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I’ve been wanting to write this post for well over a year now, and I am so excited to finally have a chance to share with others how God showed up in a very personal way in the life of our family. While this may be my story to tell, God is the author, and it is my hope that His goodness and His faithfulness will be evident to see.
I would also really like to encourage others through our experience. I especially want to encourage those who are doubting the existence of a personal God, as well as those who are facing the heartache of infertility, miscarriage, or infant loss.
You may very well be reading this and doubt that God can be known, but I hope you’ll keep an open mind as you read our story. This actually happened, and you can chalk it up to coincidence, but it’s going to require quite a bit of faith to leave it at that. I think it’s far easier to believe that God is, in fact, personal, and He shows up in our lives when we allow Him the opportunity and when we keep our eyes open.
So here goes.
My husband and I had our first child, a boy, in 2011. We had no trouble getting pregnant, and quite frankly, were pretty shocked when we found out we were expecting. Not only did I have a pretty easy and healthy pregnancy, but my doctor would joke that I was one of her most “boring” patients. I carried him full term, and we didn’t have any complications with labor or birth. (I did, however, experience some pretty intense post-partum depression, but I’ll share that experience in another post.)
So after having an overall very pleasant, healthy, and uneventful pregnancy, I relaxed a little bit more when I found out I was pregnant with baby #2 at the end of 2013. The possibility of miscarriage was not even on my radar. In February of 2014, my husband and I were both shocked and devastated when I woke up in the middle of the night and realized I was experiencing my first miscarriage. We rushed to the emergency room only to confirm that our suspicion was right. We had lost our baby.
Fast forward three months to May when we found out we were expecting again. We were very excited but also very guarded this time around about how the pregnancy was going to progress. I was fortunate though to have another very healthy and uneventful pregnancy, and in February of 2015, our daughter was born almost exactly a year after we had lost baby #2.
After much deliberation and prayer, we decided to try again for one more baby, if the Lord willed it. We figured three kids was plenty and would definitely get us out of our comfort zone since we were more than content with our two kids. We were able to get pregnant without much difficulty, but yet again, we faced another miscarriage in September of 2016. I was almost out of the first trimester when I lost this baby, much like the first time around, only this time I experienced far more physical pain than I had the first time.
But God is good, and He carried us through this second loss. However, when the dust finally settled, we were confused, left wondering if we had misunderstood God’s plans for us. Were we supposed to have another child or was our family already complete? We kept seeking God, and we never found a sense of peace with being “done.” We felt like God was calling us to trust Him still, that He wasn’t done with our family yet. We really felt called to try again. So we did.
And we got pregnant again. Not surprisingly, it was hard to feel relaxed with this pregnancy, having now gone through two miscarriages. And sadly, we lost this baby too. It was February of 2017 by this time, and now we really didn’t know what to do. We had really felt like God was calling us to try again, yet here we were facing another devastating loss, walking through the fire once more and trying to figure out what was next.
We still couldn’t find peace with being done, but at the same time, we didn’t know how many more times we could face this heartache. We decided to try just one more time with the understanding that this was going to be the last try. We figured if I miscarried a fourth time, that perhaps God was done building our family, and we were truly okay with that. We trusted God once more with the future of our family.
I got pregnant again, and if you’ve lost count by now, this was my sixth pregnancy. We are now in April of 2017. This time around I was very guarded with my emotions. I wanted to be excited, but I was trying so hard to protect myself from heartache again. Because of my history of miscarriages, I had an early ultrasound scheduled for 7 weeks. I was so nervous I was practically shaking as I laid down in the bed and got ready for the ultrasound tech to check on the baby.
We had our two kids with us, and while my husband was getting them settled in their chairs, I looked up at the screen and immediately noticed it looked different than I had ever seen. And I was getting very familiar with ultrasounds because I had so many of them in the preceding two years! The first words out of the ultrasound tech’s mouth (with a bit of hesitancy I might add) were, “So…do twins run in the family?…”
Are you kidding me?!
