See, I have set before you an open door, and no one can shut it; for you have a little strength, have kept My word, and have not denied My name.

Revelation 3:8

Have you ever thought you knew exactly what you wanted to happen in your life, only to be left feeling surprised (and maybe disheartened, scared out of your mind, fill in the blank…) when that wasn’t at all what ended up happening?

This has been my experience so many times, I cannot even begin to tell. In fact, it’s been a theme of my life, more or less, that no matter what I say I would never want in life, that is the thing that I end up doing. I’ve begun to expect it, and even laugh about it. 

For instance, I said I would never go to Andrews University for college. I was very adamant about it. 

Bet you couldn’t guess where I graduated from…after attending all four years to get my Bachelor’s degree. I loved every minute of it.

“Well, ok,” I said after starting at Andrews– “but I will NEVER be a nurse.” My grandma was a nurse, and I just knew it wasn’t for me. Physical therapy it was.

Physical therapy fell through after my first semester in college. Three guesses what that Bachelor’s degree was in…

I ended up in nursing after a turn of events that I’ll probably write about later…and, you got it– actually liked it.

But then after going through clinicals, we were asked what area of nursing we thought we would like to work in when we graduated. I wasn’t sure, but knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would not be ICU. Too many beeps. Too much stress.

Welp, I’m going on my fifth year of being a nurse, and you wouldn’t believe where I’ve worked for the majority of my career (and once again, loved it.)

I graduated college having never actually dated anybody beyond a few sparse dinner dates here and there, and was unsure of what God’s plans were for me in the realm of dating/marriage– but I knew one thing for sure…I would NOT do online dating. Ever. Period. I would NOT subscribe to eBay for men and just dial up my favorite characteristics to find someone to date. 

Guess where I met my husband?

Yep. 

You guessed it. (That’s another story for another day. Coming soon.)

Bottom line– nothing I’ve ever been so adamant about doing or not doing in my life has turned out anything like I thought it would. I laugh about it all now, and I think God gets a kick out of it too. Everyone has, really. Christian has taken to trying to get me to say I’ll never let him get a Corvette. (I don’t even know how to respond to that now. There is no good answer, and he knows it.) 

God has turned everything I knew I didn’t want in life into something that I couldn’t imagine my life without…and as frustrating as that is sometimes, it really is fun to watch.

Knowing all that you know now, you probably won’t be surprised at all to learn that we never wanted kids. At least not for five more years, maybe never.

Literally three days before we found out I was pregnant, we were at church potluck, surrounded by screaming children, looking at each other with wide eyes and hands on our foreheads saying “this is why we’re never having kids.” 

God has such a sense of humor.

At first, we were kind of a mess. Christian held it together while I was in full-blown crisis mode, and then we switched for a couple weeks, and for a few months we shifted back and forth like we were on some weird freak-out teeter-totter. (In my defense, I think I could have come to grips a little faster had my head not been in the toilet for months on end.) Once the emotional turmoil had passed and we’d started getting a little excited, we then had to deal with more complications. The nausea and vomiting has never really gone away– even to this day at almost 25 weeks I’m on 3-4 different types of medications to make me able to keep food and water down. But on top of that, then we had the ER visits for dehydration and the threatened miscarriage, which were followed by complications I wrote about in my previous post.

More than a few times, in weakness of faith, I’ve found myself on my knees asking God “Why? Why this? Why now?”

That’s the part that’s miraculous. 

Last time I wrote, things were happening that we had no control over, and we certainly didn’t know where they’d lead. There were so many unknowns. We were staring down 6 months of disability with a limited income, a baby on the way, and bills to pay… unsure if the baby was going to make it full-term, and we had no idea what to brace ourselves for next. There were no more steps to take that we could see, nothing we could do to get ourselves out of the predicament we were in. Shortly after writing, though, I got a call from Human Resources at the hospital. They had found me a job doing paperwork for the Kidney Transplant program at the hospital. I was going to get to work my full 40-hour weeks, with my full original pay, and I could stay until the baby was born. 

This was a miracle for so many reasons. 

1) I’d been told light-duty at work was on a month-to-month basis only. One job could only carry me for so many weeks until they had to find me somewhere else to work, if there was any other place. If not, I’d be back on disability.

2) Someone else in HR had just told me the day before that they didn’t know of any places that were in need of help in the hospital. 

3) It was a transplant program. For those of you who don’t know, my mom had a liver transplant a few years ago (another story to be shared soon) and transplant has always been so close to my heart and something I’m passionate about.

God hit it out of the park. 

I was thankful enough to start with after getting this job, but a few days after I started the COVID-19 crisis started to ramp up, and I started seeing more and more ways God had protected me and my family. To put this in perspective–not only am I pregnant, but I have asthma. My mom is a transplant patient with no immune system, my grandma is 91 years old, my dad has heart problems, and that puts us all in the category of “at risk for severe COVID infection” if we were to actually get it. Here’s the thing– I’m an ICU nurse– and a few days after the crisis really started, two-thirds of the beds on my home unit were rigged to be dedicated solely to COVID-19 patients and rule-outs. That means that even as a pregnant nurse barred from taking direct care of COVID patients, I could not have avoided exposure if I was still working on that unit, especially when the “surge” they’re predicting comes through. Nurses are being pulled from all areas across the hospital (including the transplant clinics)–some who hadn’t taken care of patients in years— to come help on the floors during this crisis…but I’m exempt because of my restrictions from my doctor to prevent me from having a miscarriage.

God has protected me in ways I did not ever see coming, by using situations I didn’t know where to find the “good” in.

I can still go to work. I can still get paid. I don’t have to have any contact with patients that would put me or my baby or my family at risk, and we can still pay our bills.

All because God saw fit for us to have a baby girl, and then in His providence, allow us to have lots of complications.

If there is any point made from this story, let it be a testimony of God’s protection over us, and how “all things work together for good to those who love Him.” Romans 8:28. If we put our trust in Him, He will move time and space to protect us because He loves us. And sometimes, the ways He does that may seem to us to be devastating. We may not understand right now what He’s doing, or why He’s allowing certain things to happen. But no matter what we go through, we need to learn to not declare anything “good” or “bad,” because truthfully we don’t know how God can use even the most devastating things for our good. The very things we were once distraught over, the roads we just knew we’d never take that we find ourselves on anyway, can turn out to be bigger blessings than we ever would have imagined.

“Jesus answered and said to him, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but you will know after this.” John 13:7.

I’ve always been a big “doors” person. If given choices in life, I always choose the option that leads to more options just in case, because I usually can’t ever make up my mind and I want to leave myself a way out. But sometimes, God opens doors that only lead to one more door, no other options. And when that happens, it can be absolutely terrifying. But if you get past that overwhelming feeling of helplessness, it’s actually kind of comforting–that God really has a plan that’s so specific that He literally gives you no capability to mess it up. So I’ve learned– you’ve got to walk through those doors with confidence in the God who opened them, and forget about where you imagine they’ll lead. Because if you’re anything like me, you’re probably totally wrong anyway.☸