I Got Up

"for though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again..." Proverbs 24:16

This verse hit me between my eyes as I listened to one of my favorite women speakers preach through my TV screen.  As I listened to her I could sense the Lord speaking directly to my heart and bringing to the surface things of my past...things He has brought me through, things He is restoring and things He is continuing to heal in me.  As I sat there talking to the Lord I knew He was prompting me to write, I love to write but what He has asked me to share brings about much fear inside of me.  Fear of being vulnerable, fear of opinions and the ability to not keep it all stuffed away.  Because all fear is of the enemy I am deciding to listen to the Lord's voice.

Nine years ago was probably the hardest time in my life.  I do not like to dwell on it because when I visit that time it still can bring tears and that is not a place I like to stay.  Here is the back story in a nutshell...
Nine years ago we were finally in a place to start the process of invitro, we were going to get our family started and all was going to work out magically.  We paid lots of money even up to this point to get us here and so what could go wrong?  At that time I was still well within the child bearing age according to medicine so I figured this would be it, we would do the procedure and I would get pregnant and life would be grand.  Well I did get pregnant but it was a very rocky start, my HCG numbers were high but not as high as they would like, but I was pregnant and they said it looks like it would be okay.  I was worried and had a very hard time being excited because I had already been used to the bottom falling out with all this before, so who was to say it would not happen again?  Well I forced myself to get excited, we were both excited! We told our family, friends and facebook because well that is what you do...it is not official until the virtual world knows right?  So it was out...Shubin Babies 1 and 2 were due March 3, 2011.  This was it, we had done all the testing and prayed our heads off for 4 years at this point...God answered our prayers...or did He?  Flash forward about 5 weeks and I had been having horrible cramping of what I know now to be contractions, every 30 minutes all night long.  I was home alone and my husband was at summer camp with our high-school youth kids, not good timing.  I called him in the morning and told him about the cramping and that I had some spotting.  He called my mom to take me to the doctor right away in his place and off we went.  I was hooked up to the fetal monitor and there for the first time I saw our baby, as well as the contraction waves across the screen.  It was the best sight I had ever seen and yet the most scared I had ever been.  The doctor was able to stop my contractions and back on strict bed rest I went in an effort to save this baby.  My husband was able to finally get home to me and there we sat both balling our eyes out and just hugging each-other.  We were terrified because this was supposed to be the answer to our longing for a baby and here we were waiting to see if our sweet baby would make it.  Friends of ours at the time came over and prayed over us for hours, it was a sweet time.  In my mind I had resolved that God had this, He was going to give us this baby...after all we served Him in ministry (oh the things we say to ourselves), we were His kids, He would not let us come this far to not allow us to keep this baby right?!  Well it came time for my 8 week check-up...the heartbeat appointment.  We prayed before we left but something in my gut, mother's intuition whatever you want to call it, said something is not right...but I went with high hopes I was wrong.  The doctor hooked me up and I could see the look on his face and it is not good.  He tried to stay composed and was frantically looking for the heartbeat but instead told us how sorry he was but there wasn't one.  I have no idea what was said after that, I was frozen and numb and in just a few minutes my hopes and dreams came crashing down.  I looked at my sweet husbands face and I could tell he was trying so hard to be strong for me but that his heart was shattered like mine.  Nothing prepares you for this experience because not only did our baby die, but I had to carry it until my body would pass it naturally...it is the most heart wrenching experience watching your body rid itself of this precious baby you wanted so badly.  The baby you never got to name, know the sex, hear their heartbeat or feel move.  I literally felt like my life was over...I fell into a pit of depression, a deep dark one.  I did not want anyone to come over or really to talk to anyone...I felt so alone and I was convinced no one could understand the pain I was in.  I finally mustered up enough energy to reach out and found a grief group specifically for this and so we joined with other couples who knew the same or similar pain we were walking through.  Flash forward five months later we decided to try and be brave and to give invitro another shot, we had more embryos and we so desperately wanted to have a baby.  So December of that year we did cycle number 2 and we waited to see if Shubin Babies 3 and 4 were gonna come through...they would have been born September 16, 2011.  