06 December 2011

Did God Abandon Us?

In my last post, I talked about having a second surgery to repair my uterus and taking some time to refocus. To continue...

We moved to Lafayette in April because it seemed very clear that God was moving us. My husband had a much better job to move to, and we were offered a great relocation package that would help us sell and buy a home and put us up in temporary living for up to three months. We put our Texas house on the market with the expectation that it would sell very quickly, and that we would break even financially because we were confident that God would come through since he was moving us.

The first week of May, we lost our baby Gabriel with a tubal pregnancy, thus affecting my future fertility. Our loss was devastating and discouraging. Then a couple of months on the market, we discovered that our home in Texas was not generating much interest. I became concerned because I realized that our time in temporary living was flying by. We were going to have to move out before the middle of July. And we didn't have anywhere to go...

And then, in the middle of June, I got a call from a friend in Texas who was checking in on our house every couple weeks. She called to tell me to get a plumber there ASAP. I frantically called a plumber, my husband, my parents for prayer, and my friend back to ask her how bad it was. Apparently, water had been shooting out of one of our upstairs bathroom sinks and had flooded half of the upstairs and had leaked into the downstairs. I packed a bag, put Abigail in the van, and started out the 4-hour drive back to Texas.

I spent the drive praying and on the phone. The plumber fixed the problem, but also said that we needed to have a drying company come out. I think that was when I realized that this was not going to just be a clean-up job. I arrived at the house to find the kitchen counters swollen, the hard wood floor in the living room swollen, about 1/4 of the walls swollen, the bathroom completely saturated, and carpet on both levels soaked and discolored. And I cried.

Since all of our furniture was still at the house, we were very fortunate that none of it was damaged. We were also fortunate that we didn't have any mold. In total, though, the insurance claim was more than $25K.
 
Initially, I handled all of this pretty well, considering. But after I started getting bills, and our mortgage company messed up getting us the settlement money to pay the contractors. Well ....that's when I started to fall apart.


 Our baby was gone, and we couldn't even start trying again for probably another month, with even less fertility than when I had two fallopian tubes. We had now lost almost $10K in mortgage, utilities, and deductibles and additional repairs for a house we weren't selling. My daughter, whom I had been cloth diapering since infancy was now in disposables full-time, and I was feeding her processed foods and fast food because of the chaos of our lives. She had been sleeping in a Pack-N-Play for three months now with no end in sight, and I was not even sure where we were going to live in a month. The house that we had decided to build wasn't going to be ready until August, and I was pretty sure we couldn't really afford it anyway, so we bailed on it and had to start looking again. Everything was a mess.

Where was God? Had he abandoned us? Was this move a move out of His will? What did we do wrong?

All of these thoughts were spinning in my mind, and I was dealing with a lot of anger. 

What is worse was that I had just started writing this blog. I was in the process of telling the story of our struggle with infertility and our first pregnancy and subsequent loss. I was writing this blog so I could help other women with these struggles see that they were not alone in their pain, and that God could bring victory even when you feel you are in the most desperate situation possible. How could I reach out to other women and how could I talk about victory when I was angry at God and questioning whether he even cared about me anymore?

On July 26-27, I was texting a close friend of mine about my frustration with God and my insecurities about whether we would ever be blessed again. And then on July 27, while I was still frustrated and feeling abandoned, I wrote the blog "Counseling and The Promise". My friend wrote to me later and basically called me out for questioning God after He had given me such a beautiful promise.

And I began to pray for God to change my heart and make me more grateful for the blessings He had already given me. A few days later, I woke up refreshed and feeling relieved. I was grateful for my husband, and for Abigail. I was grateful for a job that my husband loves, and that we had the ability to start over in our house hunt. I was grateful that we had this temporary apartment for another couple of weeks because of an extension we had been granted. And I was grateful for the children God was going to bless us with. The only thing that had really changed was my attitude, and it made such an amazing difference in my whole family's lives. 

2 comments:

  1. Good stuff, Han. Love, Dad.

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  2. The greatest comfort in hitting rough waters is the confidence that God HAS led me into that path, because if He has truly led me to, then He is not surprised by my circumstance and He has promised to lead me through. He knew the storm would come when He got in the boat with the disciples and told them, "Let us go to the other side." Here's a sneak peak of the message in our Christmas card this year:

    Change is a Constant. Hope is a Choice.
    May your Hope be Fixed upon the Changeless One.

    Blessings to you, Hannah. Our God is the only constant in an ever changing and sometimes terrifying life journey. Thanks for your transparency. I can't think of a time when God scolded or punished anyone for honest, anguished questioning. Think Job. Love you!

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