More Defining Moments

If you are a child of God, you will experience troubles, and Jesus says not to be surprised when they come. However, as you live life you will find yourself taken back by some of the trials you face.

Experiencing loss in life is a profoundly defining moment, especially the loss of children. We have to make a choice about how we are going to walk through it. We can find ourselves angry at life and angry at God. We begin to question Him and ask why.

Someone once said life happens when you had something else planned, and my life, as I had planned it, changed forever in a matter of months. Having been married several years, my husband and I were ecstatic to find out we were expecting a baby. It was only a few days after the first doctor’s visit that life, as we knew it, began to take a turn. Seven months into the pregnancy Sherri Layne and Terri Lynn were born and in less than twenty-one hours they went to heaven.

Our lives would never be the same. I had so many questions and not many answers. My days were filled with tears and trying to wrap my heart and arms around what had happened. Was I dreaming? I could not imagine that I would have walked through something so painful. I didn’t know one person who had lost a baby, let alone two.

In a life event like this, you come to a place that Henry Blackaby called “a crisis of belief.” Was I going to embrace and believe God is Lord over everything, even the death of my baby girls? Was I going to be bitter or was I going to be better?

God has been so faithful to allow me to use my journey to help women along the way. Many women today are facing infertility; who better to understand than someone who has personal experience? As the director of women’s ministry, I would have never known how to minister to others if I had not walked through it.

The Lord continues to use our experience to show His blessings. I discovered this a couple of years ago as my husband and I left the grave of our babies. I asked him, “I wonder what our life would have been like if the twins had lived.” His reply, “We would have been busy.” I felt my eyes fill with tears and I said, “We probably wouldn’t have had Allen and I wouldn’t have wanted to miss that.”

Father, I pray today for those who are walking through defining moments. May the life-changing events that could possibly define us forever be used for Your glory. In this life there will be trouble, but we have a greater source of strength to guide us as we walk through it. Amen.