Speaking about Lawson

So I was asked to speak at a women's conference in May and I thought I'd share the testimony that I did.....
 

In Jeremiah 1: 4-9,

4 The word of the Lord came to me, saying,

⁵ “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
    before you were born I set you apart;
    I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

⁶ “Alas, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young.”

⁷ But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am too young.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. ⁸ Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,” declares the Lord.

⁹ Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “I have put my words in your mouth.   

 

I’ll start with telling you a little about me. I am 26. I grew up not far from here towards Huntsville/Gurley area.  My parents raised me in church and encouraged me to participate and I stayed pretty active in church activities all throughout my childhood into teenage years. I felt like I had a pretty good relationship with God as I’ve grown up. I went to a small school where we were pretty much all involved in church and unafraid to express our faith because we all knew each other so much, it was hard to not know something about each other.  I didn’t have a whole lot of “trying” times during my childhood and only a few as I was in my teenage years. I’m just like all of you, I had and have everyday struggles in my faith and have fallen short plenty of times. I know you guys don’t want hear my whole life story because that would be pretty boring. So I’ve given you a little of the backstory but for the most part, as far as testing my faith, I hadn’t gone through a whole lot of struggles. 

I am a wife and a mother. My husband, Billy Prince and I have been married for almost 6 years and I have a very active and stubborn 6 year old little boy named Landon. My husband and I had a few early rough years of marriage trying to juggle one income, me still being in school, having a small child. Just in the last couple years of our life as a young family, we have withstood some very trying times in our lives.

We began talking of wanting another child when Landon was about 2, and for months and months it just wasn’t happening. I started seeing my OBGYN doctor for problems with my cycles and such. After a year and a half of trying, we started on a round of fertility medicine called Clomid. Miracles happen, because within a month on Clomid I was pregnant. I was so nervous, especially during the first couple months, with my background in healthcare (I do ultrasound), I had heard and studied almost every kind of abnormality in pregnancies that could happen and let me assure you that knowledge can be super scary. I prayed and prayed for a healthy baby all through those months, all my time driving back and forth to work was me crying out to God about my fears and asking for His peace. As the pregnancy progressed I began to feel more comfortable that God was going to give us a healthy child. All the ultrasounds had been normal and no other problems. Around my 6^th month I started feeling pretty bad, that was around the holidays because the baby was due at the end of February.  I had started telling my husband that things just didn’t feel right and I didn’t have the peace that this pregnancy was ok. I struggled through the holidays and had my parents stay with me a couple times while Billy was away for work. I started back to a normal routine at work once the holidays were over but I still didn’t feel good. I just kept telling myself it was part of the pregnancy, and I just had a few more months. I could do this! I had a few abnormal liver tests and such as I progressed but I was assured that it would have no effect on the baby and that they were going to monitor me closely. Finally on January 7, I went in to work like any other day and I just couldn’t clear my head and felt dizzy. I went over and had the nurse take my blood pressure and it was super high. I called my doctor’s office and she wanted me to go to the hospital to be monitored. They put me on the monitors and not long after my doctor came in to tell me that she wasn’t too happy with the way he was reacting so she was going to keep me overnight and I would be on bed rest from here on out. She had ordered an ultrasound so that she could get a better picture of what we were dealing with. The ultrasound was done within about 20 minutes and everything from there was almost a blur. The ultrasound showed fluid on the belly and brain and the baby didn’t look good at all. My doctor explained that they needed to deliver the baby now so that the doctors could look at him and figure out what needed to be done. I was crying hysterically, of course, because it was all so sudden and I was only 33 weeks so I knew that we were taking a huge risk. My husband wasn’t there and everything was not going like I planned. But on that same day January 7, 2013 Lawson Drake Prince was delivered within a few hours of me being there, and they knew as soon as he was out that things did not look good. He weighed 5 lbs but he was very sick and they weren’t very certain what all was going on. Let me just tell you that the worst fear of being a mother had come true, my child was sick and close to dying and I couldn’t control it or help him. It’s the most heartbreaking moment I’ve ever felt.

So many questions and no answers, it was literally all in God’s hands because we can only do so much and our human efforts weren’t helping him. Throughout the next few hours, I kept a sort of denial that he would die. I just knew that this couldn’t happen. I can’t really explain except that my brain was in kind of a fog. Like I was standing back watching someone else go through this. As I came up from recovery after the c-section, I was rolled in and got to hold his hand. (That’s the picture that you see.)I spent a few minutes with him, but then we were sent to a room to get settled. But it wasn’t long before we were called back to the NICU. When we arrived, I just stared at this baby that couldn’t give anymore and I just cried and cried. His little body just didn’t have any more power and God took him. In those moments, I didn’t cry out to Him. I was too upset and in that fog that nothing made sense in the world. I wasn’t real in my mind in those few hours. Maybe he gives us those coping mechanisms just to get through. There is so much uncertainty and in that time there are so many things that parents never want to think about. We didn’t even know that he was going to be a boy until right before he was born, so his boy name had just been on the backburner so to speak. We had decided on a girl name for sure, because that’s what our 20 week ultrasound told us.(we even had all baby girl clothes picked out and her bedding was purple gray and yellow) So we luckily had a name already picked and decided God had given us the name Lawson for a reason so it was the only choice. (by the way that’s my maiden name) 

There are a lot of emotions that I went through just in the few short days that I had to remain in the hospital. The worst memories are of course the prominent ones because of my exhausted emotional state. Particularly when you are on the maternity floor after your child has died, the nurses and staff are used to congratulating parents on their newborn, however, with my situation it’s not such a happy situation. There were instances such as the nurses bringing by our menu for the “congratulatory” dinner they provide and having to explain we didn’t want it. There were doctors that came in to check in on me that had not read the fetal demise sign on the door nor my chart and said things such as with your new baby, you will be a little stressed but try to take care of yourself also. Finally I broke down at the last doctor and said “well, my baby died.”

