I haven’t written very much in the past 3 years.  I haven’t posted anything on my blog since 2023.  I have so much inside, and it is time to get it out.  I fear exposure and being too vulnerable, but I also know my story is not just my own. I know there are others out there who have lived through a hard, hard season and may be haunted by the trauma left behind.

I want to tell my story of God’s goodness in it all!

               The year 2023 started with many God encounters.  I experienced the love of God as my father and my mother in deeper ways than I had before.  Jesus started opening my heart to His romantic advances.  I had knowledge of this divine romance, but had little experience with it. Jesus was wooing me!  Waves and waves of His love would roll over me culminating at the Women’s Encounter in March (called Waves) when I discovered that I was pregnant at 47 with baby 11. I was so thrilled!  Intimacy produces good fruit, doesn’t it?

               I had so much faith for this season.  I prayed that God would redeem all trauma from my 10^th pregnancy and birth. I prayed for supernatural healing and for the best pregnancy and birth yet!  I heard through a couple sources a word from God, “I will give you all that you have asked for (1 Kings 5:8).” 

               I asked for a homebirth that would redeem the nightmare homebirth turned ambulance ride from 5 years ago.  But the health care professionals I reached out to labeled me “high risk.”  God worked a miracle!  I friend introduced me to a “Crunchy Mama” Facebook page which introduced me to a “Homebirth” page which introduced me to a midwife who was currently pregnant with her 10^th, in her 40s, and had successfully delivered many women like me at home.

               I struggled to get through the first trimester, but that is always the case for me.  I was looking forward to the second trimester and taking the family vacation we had already planned for June.  That beautiful, glorious vacation at a house along the Loyalsock Creek began my descent into despair.  I had been hoping to be full of energy for every family outing, but I had to push myself to do anything.  I still was nauseous from the first trimester, but the aches and pains plus varicose veins from the third trimester were already upon me. I had picked out the cutest outfit to wear on a date with Chris, but alas, I was already too big to wear it! Feeling old, big, and ugly; I still looked for a God encounter.

God speaks to me on every vacation we take, and this year we had revisited the area where I had first spotted an eagle. I had purchased a photo of the eagle at the Hills Grove General Store right before I walked outside and saw the eagle in person!  That was six years ago, and what a wonderful adventure it has been, learning to soar with God above the earth. I tell all about it in previous blog post , and part 2

               We planned a trip to the same store which is now called the McCarthy Mercantile.  It looked much the same, but no eagles inside or outside! That was on Tuesday. On Wednesday I was talking to God about seeing an eagle again. It had been such a long time since I had seen one.  We were leaving Saturday morning, and I didn’t want my God encounter to slip away.  I was standing by an open window, listening to the rushing water of the creek outside. What a calming sound.

               “This time it isn’t about the eagle.  It is about the water,” I heard God say.

               Oh, it was so good to hear His voice!  But what did He mean?  I loved the symbol of the eagle dearly and missed it.  I pictured the waterfall that Much-Afraid beheld in Hinds Feet on High Places. The water was joyfully leaping down the mountain, to be broken on the rocks and to flow ever lower until it met with the expanse of the ocean. 

               “Am I supposed to be like that? To go lower and lower and to pour myself out like a drink offering?  To not care if I live or die.  To be happy about sorrow and suffering?”

               This thought was not nearly as thrilling as soaring like an eagle.  Even though I knew that God is always good and loving, I felt discouraged.

               “This isn’t what I wanted, what I was hoping for,” I whispered to Him.  If He offered me comfort, I did not hear it.

               As the second trimester was nearing the third, I couldn’t resolve my severe anemia, and I blamed it for all my weird symptoms like shortness of breath, extreme fatigue, and an unsteadiness that hindered me from walking in a straight line.  I was supposed to be out walking, but I felt like I couldn’t walk!  I was supposed to be doing exercises, but I felt like I could hardly move. I finally received an iron infusion and prayed that it would work since my midwife had been threatening to transfer my care to Divine Mercy Hospital.

               It worked, at least my bloodwork said it did.  But I felt no different. I wondered how I was going to get through my third trimester with this feeling and my core muscles already threatening to give out on me completely. Despite God’s love for me, one thought kept returning.

               “If God loves me so much, why would He want me to suffer?”

               In September I had a dream that felt very spiritual.  In my dream, I was on vacation in the mountains at a Christian Retreat Center.  I was sleeping so much that I hadn’t even seen the mountains.  I saw two of my other friends heading out for a hike, and I didn’t want them to think that I couldn’t handle my pregnancy, so I rushed to follow them.  My five-year-old daughter Aria joined me. 

               When we stepped out to take a walk, we found ourselves viewing a cityscape like New York City.  We were in a high rise with floor to ceiling glass and the view was amazing!  I saw some very large birds flying among the skyscrapers and stepped closer to the glass.  Could they be eagles?

               One bird started flying straight for me and in excitement I thought, “This could be my God Encounter!”

