Hope Deferred.....

The Bible tells us that ‘hope deferred makes the heart sick’… (Prov 13:12)



Over my lifetime I have had ‘crises’ or what I thought were ‘crises’…events that made me cry alone at night or during the day or on the phone or with friends and family, including the loss of one of my parents. But I realized quickly that all those issues paled in comparison to this situation. I’ve cried so hard my heart literally hurt…I’ve cried in church while others stood around me singing, cried at home as I watched TV or prepared for bed, or pretended to ‘live life’, cried in my car as I drove around, even cried at work (with my door shut and my bottle of Visine to make sure I could avoid the questions and concerned looks). I would wake up in the morning thinking it was all a bad dream and it would hit me that it wasn’t, and then I would cry some more…


How…I wondered did we go from so much hope and joy and anticipation to this…fear, dread, doubt and sadness. What did we do wrong? Who did we offend? Why was it ‘different for us’?


The Bible also tells us that God ‘does not give us more than we can bear’, and as I cried I asked God how... and if... He really thought we could bear this. Over time my tears eventually stopped gushing but still remain welled up behind my eyes waiting for the chance to well over. These days it doesn’t take much..


As the flurry of medical testing died down and it became clear that the problems were ‘real and present’ then the physicians turned to us- with the questions- What next? What would you like us to do? We walked away from a meeting with the specialists with a list of ‘termination clinics’. My husband and I prayed and fasted and asked God to speak to us…what were we to do? We were faced with a decision no one should be ever asked to face and we realized that ‘termination’ was just a fancy word for ‘abortion’, a word so much uglier and raw in its meaning and premise.


With our hearts so heavy we wrestled – if we said ‘Yes, terminate’ had we crossed the line- grieved God, shed blood, and ended an innocent life. If we said ‘No’ were we being selfish –insisting on bringing this child into the world despite what the science said about his life, forcing him to live whether he would be able to appreciate it or not. Now was the test of our faith, the years of Christianity and worshipping God had all boiled down to this decision.


One day as we sat on our couch, my husband turned to me and said (with such pain in his eyes) “Whatever we decide, our lives have been changed forever…we’ll never be the same”