Good News/Bad News

August, 1991. We had been married only two months and I was ecstatic when I found out I was pregnant. We were 36 when we married and we wanted a family right away! Then one day I was sitting in my French class at the community college near us, and I had started bleeding. I called the doctor when I got home and he basically told me to get my feet up and we would see what happened. Cramping started that evening and I went to the doctor the next morning. When he came in to tell me the news that I had miscarried, he had tears in his eyes. Although we tried every month to get pregnant, I didn't. My biological clock was ticking away! We went to an infertility specialist. We were preparing to go to French language study in just a few months so we were hoping to find answers before we left for France. We tried all the techniques. Boxers instead of briefs, temperature every morning and charting ovulation. We had done a lot of reading and talking and had come to a consensus on what treatments we would pursue. Our specialist even told us that in five years we might have a baby! When it was time to leave for language study, we left confident that God would give us a baby in his time.

While at Les Cedres, my teacher was pregnant and I was reminded of my loss each time I saw her. One week I did a meditation on infertility and adoption. My teacher called me in to correct my grammar and to encourage me not to give up hope. She assured me that once the stress levels were down I would get pregnant--once I was on the mission field and life reached a normal level, she was sure I'd get pregnant. I believe that God's timing had all to do with when I would get pregnant and not getting pregnant had nothing to do with the level of stress I was under.

One weekend we went to Lyon for the weekend to visit a friend of mine from Iowa. She was a nanny and the family she worked for was out of town. We stayed the weekend and went to an art festival with her. I saw this beautiful leather brooch that I kind of liked, but couldn't afford.

About two weeks later I received a gift in the mail from my friend in Lyon. It was the brooch I had admired at the art festival. But it was not just a leather brooch, but a tiny black baby's face carved in leather with a brown blanket surrounding it's tiny head. I had not shared with her that I could not get pregnant, that I had miscarried. She knew nothing of these struggles. Yet it was as though God was speaking through her. I was at a loss as to exactly what he was saying. Adopt an African child or get pregnant in Africa?All I knew was that God saw me and saw my pain of not having a family. That leather brooch gave me hope!