Ten years ago today, March 1, 2010, God used a church meeting to set us free from decades of spiritual abuse in a church-turned-cult situation. After the meeting we discovered the new calendar page for March was this:
Isaiah 43:19 “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?”
Indeed, we perceived it! This verse became the theme as David and I, now finally free to marry, began to plan our wedding. Not outside of God’s gracious sovereignty, but under the unbiblical leadership of David’s father, we had been waiting for eight years to be able to join our lives as we were convinced God was leading us to do.
Later, on April 25, 2010, we shared in an evening service about the history of our relationship and our new engagement and invited our church family to our wedding, set for July 30. As those eight years had passed by, so had my prime child-bearing years and we were unsure if we would be able to have children. At the end of that service, there was corporate prayer for us including specific prayer that God would give us a child. Daniel was born April 25, 2011, one year later – to the day.
He wasn’t due until mid-May, but he had had a brain hemorrhage in utero and the doctors wanted to get him out before I could go into labor. A strange coincidence in the midst of awful circumstances? No. Unbeknownst to each other, God had given both David and me Daniel’s name eight years earlier. God had strongly impressed on us the previous year that we needed to be married by the end of July, and God had brought Daniel into existence at the very first possibility after our wedding. When we learned about his brain bleed and were crying out to God, He spoke to my heart that nothing was “wrong”, but this would shape Daniel to be the person God intended him to be. Being born one year to the day from corporate prayer that God would give us a child was to us an underscoring that God was saying “This is my boy.” In the daily challenges we face because of Daniel’s cerebral palsy and epilepsy resulting from his prenatal brain injury, this gives us peace.
So today, on the tenth anniversary of the deliverance God brought which opened the way for Daniel to even exist, as we participated in corporate prayer for Daniel as we head to Cleveland Clinic, we stood with expectancy and confidence.
This is not confidence in a particular outcome, but confidence in a God who practically moved heaven and earth to give this precious boy his life; in a God who orchestrates dates and details to deepen our faith and encourage our hearts; in a God who is all-wise and all-knowing and has revealed medical mysteries and opened new medical methods to bring deliverance from things like epilepsy; in a God who is still doing a new thing!
Praise Him with us.
Beseech Him with us.
Uphold Daniel and us as we go through this next week or so of testing and, we hope, of a life for Daniel without the ravages of epilepsy. Now that would be an amazing new thing!
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