I wish I could say this was the happy ending to the story, but just like the first we lost both of them and we were no closer to having a baby and the pit of depression was getting deeper and deeper.  I did not have a ton of time to grieve as I had to get back to teaching and my Christmas break was coming to an end.  As if this was not a heavy load to carry things got worse.  A few months later my husband was laid off from his job, the ministry we loved and poured our heart and souls into was transferred to other people without even a warning, our best friends that we had had for years broke-up with us, and then my teaching job was given away without a warning.  Literally everything that we loved, knew or trusted was ripped away.  Life made no sense, life was so painful and life was hopeless in my mind.  I wanted to quit, I was so low and I had no idea why a God that loves us would allow all of this to happen.  So here I was a very broken and painfully hurting girl.  I have never felt so alone in my life and I had no idea what to do.  I was so angry and that anger turned to deep bitterness...I felt that the God I had known had forsaken me.  He was not good like I had always heard about and I decided to do whatever I wanted in rebellion.  I thought how dare a God that I gave my life to and served for most of my life do this to me?  I thought He loved me and was for me?  Where was He now?  This was a very pivotal time in my life because being angry is okay but it is what you do with it that matters.  It did not drive me to dig deep to find Him, instead I was like Jonah I wanted as far away from Him as possible.  I was successful in doing what I wanted and trying to distract myself from dealing with any of the shattered pieces of my life. I was so empty and so far away from the life I once knew.  The girl who loved to serve in just about any ministry capacity, the girl who was privileged to disciple and speak in front of youth, the girl who loved and walked with Jesus daily...she was what seemed like a distant memory.  I was so numb and so broken and had no idea what to do or how to fix anything or even get back to a little of who I once was seemed impossible.  Not only did I just kind of give up on life in a sense, I stopped pursuing the baby dream.  That wound was SO painful that I was terrified to try again and so I abandoned that as well.  So here I am broken, hurt, bitter, angry and far away in my mind from the Lord and so depressed.  I thought this was how life was going to be from here on out, just one big disappointment. 
You want to know the most amazing thing about the Lord, that even when you think you are far away He only allows you to go so far but He will always find you, call out to you and pursue you.  He found me again except this time I was a huge mess.  Another thing about the Lord is that he specializes in taking messes and making them into something beautiful!  I remember calling out to Him and saying "Okay Lord I am so tired and I have made a huge mess of everything, I am broken, hurt and bitter...help me."  That was literally all I could come up with to say.  This my friends has been 3 years of re-learning who my God really is.  Before on the outside I would look like I had it all together and was super spiritual woman, looking back I was not even close.  I knew the Lord, I knew His Word and I knew all the right things to say to help people...but I did not know Him like I know Him now.  The last 8 years have been so painful, it was like being in the trenches of war and the wounds were deep. I in no way would want to go back through any of that, but I would not trade it either.  When you are in the deep trenches of the valley He is literally all you truly have. I had to re-learn not only who He was but who I was.  My identity was so skewed and moved by everyone's opinion but God.  I am now more confident in who I am than I have ever been, not because I am amazing but because I know who I am in the One who created me.  I know now without any doubt that He loves me, that He has called me, that He has a purpose for my life and that He ordained all the pain for me to walk through...I do not completely understand why and I may never know until I see Him face to face in heaven and I am at peace with that.  God wastes nothing...pain or joy all the same He uses it.  I am here to tell you that my God good all the time even when life is not.  We are going to endure pain and trials as long as we are here on earth, the choice becomes what we allow to define us...the pain or what He wants to do with us through it.  Oh and that baby dream, well we picked that back up and God gave us an amazing baby boy! I could not even dream up this sweet boy...he is just awesome.  His smile everyday is a reminder that God does not leave things in a broken state, you just have to sometimes walk through the rubble and then watch Him rebuild your dreams.  We are all going to fall, it says so in Proverbs 24:16, but we have a choice to stay down or get back up!  I have gotten back up...I have decided that I wasted too much time being ineffective that I don't want to waste another minute of what the Lord wants to do with me! I may have been down for a little while but I got back up and I will allow Him to use all the junk and pain for His glory and be available for wherever and whatever He calls me to.