Nope.
My husband was elated. I think he actually jumped out of his chair. I, on the other hand, was terrified, overwhelmed, and shocked. I was happy too, don’t get me wrong, but I was also very guarded. It was a lot of emotions to process, especially since my odds of making it past the first trimester weren’t all that great.
We left the appointment with the deer-in-the-headlights look on our face and headed home to have dinner and get our older kids ready for bed. Needless to say, we had a lot of phone calls to make that evening to let our family know how the ultrasound went. I mention this because we were running late on getting our kids in bed at their regular bedtime.
So there we were, reading with our kids much later than we normally would have been. We looked out the window, and much to our amazement, we saw the most spectacular and vibrant rainbow we had ever seen. It was enormous and appeared to go on and on, rather than just a portion of a rainbow in faint colors like you typically see.
It was such an impressive sight that my husband insisted we go outside to look at it. So we all threw on our shoes and went outside.
Now I have to pause the story for just a moment to point out something very significant here. If you’ve never heard the term rainbow baby before, allow me to quickly define it. A rainbow baby is a baby born after a miscarriage, stillbirth, or neonatal death. My oldest daughter is a rainbow baby because she was born just after our first miscarriage. The term represents the hope and joy the baby brings after surviving the devastation of the storm.
So there we were, taking in the sight of this truly amazing rainbow. I had never in my life seen a rainbow like this one – one that made a complete arch in both directions for as far as I could see. And as if this sight weren’t amazing enough already, we soon realized that there was, in fact, a second rainbow! It was a lot harder to see because it was faint, but it ran parallel to the other one. Twin rainbows on such a day as this! We couldn’t believe it. We were in absolute awe of God’s intimate and personal way of speaking to us and giving us hope for what lay ahead.
Only a few hours earlier were we sitting in a dark ultrasound room with baited breath, hoping just to see a strong heartbeat. Instead, we found out God had planted not one, but two tiny babies in my womb. Both had good, strong heartbeats, and we just knew that God put those rainbows there as a promise – a rainbow for each baby I was carrying.
What I love about this story is that there’s absolutely no way my husband and I could have planned it or somehow have set it up to happen. I mean, what are the odds, really, that we would see not only one, but two rainbows, just a few hours after finding out we were having twins? Not only that, we weren’t just having twins. These two babies I was carrying were following the loss of two miscarriages in a row, making them rainbow babies, a well-known term that I did not come up with on my own.
Add to that, we live in Minnesota, which is in a cold climate, so we don’t even have the proper conditions for a rainbow for many months of the year. And because God is so amazing, He didn’t just throw some wimpy little rainbow in the sky that evening. He painted the sky with the longest rainbow I had ever seen!
This was truly a special evening for our family. We had experienced a roller coaster of emotions, yet there was God, constant and faithful, and always with us. Now as I write this, our twin baby girls are almost ten months old, and they continue to be a daily reminder of the joy and hope that God offers through all seasons of our life, so much so that we gave them middle names of Joy and Hope.
As I bring this story to a close, please don’t think I’m trying to say that all stories of infertility, miscarriage and infant loss have happy endings. This is simply not so. We don’t always get the privilege of knowing WHY we’re going through our present difficulties, but that doesn’t mean we can’t trust God in the midst of them. After all, His ways are higher than ours and His thoughts are higher than ours, as it says in Isaiah 55:9.
This is not some generic god or some vague spiritual being that is found in nature or within ourselves. This is the God that has made himself known in both in the Old and New testament of the Bible. The God that offers a personal relationship with Him through His son Jesus who died on a cross to save us from our sins.
Although we cannot see God physically, He is infinitely personal and desires to have an intimate relationship with each and every one of us. He knows us inside and out – our flaws, our mistakes, and our weaknesses. We are fully known, and He loves us just the same.
Thank you for sharing your beautiful journey!