My Story: God Is In Control

I’ve been sharing some about my faith and my story recently. What makes me love God? Why do I believe in Him? I talked about how He’s the Ultimate Planner last week and about His Grace before that. Today, I’m going to talk about how God is in control even when it feels like he’s not.

13 Months

We learned through our move that God had a plan for our lives. We had no doubt that we were supposed to be in Denver. That didn’t mean it was going to be easy. The 13 months following our move turned out to be months of growth and stretching for us.

The first few months were an adjustment of course. We found out I was pregnant in mid September and were so excited! Our dog passed away suddenly, and about a month later I started having difficulty with my kidneys. This required several procedures during the pregnancy and caused a good deal of discomfort for me. I was so ready for that baby to be born, but then he was a couple days late! We had to have an emergency C-section and then our little guy ended up on oxygen for several weeks. It just seemed like nothing was going quite according to plan…my plan anyway!

A New Foundation

Those 13 months of difficulty helped to lay a foundation for our life to come. I’m not saying it was the end any difficulty in our life. I don’t think anyone will ever be rid of at least some difficulty, but we grew and became stronger. Some really great things happened during that time. We made new friends, found an awesome church, and really embraced the fact that God’s got our back. It was truly tough at times, but He was always there for us.

The End of The Story?

I wish I had a way to wrap this all up in a nice little bow: “this is why we went through that hard time.” Our baby boy is now healthy, and you would never know that he had any difficulty and needed oxygen. I still sometimes have little twinges of pain from the kidney issues, but all in all I’m healthy. So why was it so hard? Why was he late? Why the oxygen? It feels like there should be a point there. A lesson. A plan. But the truth is we don’t know for sure. We don’t always get to know God’s plan.

We do know a couple things:

Through all the difficulty, and even though there were times I was angry at Him, we grew to lean on God more than we ever had before. We learned that God is in control. I still wonder why the pregnancy was so hard, but maybe our little guy was late, because he needed just a little more time. Maybe he would have been on oxygen even longer had he been on time or early.

That time and the difficulty also may have been the push we needed to find our community. We found a church we loved. We joined a small group and made friends (that’s something we never did in all the years we attended our church in Colorado Springs). They prayed for us and were part of our support system and still are to this day. We love those people and are so thankful for them.

Someday maybe we’ll know more about why we went through all that, but for now, we’re just thankful for what we gained from it: a healthy son, friends, and a deeper relationship with our Savior.