Thank you for letting me be real and tell my story...if you are in a place of pain and feel like you have fallen, reach out to me I would love to love on you in any way that I can.  Blessings, Michelle

Full Circle

Did you ever have a diary when you were younger and then years later find it and re-read all that you had written to see if anything had come true or how different your life was? I for sure did! I did not marry any of the guys I had crushes on which is probably a huge blessing nor did I attain that mansion that the game MASH said that I would have...haha :)  My childhood diary was a fun thing to find but did not really serve any purpose to me except a good chuckle of memories from when I was younger.  Honestly I could not tell you where that thing is now, nor do I really care because it does not have any substantial information to hold onto. 

When I was in 7th grade I was in a junior high discipleship group at church and I was given a journal from my leader of which she encouraged us to use as a prayer journal or a diary between us and the Lord. I remember that day as if it was yesterday and I took that journal and did just that, I started writing my prayers down and it was such a good outlet for me.  It was a special thing between me and Jesus, it was safe and I could just pour my little heart out knowing I would be heard.  I filled up that journal and then bought another and another...it had become a thing with me and the Lord.  I still to this day have those prayer journals and I will keep them so that when I pass they will be given to my child or children.  My childhood diary there, is nothing really that special about what is written in there, nothing that is impacting or life changing.  My prayer journals, well those are special and let me tell you why.  These journals are not just prayers, they are part of my story being written down in expectation, heartache, joy, pleading and waiting.  If you were to look in my journals you would see the date of which I had written that specific prayer and then perhaps another date in the margin when the Lord had answered.  The date of which it was originally written is not as important as the date of which the Lord answered me!!  I want to tie this altogether so just bear with me.

I was reading in the book of Judges tonight and these verses stood out to me:
"The people served the Lord as long as Joshua lived. They also served him as long as the elders lived. Those were the elders who lived longer than Joshua did. They had seen all of the great things the Lord had done for Israel. Joshua, the servant of the Lord, died. He was the son of Nun. He was 110 years old when he died. His people buried his body on his own property at Timnath Heres. It's north of Mount Gaash in the hill country of Ephraim. All of the people of Joshua's time joined the members of their families who had already died. Then those who were born after them grew up. They didn't know the Lord. They didn't know what he had done for Israel. The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. They served the gods that were named after Baal." Judges 2:7-11
I read that and thought how did the next generation not know Him, or better yet how did they forget ALL the miracles that their fathers and grandfathers had seen? The splitting of the Red Sea, Jericho's walls falling, battles won, ect...how?  Then it came to me...the generation of fathers had stopped retelling the stories, the miracles and remembering what the Lord had done for them to their kids.  They did not have the Bible in text, they only had their stories to be retold from generation to generation to be a reminder of who God is and was. This made me so sad for this godless generation, because what came after was God's dealing with them and it was really hard on the nation of Israel.

So it got me thinking...if we as Christians do not tell our story and share the miracles and answers to prayers in our own lives with a lost and hopeless world how will they ever know Him? To bring it even closer, if we as parents do not share with our kids who God is, there is a world waiting to tell them all that He is not.  There is a reason the Lord always told the Israelites to build an altar in places of victory, it was so that when they would pass by they would remember what God had done for them. It is the same with my prayer journal, those dates written in the margin are so that when I look back I see the faithfulness of God and what He has done in my life.  Our story is not just for us, it is to be used to tell of the greatness of who God is.  Are all the parts pretty? I would venture to say no and they are probably messy and sometimes painful...but God takes it all and uses it to reach those around us for His glory...yes even the most painful parts.  

This blog has come full circle from the first entry I made 5 years ago...my God has been faithful to me once again and has answered the deepest cry of my heart. My arms are no longer empty, I am a mommy to am amazing baby boy!  He also answered a dream of mine and that was to experience pregnancy, a time I will never forget.  I have no idea what is in store, I know that I have dreams still that I pray about and wait for His leading...but in the meantime I will look back at all my altars of victory and keep telling my story because there are women out there, my child(ren) and one day their children who need to know who God is.  He is a God who brings it all full circle, but in the meantime of waiting praise Him anyway there is a world watching you.