God stuff

This post is inspired by Tammy's post on her blog about serving God's purpose so thank you, Tammy. She has prompted me to write something that has been on my heart for oh so long. I can see that a lot of you out there in blog land are Christians and I really like reading your posts. But I can't help but feel a little bit of yearning at the fact that you all seem to know God so well. I wish I felt like that. I often feel like Christian's are like God's roomies - they know God well, they spend their days and nights with Him, He's their "buddy". Well you know how sometimes you might have a good friend who is friends with someone say at their work - you hear a lot of stories about them but because you don't work there too you have never actually met them? Well that's how I feel about my relationship with God. I hear the stories, I know He is there, every now and then I might even "bump into Him" so to speak. But we are not what I would call "buddies".


I didn't grow up in a "God house". My parents are "when you're dead, you're dead" people. My only dealings with God were through RE (religious education) in school. We had the most beautiful teacher, his name was Mr Beer, which of course we all thought was extremely funny. He was this sweet old man who was probably in his 60's or 70's. I was about 9 at the time so who knows if he is still around. I remember one lesson Mr Beer spoke about asking God into our hearts and how to do it. Everything he had said so far had really spoken to me, and this God guy sounded like he would be a pretty neat friend so I went home that night and did it. I lay in bed with my pj's on and the light off and said "God you can have my heart and my life. I believe that Jesus came into this world, sent by you as your son, and died for my sins on the cross."


The next lesson, I told Mr Beer what I had done and he was so excited. The next lesson after that he brought me a bible which he inscribed. I think I absolutely made his day. Ever since then I have always thought there was a God and I have always looked for Him. But I only read that bible a little bit before it became boring. I graduated from primary school and didn't see Mr Beer again and we never had RE in secondary school. My parents never spoke about God of course so I kind of forgot him. That is, until I found out about Brad and my fertility problems, and suddenly I really wanted to know where He was.


Before we started IVF, when we were just starting to piece together the pieces of the puzzle as to why we hadn't gotten pregnant and were realising what a long road we could possibly have ahead of us, a friend of mine invited me to come to her church. She often sings at the services there, and was singing this particular day. She said to me that it might make me feel better about a few things, to come to church and hear God's word, but that if I ended up hating it well at least i would hear some nice music. I took her up on it and went. I really really enjoyed it and went many more times. I saw baptisms on Good Friday which moved me to tears. I helped with different parts of the services at different times and really enjoyed participating. A lot of God's messages really spoke to me and I was eagar to learn more about Him.


Then we hit a bump in the road (or two or three) in the road of infertility and I stopped going. What was the point. Here I was working so hard to get to know God's plan for me, and God was not even breaking a sweat for me. Maybe he wasn't interested in me after all. Maybe he had better things to do. Or maybe worse still, this WAS God's plan for me: sadness, suffering, tears and no baby. Well i didn't like the sound of that. I would do it my own way.


Fast forward a couple of years and there Brad and I were about to do our embryo transfer. We had been through many disappointments with IVF and we had not even got to do an embryo transfer yet. During my stimulated cycle my ovaries had hyperstimulated and two days after the egg retrieval surgery when I started to feel sick beyond words, Brad called an ambulance and I spent a week in hospital being monitored as they determined that I had quite a serious case of Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (OHSS). They had retrieved 19 eggs during my surgery, 11 of which had fertilised and become healthy embryos. These embryos were to be frozen because I was too sick to proceed with an embryo transfer at that time. Unfortuneately in the attempt to grow the embryos to blastocyst stage (day 5 of their development, and the optimal age for transfer) 9 of the embryos died and we were left with only 2 to freeze after all that hard work and trauma.


The night before the transfer of embryo number 1, I really felt like a broken woman. I sat in our empty spare room without turning on the light. At that stage there was a bed and a bookcase in it, but for some reason I sat on the floor. I began to cry my heart out and to plead with God. I told Him I didn't understand Him and that I didn't think He had been there for me. I said that if He really did know me so well as He claimed to, then He would know that my heart is the heart of a mother. I told Him that tomorrow we would be having an embryo put in, and that I would give anything for it to "work" so that the embryo would implant and I could have a baby. Then my last statement is something which is constantly on my mind: "God," I said "if you let me have a baby, then I promise you I will make sure that the baby knows who you are."


Looking back on all of this now that Nickie is here I realise a lot of the things that I thought back then weren't true. If God didn't love me, if He wasn't interested in me, if He woke up every day and thought "ha ha let's see what we can throw at her now" as I believed He once did, then there is no way I would have such a perfect little son. Happy, healthy, but most importantly HERE. I don't know what God has tried to teach me. Maybe patience, maybe faith, maybe just to be appreciative. Maybe none of those things. But I do know this: all those times when I felt alone, and cut off from God, it was because I was. Not because He turned away from me though, because I turned from Him. He wasn't the one who was distancing himself from me, it was the other way round. If you or I did that to our best friend - ignored them and pretended they didn't exist or they were someone we didn't need in our lives then we would be pretty hurt and probably nobody could blame us for walking away and not looking back on the so-called friendship. Obviously though, as I am now learning, God isn't like that. I was a spoiled brat to Him. I called Him names, and I turned my back. He could have said to me "well fine then, you don't get anything from me, you don't deserve it" but He hung around waiting for me to get over myself and then He gave me the most beautiful little boy. I feel so guilty about that.

A few weeks after Nickie was born I took him to church. It was really hard because I felt bad being there. If I was God I would be like "hmm what does she want now? It's that b*tch again. How dare she show up here at my house." Because of that I haven't taken him back since. I really don't know how to get close to God again without being overcome by this guilt. It is something I would love to do, but it makes me feel like a hypocrite and I don't know where to start. I am especially scared coming into a second try at IVF because I feel like I didn't even deserve the first success let alone a second. I would love to make the commitment to Him that I made innocently as a little girl, but this time I would love to make it as a mature adult who has experienced God's grace first hand and who actually knows what the words she is saying actually mean with her whole heart. I would like to say those words and know what I am saying and to say them for the right reasons, not just because I am 9 years old and impressionable and wanting to do the right thing. But I have no idea where to start and am very confused about it.

So that is what is on my heart about God's purpose for me. Thanks for listening and thanks to Tammy for putting the challenge out there to say it.

Have a great day everyone!