Eyes of a Child

1 Samuel 1:27

“I Prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him.”

So even before our son Eli was born, we knew that God was involved.  Let me explain.  Going back to 2014, Lindsey and I decided we wanted to start a family.  To be honest, we really, really, really wanted to have a child. We were super excited to be parents, and really felt that God was telling us it was the right time.  Never in our wildest dreams could we have imagined that there would be complications.  Every one around us started having kids, or announcing that they were expecting.  I will never forget Christmas 2014, going to family’s house and as we arrived, her cousins came walking out wearing one of those t-shirts announcing that they were having a child.   Your first response of course is excitement for them, but after about 10 minutes I noticed Lindsey was missing from the room.  Searching around the house for her, I found her crying in the basement bathroom.  As a guy of course I had no clue what was wrong.  She explained to me the heartache she was feeling, don’t get me wrong, she was excited for her cousin, but also hurting feeling something was wrong with her.  At that point,  we started to seek medical advice.

During that time, for some reason I started to read 1 Samuel chapter 1.

⁵ But to Hannah he gave a double portion because he loved her, and the Lord had closed her womb. ⁶ Because the Lord had closed Hannah’s womb, her rival kept provoking her in order to irritate her. ⁷ This went on year after year. Whenever Hannah went up to the house of the Lord, her rival provoked her till she wept and would not eat. ⁸ Her husband Elkanah would say to her, “Hannah, why are you weeping? Why don’t you eat? Why are you downhearted? Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?”

⁹ Once when they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh, Hannah stood up. Now Eli the priest was sitting on his chair by the doorpost of the Lord’s house. ¹⁰ In her deep anguish Hannah prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly. ¹¹ And she made a vow, saying, “Lord Almighty, if you will only look on your servant’s misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life, and no razor will ever be used on his head.”

¹² As she kept on praying to the Lord, Eli observed her mouth.

¹⁷ Eli answered, “Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of him.”

In this story, you have a few characters, but I want to focus on 2 of them today, Hannah and Eli.  First off was Hannah, the barren wife who was irritated and heartbroken about her situation. In her deep anguish, she never gave up hope.  Year after year she would cry out to God for a child; weeping so violently that the priest thought she must be drunk.  Talk about some crying going on, I can only imagine.  The second character in this story is Eli, the priest.  He hears her weeping and with empathy goes to her, and I love his simple response, “Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant what you have asked.  Such a simple, profound answer.  Not a ton of words, but just a faith that God would answer.

Now as a pastor I have learned that there are times when I put my foot in my mouth and it comes across as preaching at my wife.  So here I am reading this chapter, I couldn’t wait for her to get home so that I could share it with her.  Trying to console her and express that we truly just needed to leave it in God’s hands.  Well it didn’t quite come across that way, but this did become our prayer.

As time went on we kept getting more bad news from the doctors and of course during this time,  more people around us kept finding out they were pregnant and expecting.  It seemed the more wood kept getting thrown on the fire if you know what I mean.  With each announcement, the more anguish we began to feel.  We were trying to keep the faith and trust that God was in complete control but at the same time going, “God, why not us?”

Fast forward to the end of March,  Lindsey is now having crazy stomach pains.  The doctors start running blood work and all kinds of tests to see what is going on.  (By the way, WEBmd and a wife who works in the medical field equals worst case scenarios) They decide to run an ultrasound to seek some answers, hopeful for anything.  They find that Lindsey is full of cysts on her ovaries. Needless to say, not a good answer for anyone, trying to have a child.  Again we just continue praying for this child, trusting God even in the midst of these answers.

Finally one day, Lindsey comes home at her breaking point, totally heartbroken, completely in tears.  She had just gotten a call from the doctor that morning with the news that we were to stop trying, go back on birth control for a bit and wait a few months and then try again, but they really didn’t have any other news for us than that.  So here we were, being told, try for three months, stop for three months, try for three months, stop for three months; pretty much what it came down to was the doctors saying, “Good Luck, but don’t get your hopes up.”

I just kept going back to that story in I Samuel and the idea of others around having kids, Lindsey being heartbroken thinking something was wrong, and continuing to have faith that God was in control and hearing our prayers.

So that afternoon when she walks in with the birth control in hand, for some reason unknown to us, God showed up.   Before she started back on birth control, luckily, for some reason, she decided to take one last pregnancy test.  Talk about a shock, she came running and screaming, thinking I had somehow played a cruel joke on her.  She just kept screaming!!!  “Josh, what did you do? That’s a second line!”  In my mind, I just kept thinking this is crazy, no way!  This was not supposed to be possible. So she started chugging water so she could take another one just to be sure.  Well in the midst of all this as she is running down the stairs my best friend Sean shows up at our back door and he could tell by just looking at her face.  To be honest though, as I want to do in this blog, all I could say to him was, “Hey you want a beer to celebrate?”

We learned though in this whole experience that even when things don’t look possible in the eyes of the world, even in the eyes of doctors, that God is still in control and that he hears our prayers.

Little did we know that when they ran the ultrasound, one of the cysts they saw was actually our future child.  Maybe this was God’s way of teaching us to just cry out to him!