a townhouse in Crestview in 2003, bought a house in Holt in 2004, became foster parents in 2008, obtained the family business and bought a second home in Holt in 2010, opened a pool store in 2011, and then a bigger pool store in 2012. About once every year we would go through a burn-out period, usually toward the end of each summer (the end of our crazy-busy season). And then, the next year we’d light back up after attending a trade show or something else of the sort.
Throughout those years I wanted kids. Badly. Tim wasn’t with me on that train, he was very business-focused. We weren’t officially trying…yet, we weren’t preventing either. (Anyone who’s ever dealt with infertility knows that if you’ve been not preventing for a year or more, doctors start trying to run blood tests and check out the plumbing. We were going on eight years.) Sometime around 2005 Tim and I were driving through town talking about random things. The subject of baby names came up (which was totally weird because he wasn’t the slightest bit interested in having a baby at the time), and we both decided that we loved the name “Noah”.
By 2011, I had pretty much given up. I became inwardly bitter, not even Tim really knew. I told people that I didn’t want kids, and told that lie for so long I actually started to believe it, myself. God knew what I really wanted. I constantly had dreams that would remind me of what I desired. I wrote them all in my journal and stuffed it all way down deep, in a place where feelings and emotions can’t be felt. For a woman, not being able to conceive brings with it despair. You feel inadequate, incomplete and broken. Shame creeps in. The enemy comes to steal, kill and destroy – and that’s exactly what he intended to do. He tried to steal my identity as a woman, he tried to kill me emotionally (and almost succeeded) and destroy my self worth and every bit of confidence that I had in God.
Right in the middle of 2011 – peak season – we had just opened the first pool store…I found out I was pregnant. But, just as soon as I found out, I lost the baby. It was very early, around week six. For the three days before miscarriage symptoms showed up, though, I allowed myself to relish every emotion that comes with pregnancy. It was an amazing feeling to know I was not weird, that my body was able to do what it was created to do. Losing the baby rocked my little world and brought up every negative feeling and emotion that I’d stuffed down. Miscarriage affects you at a completely different level. I wanted to know why it happened. I knew it wasn’t God’s fault, so I blamed myself. After a five-month inward pity party, I had a mission. If it could happen once, then surely it would happen again. I found every promise, every verse and read them out loud. every. single. day.
(At the end of that year we let our foster care license lapse. We were so busy with work that it wasn’t fair to the kids. The two girls we had at the time were sisters and in the process of adoption. They transitioned out in August, right before school started. It was perfect timing.)
The would-be due date of the baby I lost was Valentine’s Day, 2012. I got pregnant a second time just before that date. I was excited because I saw the fruit of standing on the Word, yet I lost that one, too. A week before Valentine’s Day. Angry, frustrated, disappointed and discouraged… Not at God. I knew it wasn’t His fault. I directed everything toward the enemy. It was a theft. Several months before the second miscarriage, God showed me the spirit of miscarriage and explained it as exactly that. The thief stealing.
The weekend I lost baby number two was the same weekend Tim and I attended a Gospel Truth Seminar with Andrew Wommack in Houston, Texas. Just before Valentine’s Day. The timing was impeccable. He spoke on God’s love. Everything I needed to hear was in that message. In the past I would never, ever go up to get prayed for…I’ve always been very independent with all things Spirit. I knew that God had equipped me with everything I needed and He was my Rock. I didn’t need anyone else. But, I did that weekend. The lady told me that our first child would be a girl (I was extremely skeptical, I only wanted boys). And, the very last night Andrew called us out. There was around four hundred people there and we were the only ones going through loss/miscarriage. He told us not to get discouraged, that our kids were coming (in so many words).
That conference also rekindled our desire to attend CBC. I knew in my heart that our kids were in Colorado.
We went home and lived life as normal. I refused to get discouraged and live in my head again. It’s so lonely there. I delved back into work and our local church. We were youth pastoring, doing children’s ministry and whatever else was needed.
Toward the end of 2012, we found out that the two girls we’d had were back in the “system”. And separated. One of them was placed in a group home, so we called her caseworker to find out if we could take her. We did. And, after a long, very drawn-out couple of years, we adopted her. She was twelve by the time the adoption was final. Some time after, I remembered the words of that lady at the GTS in Houston. “Your first child will be a girl”. And, so it was… She changed her name to Charis. (We had absolutely nothing to do with her choice of name. That was all her.)
In 2014, Tim and I were really feeling it. Life was busy, work was busy, church was busy. We were tired. Tired of the day-in-day-out, every day felt the same as the last. We’d always said we didn’t want that.
We officially started planning. We decided that the pool store needed to be closed. It wasn’t something that we could maintain while gone. We closed it at the end of 2014, and moved the office back to the house. It freed us to work toward setting the company up to be run long-distance. In March of 2015 we attended a Campus Days event at the college to see if we truly wanted to be there. It confirmed everything we’d known for the past twelve years. We signed up for the November term of that year, paid the application fee and there it was. A real decision. Not just a hope or dream.
We went back to Florida with a goal. At the time, we weren’t completely sure what it looked like to run that particular type of company without actually being there. We set up systems and programs that allowed us to do it. We sent Charis on a mission trip to Africa for the summer, so we really had nothing else to do but prep the business.
Amongst the day-to-day things, we installed two pools from start to finish, one for my parents and one for a friend of ours. It was a very busy summer.
November finally came. We hadn’t sold our house yet, and the geniuses we were, we decided to buy an RV and live in that for the whole three years of school. It was a brilliant idea. We bought a big toy hauler so Charis could have her own room and bathroom, sold and gave away everything, stocked it up with entirely too much stuff and headed out. Tim, Charis, both dogs and I.
We arrived in Woodland Park on the Thursday before Thanksgiving. (By that time, the school campus had moved from Colorado Springs to Woodland Park.) Tim got the rig all hooked up, and there we were. We spent the next week getting set up to work. Thanksgiving was the following Thursday. And, school started the week after that, on November 30th.
A week into school and two days after our thirteen-year anniversary, I found out I was pregnant. Wow, God… I knew our kids were in Colorado, I just had no idea it would happen that fast. Naturally, after having two losses, your mind kicks into high gear. But, we were in the best place during that time.
And, thus… My life had officially resumed. We did away with the RV, because…no. Nope. I was not going to attempt a baby in an RV with three big people and two dogs. We bought a house in March of 2016, finished our 1st-year of school that summer and on August 21, Noah made a very, very remarkable entrance into the world.
As I write, everything I just told you feels like a dream. My first year of Bible college is a complete blur, as was the entire pregnancy. And, that pregnancy couldn’t have been more perfect, more healthy. Absolutely no complications.
His birth was very different than what I’d imagined. That’s another story.
I’m reminded, just now, of how faithful God is, even when we don’t see what He’s doing right now – behind the scenes. Looking back over this, I can see His hand and how He caused things to move and flow, almost effortlessly. I did not move effortlessly. I questioned Him and circumstances regularly. Yet, even when we question Him, He’s not moved by it.
Trust. Trust Him.
**This was a very nut-shelled version of all that happened. I couldn’t possibly get everything out in one post. I certainly don’t have time to write it, and you most likely don’t have time to read it. 🙂