               The eagle flew right up to the glass and hovered there. It was much larger than I had first thought.  Horror filled my heart as I saw what the eagle really was. It was covered with fluffy white feathers, and one wing had been mangled.  The bloody twisted bones protruded where the feathers had been stripped.  But it’s face!  Not the face of an eagle but the face of a man.  A man with chalky white skin and pink and red makeup drawn haphazardly around the eyes, like a clown you would see in a horror movie.  Oh, how I wished that Aria wasn’t with me to witness this dreadful sight.

               I saw the expression on the ghastly face.  It was smiling at me. No, smirking at me.  It knew something I didn’t know and was wickedly happy about it.

Mocking me as though it was saying, “So you have trusted God?  I am going to enjoy picking you apart bit by bit.”

               I woke up with a start and didn’t know what to think.  The next few days the face of that eagle would flash through my mind and each time my trauma response increased.  Finally, I sought God and asked Him to explain it to me.

               He answered in His gentle way, “That is how you are seeing me right now.  You feel sorry for yourself because you feel mistreated by me. You wonder if I am good and you wonder if I love you.  Take that belief system to the ultimate end and you get a God who delights in torturing you.  That is not who I am.”

               I felt ashamed!  Yet unable to get out from under it.  Finally, I told Chris about the dream and how I felt about God telling me that it is not about the eagle this time but the water.  He helped to bring me out of my hormonal haze and show me reality. He saw the water as a very positive thing. He sent me a video of water flowing over a dam so I could hear the sound whenever I needed it.  When I listened to it, I heard, “Nothing bad has happened.”  I was fearing and worrying over many things, but none of them had manifested…except my sorrow and suffering.  How to bear up under it?

               Pastor Charles had been doing a series on Strongholds, and I realized that I had one: a mindset impregnated with hopelessness about situations contrary to God’s will that I had accepted as unchangeable.  I was sitting in church listening, but pain in my back and neck wouldn’t allow me to stay any longer. I had to get up and go to the bathroom.  A dear friend and prayer counselor, Lori, was in the ladies’ room, and she asked me how I was doing.  I probably mustered a “pretty good” or “ok”, but actually I was in the depths of despair.  Lori looked me in the eyes and said, “Are you depressed?”  I don’t think I have ever answered “yes” to the question before, but I did this time.

               She whisked me off to her prayer room and, oh the tears and wonderful words of God that were released there.  It was a lifeline to keep me going.

               I texted Chris, who was still in the service, about where I was.  He forgot to check his phone, so after the service, he had many of the women scouring every nook and cranny of the church to find me.  He was worried enough to organize a search party, and I felt so loved!

               The rest of my pregnancy became about trusting moment by moment, getting as comfortable as I could, and sleeping.  I was able to sleep 14 hours a day and still felt exhausted, but how glorious was the sleep!  I began to visualize how I wanted my labor to go.  The bulk of the contracting and dilating would happen while I slept.  I would wake up to discover that my baby had dropped into position.  He would slide out easily. I wouldn’t be pregnant anymore!  I could eat whatever I wanted!  I could sit and nurse to my heart’s content!  I could meet this mysterious little man who flipped and twisted and laid himself out diagonally inside me.

               At 38 weeks I received a phone call from my midwife. She explained that my bloodwork came back with some very bad numbers, and she was worried that I had a condition I had never heard of before (some rare form of preeclampsia).  She used a lot of words, but I understood almost none of them.  She wanted me to pack a bag and go to Divine Mercy to be induced immediately!   I wanted to collapse in bed and wail, but I had visitors sent by Ashlyn’s case worker to set up care for her.  I got through the meeting and received another call from the midwife. 

               “I called Divine Mercy. They told me that your bloodwork isn’t as bad as I thought. I can monitor you until you deliver, and if your blood pressure doesn’t go up and your bloodwork doesn’t get worse, you should be fine. But you must take your blood pressure twice a day, eat protein every hour, and double your water intake,” she said. 

Now I had many more hoops to jump through to secure my homebirth but…phew!  I was incredibly relieved!!      

               This baby was going to come early…any day now, I just knew it.  He was so heavy and so low, he just had to be ready.  My midwife had explained that mothers of many babies tend to go late because their bellies have been overextended and the baby isn’t in line with the birth canal.  I faithfully taped up my belly as far as I could manage with kinesiology tape and tried not to bother with how itchy it was. Everyday I went to bed with the expectation, “This could be the night.”  Every morning, I woke up pregnant.  I experienced contractions while I slept. Just mild ones that wouldn’t wake me up but would be in my dreams. Finally at almost 40 weeks, I stopped thinking that baby Camden would come early and just said to myself, “I made it through this day, I can make it through another,” and would fall asleep in peace.  Now I was getting stronger contractions at night that would wake me up, but I was able to go back to sleep.

               Finally on Dec 4^th, only 3 days overdue, the glorious morning came when the contractions didn’t stop.  I experienced a redeeming home birth that played out much like I prayed that it would.  Except that it wasn’t easy or pain free. It was the most painful of the 11. 

And there was a little trouble afterwards with a sudden flow of blood that convinced the midwife and my husband that I was minutes away from dying.

