A Warrior Princess Weapon Part I

I have really been struggling with living in our current circumstances; coming out of a year of more health issues, my husband being out of work for 10 months, depleting our savings,and now my daughter facing a pretty serious surgery later this month.  It is hard not to cave in to depression and despair when we keep praying and God does not move or change anything.  I have definitely done my share of praying and crying out (and plain old crying), but the Lord is telling me to remember what He has already done.  So, the weapon I am using this week is REMEMBER.

But do not be afraid of them;

 remember well

 what the Lord

 your God did

to Pharaoh and
to all Egypt.

Deuteronomy  7:18

There are so many places that the Lord tells us to remember.  It is for our own good because so much of what we fear and worry about has not even happened yet.  And if if it does happen, we need to remember that He is ALWAYS in control.  Remembering past situations where things seemed fearful and out of control help us to see that God has already brought us through difficulties, and give us encouragement that He is still in control in our current pain.  So, what I have to share with you right now is for my own strengthening.  I choose to remember what He has already done.  It is a bit of a long story, so I'm going to post it in several parts.

About 15 years ago, God made it very clear that we were not able to have children.  I am thankful, as painful as it was, that we had a definite answer and knew that our best option was to persue building a family through  adoption, so I will spare you the struggle and pain it took us to get to that point, and begin with the place where we began the process to get certified for adoption.

When we started the adoption classes we thought, “Open adoption has worked fine for some of the couples we know, but we don’t want that.” The truth is, it was scary to think about having a relationship with the birthmother of our child. We wanted our baby to be “our baby” and we didn’t want to have to share him/her with the birth family. Plus, what if our child ended up wanting a relationship with the birth parents and liked them more than us, and the list of fears went on from there. That was self protection and fear, and God wanted to free me from them.

For God has not given us a

 spirit of fear and timidity,

but of power,

love,

and self discipline. 

II Timothy 1:7

 

The night of our first adoption class at the Christian agency where we were pursuing adoption through, our instructor addressed this issue of fear head on. She said that instead of fearing the birth family’s involvement in our lives, that we should consider that God had ordained each of our families and that this might be an opportunity to minister to our baby’s birth parents. What if we took the wind out of the enemy’s sail and turned it around as an opportunity to bless instead of self protect? What a freeing thing it was to admit that we have this fear, but trust that the Lord had everything orchestrated for His purposes and our good, and ultimately the good of our child and his/her birth family.  The only way we knew to accomplish that would be to take every fear and/or desire to the Lord.  There were a lot of them because the enemy had been heaping a lot of lies on us as we struggled through our infertility; thoughts like us not being good enough, so that's why God wouldn't allow us to get pregnant.

We demolish arguments

and every pretension

that sets itself up

against the knowledge

of God,

and we take captive

every thought

to make it obedient

to Christ.

IICorinthians 10:5

So, we left there that night in October ready and willing to face our fear, open to a relationship with our baby’s birth family, and with hearts excited and praying for our baby’s birth mother. That night in October we began to discipline our hearts and minds to think, act and pray out of power, love, and truth. We chose to take captive our fearful thoughts and replace them with the truth that God is in control, and we began to pray for our baby and his/her birth mother.

As I look back, this was a great training ground for things we were going to face later.  It had been painful going through the process of finding out that we could never have children on our own, but since we had no other option but to trust our Savior, He was already preparing me to trust Him completely even in things that I felt like I had some options to make things go my way.  He was getting me ready to trust Him in COMPLETE abandon.  I'll tell you about that next time.

Sole Deo Gloria,
WP Stacey