Thursday, February 17, 2011

The Rest of the Story

A lot of you read my wife's blog post this week and I wanted to thank everyone for the response she has gotten. As her husband you can imagine that the hardest times for me were watching how sad my wife was. To see all the love and support that friends and family have given her in the last few days is nothing short of amazing and I guess I can only credit it to the love of Christ. Thank you all so much!

Now the title of this blog is "the rest of the story". Certainly this will not cover the rest of the story but I wanted to give a little insight for those of you who read her post, through my eyes.

As I mentioned earlier, the hardest part for me was watching my wife struggle with this trial. There have been many times in my life when I've had to wait for something that I thought I wanted right then and I have learned that God always fulfills his promises to me in better time than I could have chosen. So for me waiting for a baby almost seemed like waiting for a package to come in the mail (forgive my poor choice of a metaphor). I knew that when the time was right God would send us a child. But it is so much harder for me to watch my wife not receive something that she deserves and wants.

Now let me step back a bit in time with a couple of experiences so that you can know how I knew. As Ashleigh said in her post our "plan" before we got married was to wait a year before we started to have children. A couple of months after we had been married I was blessed with a dream. Now before you call me crazy I had never had a dream before that I had considered "revelation". Probably because I wasn't very open to the idea of having something revealed to me in a dream. That's Book of Mormon stuff I thought. So back to my dream; one night I woke up after having a very vivid dream. In the dream a little girl with long dark hair came up to me and said "Don't you want me daddy?" I almost started crying it touched me so much. When I woke up I was a little bit shaken, I wanted to think that it was just a strange dream and so I didn't mention it to Ash. After a couple of days the dream still weighed on me so I finally decided to do what I ought to have done in the first place. I knelt down and asked Heavenly Father if it was revelation or "just a dream". I felt strongly that it was indeed a revelation that we shouldn't wait any longer to try and have kids. That night I told Ashleigh about the dream and my prayers and as you can guess you couldn't have seen a happier wife. (As it turned out I was looking for a spot to bring it up because I wondered if she wanted to still wait and then we saw the episode of the Office where Jim and Pam find out they are prego, who knew?) So Ashleigh told you that she went off birth control so now lets fast forward a few months.

Ashleigh also mentioned a blessing that I gave her that helped her receive some comfort. Before I gave that blessing I decided to go to my bedroom and pray for a bit so that when I gave the blessing I would say what the Lord wanted said and not what I wanted to happen. I hadn't really ever done this because I hadn't ever been in a situation to give a blessing where my will played strongly into the situation. As I prayed I felt comforted and I knew that the Lord would put words into my mouth. As I laid my hands on my wife's head I felt the Spirit come over me very strongly. I can only remember a few things from the blessing besides that feeling. First I remember I told her to be strong and have faith, the Lord loved her and really was looking down on her and was the only one who really knew how she felt. Second I advised her to continue keeping the commandments even when things got hard. Last I remember I told her that she could be comforted because "we would have a baby soon". As I took my hands off her head I wondered what it meant to "have a baby soon". Soon for me would be next month but soon for the Lord could mean a few years. It didn't really matter though because I knew it would happen, I had felt the Spirit testify on multiple occasions now and so now I was only waiting for a package to be delivered. I do know that it will come when the Lord sees it best to come. He has always blessed me with what he has promised.

Again I want to thank all of you for your love and support. The Spirit has comforted me when I read your comments to my wife and I know that she is blessed with lots of support and in way that takes a lot of worry off of my shoulders. So thank you again and may we all continue to show Christ's love to those around us!