This prompted a 911 call and a flurry of activity that changed the entire atmosphere: from relaxed and comfortable bliss to frantic and jarring fear.  Thankfully, I quickly stabilized, and the ambulance was canceled.  Chris said it was the prayer team he had assembled in a matter of seconds.  The midwife said it was Camden who saved me as he nursed and looked at me with wide eyes.  I said I was never going to die and felt just fine (until I tried to stand and walk).

Overall, it was a beautiful, fast homebirth to a robust and healthy boy! I was so thankful!

There was the small detail of a strange man pushing his way into my bedroom to ask me questions while I nursed my baby, still laying naked on my bed. The ambulance hadn’t been canceled after all! That indecency haunted me for months afterward.

               I finally asked Chris, “Why didn’t any of you think to cover me in that moment?”

               “You should be glad to be alive!  You need to remember all the miracles God has done for us,” he would reply.  And he would list them again and again.  I wrote them down and meditated on them.  It was truly stunning what God had done for us!

               Yet I found myself weeping often: when Camden wasn’t gaining enough weight, when I recovered so slowly, when I noticed how hard it was on the rest of the family, when I felt like a burden, when I wasn’t even good at my main job – nursing.  Finally, Chris called Lori and had her talk to me while I lay on our bed, exhausted.  Again, I was able to release tears and trauma and except His love.

That was the turning point where I left depression behind and embraced this new season before me. I love the newborn stage and tried to enjoy every minute: through homeschooling, through nursing and making of homemade formula, through Chris’ transition from a good, steady income with health insurance to owning a business with no guarantees.   We also had so many good times with our children and many opportunities to experience grace.

Summer and then autumn came again. I felt God leading me to homeschool my two high school boys in addition to the other 3 younger children.  I had never done high school before because it was just too difficult. It is just like God to give me this assignment while I was still feeling like my pregnancy had left me much weaker than before. He believed in me.

I had pruned my life down to the essentials: sleeping, eating, praying, taking care of my family and then cleaning, cooking, and homeschool if there was time.  It was hard to get the family all to church. Hanging out with friends became a very rare treat. I had dropped out of women’s prayer.  I wasn’t posting any blog articles or interacting much on social media.  In October I felt compelled to dedicate Camden at church.  I just had to release a spoken testimony about this miracle baby, or I was going to bust!  He was happy, healthy, and developing perfectly.

A few days after Camden’s first birthday I was able to attend the Women’s event in December. It was very powerful and Marcey started us out with a quote from “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”.

Aslan said to Lucy and Susan after his resurrection, “Climb onto my back, we have far to go, and little time to get there.”

I pictured Grace carrying me all this time.  That was the only way I was going to get anywhere important.

Marcey said, “This will be the ride of our lives. It will be hard, but I don’t want you to disqualify yourselves. We need all of us. We need to surrender to Him.”

She was speaking right to me and igniting a fire.  I didn’t just want to survive; I wanted to run my race again and let Grace carry me to places unknown.

Each woman had been given a little journal with a personalized word printed on the inside. My word was, “UNBROKEN.”  I pulled mine out and started writing.

We watched a clip of the movie and Aslan was talking again after his resurrection, “If they [those who had killed him on the stone table] would have understood the power of sacrifice, they would have interpreted the ancient prophecy differently.  When someone who has committed no treason, willingly gives themselves up, the stone table will crack, and death itself will begin to move backwards.”

The power of sacrifice – the phase seemed to burn into my mind.

“Is that what you have been doing in my life the past two years?” I asked God.  Each moment of weakness, pain, depression, shame, and seeming defeat that I had gone through…could it be that there was power in it?  My sacrifice to carry my 11^th miracle child contained within it little gems of power to bring God’s glory to the earth?  I didn’t realize it at the time, but perhaps my feeble attempts to praise God and follow Him through the sacrifice were like little altars, the smoke of sweet-smelling incense rising to heaven and pleasing God?

A vision of the evil eagle from my dream popped into my mind again.  It still plagued me from time to time.  It brought shame when I remembered it, because I thought it was just my subconscious mind showing me how I viewed God, a reminder of how far I had fallen from my lovesick devotion prior to becoming pregnant. 

I heard a whisper from God, “Your enemy showed you his face.  He thought he could take you out, take your baby out, take your family out. Not once did he pluck you out of my hands. Your life and purpose were secure the entire time.  You remain UNBROKEN.”

Peace began to chase away the shame.  I asked God what I should do with the image of the devilish eagle.  I began to surrender to God and saw a rushing river.  The water was so dark, it was black.  I couldn’t see how deep it was or where it was going.  The eagle circled above the river.  Dark water in the form of great black arms reached for the bird. The water pulled my enemy down into the river and the eagle was completely consumed, never to be seen again.

I prayed, “I surrender to your river, your living water.  It feels like a risk – I can’t see the bottom; it is so dark. I can’t discern where it is going.  I don’t know what will happen to me.  Will I sink, swim, or float?”

It seemed like I received an immediate answer from the LORD as Yadira’s voice broke through, “This is a new day.  You have been tested and purified.  You have been given a double portion of faith. A new assignment.  You are being commissioned for a new assignment.  Surrender to whatever God wants.”

A new surrender

A deeper surrender

A holy surrender

The perfect conclusion to a hard, hard season.