OK @Pater15
A Personal Testimony; every bit of this story is true!
I was a young Christian, newly married, and barely living from paycheck to paycheck when I received the most wonderful news a young husband can hear; we were pregnant. This Jesus I was just learning about had decided to entrust my wife and me with one of His human beings to raise in His ways. I was elated and petrified at the same time. As the pregnancy progressed, we prepared for the arrival of our child. At around 7 months, my wife was larger than expected, so our doctor asked my wife to have something called a “sonogram”; an new emerging technology at the time, that seemed like magic to me. The sonogram technician performed the noninvasive test quietly, without emotion, and refused to tell us anything that she was seeing in the images on her screen, citing some hospital rule blab la bla.. When it was completed, she said the Doctor wanted to meet with us. Our suspicion was he was going to tell us we were having twins, and I was glorifying God, praying thankfulness for His manifold gifts.
Sitting in a small room, across a desk from the Doctor, he said, without hesitation, “There is no good way to tell you this, but your baby doesn’t have a head.” We were in shock. The news hit us like a piano falling on our head. “What? What are you saying? Everything has been going fine, even better than fine. What are you talking about”. The doctor coldly told us that our child was “anencephalic”, which means the baby’s head does not develop completely due to a “neural tube defect”. These words were a foreign language to me, and I could not process the gravity of the news; my poor wife was weeping. The doctor immediately began explaining the abortion procedure he would perform, in graphic detail. My new Christianity reared up inside me as I rose to my feet and proclaimed “We will not be aborting our baby!” The doctor tried explaining how we would not be doing anything wrong to abort the baby since the child could never live in this condition. If we refused the abortion, due to the anencephaly, our pregnancy would probably continue past 10 months and even into the 11th month. He intimated that we would have to live for possibly the next four months knowing we were going to deliver a baby who would not live. We left his office defiant, and without consenting to his solution.
My mother-in-law was a nurse, and my wife called her in panic and confusion. Her mother practiced in a hospital 200 miles away, and she invited us to come and meet with a doctor she knew for a second opinion. We did exactly what she told us to do, since we had no idea how to handle this situation. The second doctor was a sweet-natured man, who sympathized with our situation, reperformed the test, and came to the same conclusion; our baby had a severe neural tube defect that interfered with cranial development. He told us he did not perform abortions, but that is the medically indicated course of action. I cried out to Jesus, I cried out in pain, I begged for intervention. The second doctor confirmed that in cases like this, my wife would most likely carry the nonviable fetus for 10 to 11 months before delivering. My newly-minted Christian ethics stood in stark contrast to consistent medical advice. My wife was a pile of butter, she could not think about anything but loss.
We went to my mother-in-law’s house, sat alone in their living room, and I began praying for God to deliver some answers, some direction, some insight, some help, some intervention, something! As I prayed, my wife began having contractions. We thought it was due to her stress so we ignored them for hours, as I continued to pray. When her contractions became regular and painful, I decided to call the doctor back that we had just seen. His staff spoke with him and assured us the contractions were “false labor” and they would subside. They did not! I called again and the doctor agreed to see us again, after his normal office hours had ended.
We arrived as the last patient was leaving for the day, and the doctor tried reassuring us, but agreed to examine my wife. He emerged from the exam room and said to me, “This is unexplainable, but your wife is in full labor, and dilated to the extent that she needs to be in the hospital NOW!” He agreed to meet us at the hospital, where my mother-in-law was working, as soon as he could get there.
We arrived at the hospital, had my mother-in-law paged, and proceeded to the delivery suite with haste. A few minutes later, the doctor arrived in just enough time to catch my newborn daughter as God pushed her from my wife’s womb into his latex-gloved hands. She weighed a little over 6 lbs, was swaddled with care, and died a few minutes later. My wife never got to hold her. I met my wife in recovery and we prayed together. The Lord miraculously flooded both our souls with His unmatched peace that surpassed our understanding. We were filled with His love that is deeper than I can imagine, and overwhelmed in His unexplainable favor. Right there, in the recovery room, my wife and I named our new daughter Grace.
Later that evening, my Father-in-law came to the hospital, pulled me aside, and told me to not worry about any funeral arrangements, he would take care of everything. He did. Later I found out that He had his own mother’s grave opened, and had our newborn Grace buried on top of His own mother. I didn’t even know that was possible.
We still think of Grace often. We eventually had three boys, one of which delivered a daughter on Graces’ birthday, and she was named Tessa Grace.
Grace, grace, God’s grace,
grace that will pardon and cleanse within;
Grace, grace, God’s grace,
grace that is greater than all our sin.
KP
but then reassured him… “blessed (pleased, or made happy) are those who have not seen, and yet still believe.”.