While we were still in the hospital the day after Lawson died I just broke down and sobbed because I wanted to be the one that had been taken so that he had a chance at life. I remember my mother saying to me that I was her baby and that she didn’t want me to be taken just as much as I hadn’t wanted Lawson to die. There was so much anger, so much fear, and so many emotions in such a small span of time. You have to learn to be a whole new person in a matter of seconds. You have to explain to people that don’t know what happened. And then there’s the awkward silence or the odd comment from them. Lots of times people want to be sympathetic and say things like “well God has a reason for everything.” That’s not exactly something I wanted to hear at all. (its hard to come up with anything in my book that is ok to say, harsh I know but there really are no words) Even as you leave that place where your child died, you feel like you are losing control because you aren’t supposed to be getting in that car without your baby. You have to go back to a house that has all the baby things you’ve bought and it hits you that the last time you were here, he was still alive. And eventually that house will get empty of visitors and you have to sit in the silence of a house that isn’t supposed to be silent or sad. Billy and I had to try and think of a way to explain it to Landon without scaring him. There were several times when Billy and I needed some quiet time to grieve, but life didn’t slow down with an active 4 year old. He was still asking about his “sister” and acting really confused about our answers. Billy is a very quiet guy and he tends to hold his feelings in. So I had to try and find a way to still be a mom and wife and comfort them but I couldn’t even figure out how to get through a moment without wanting to break down, much less take care of someone else. 

 The nightmare kept going, it seemed because then came the worst decisions: where do we bury him, where will the funeral be, what kind of casket do you want, what kind of headstone will portray him the best…oh those were some of the most awful decisions I’ve had to make. You forced to make all these decisions while you are still trying to cling to and grasp what has gone on.

 I believe God still stood there with me, as I lost my son, as I was upset, as we went through the funeral and buried him, as I had such a disbelief that I couldn’t comprehend it all, He stood right there and did what He does best. He was with me, when it seemed no one was. Because I can tell you that it wasn’t me getting around, it was Him carrying me.

Dealing with a child’s death is one of the worst things we can experience in my opinion. I believe God gives us that unconditional love and natural protection for our children that’s completely different than the love of our spouse or other family. I think that’s the closest thing on earth to His love for us. So after Lawson died and the funeral was over, I was devastated and I remember laying in the bed and just crying out to Him and being so mad at Him. Why did you give me this child to take him from me, why me, why him, why when we’ve tried so hard do you give these other people no problems conceiving and they don’t care for their children…..any “why” you can come up with, I probably yelled at Him. In Psalm 6:6-7, it says,  “I am worn out from my groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.⁷ My eyes grow weak with sorrow;  they fail because of all my foes.” That’s exactly how I felt. I was worn out from this suffering and it took me a long time to want to praise the One who gave me Lawson, and the One I felt like allowed him to be taken from me. I was upset, angry, sad, the list could go on and on. One of my favorite songs that I refer to over and over is “I will carry you” by Selah. The lyrics go

I will carry you
While your heart beats here
Long beyond the empty cradle
Through the coming years
I will carry you
All my life
And I will praise the One Who's chosen me
To carry you

God uses His ways to do things, sure He could have come in and healed Lawson or He could have kept me from getting that virus all together, but His way isn’t our way. Ecclesiastes 11:5 As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.  

When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he didn’t do it when Mary and Martha and the others were expecting him too, He did it in His time because it required more belief in the awesome power of God. Maybe that was God’s plan for Lawson and I, losing him was my way to rely solely on God and allow Him to show me the way and teach others through my experiences. He knew that I would fall, that I would be mad at Him. And He lets us be, He understand our pain. He lets us come to Him. He lets us literally “heave” all those problems on Him and you know what, He gladly accepts them because that means we are calling on Him. I could have kept all that bitterness and anger but slowly, and I mean it took a lot of time and definitely wasn’t easy, I started looking at the good things that He was in all along the way. For example, He allowed my mom and sister to be there at the hospital that day so I wasn’t physically alone, He gave me and my husband time to see our child, He didn’t allow me as an ultrasound tech to find my baby’s heart not beating…the list goes on. To me, my struggles were the worst, and I found myself upset that other people were mourning this or that when I had lost a child and in my mind nothing could compare to that. But to God, our struggles are all equal to Him. Just like a good parent, God hates our suffering. We don’t like to see our own children hurt or suffer and neither does He! How awesome is it to know that our God is so powerful that He can know every emotion we have and every trial that He will walk through with us and yet He still pours out all His love on us…who are we to deserve such love and understanding? After all, Lawson was never really mine at all, for everything that is, is His. The bible says it numerous times,

The world is mine, and all that is in it. Psalm 50:12

For everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, O LORD, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all. 1 Chronicles 29:11

 I have the faith in my God that I will get to see Lawson again. He just allowed me to have Lawson the small time that I did and I am thankful for each and every moment.

Even now, as I feel like I’ve sorted out the emotions and feel like I’m in a better place with my relationship with God, I still have struggles everyday with those upset feelings trying to take over. We are still suffering from infertility and it has not been an easy journey. However, it is so easy to let the devil come in and steal your joy of today. “Lord, if you wanted me to have more children, you would let it happen” and “are you trying to tell me something by taking our second child”….doubts and questions like this don’t get me any closer with my trust in God. There are many people in the Bible who experienced the things we experience. Hannah suffered for a long time with infertility. She cried out to God and He finally granted her a son. Now I won’t say that God gives every person a child, because He doesn’t. That’s another area in our lives that we do not know God’s exact plans for us. As you can see all through my talk here that I certainly don’t pretend to know God’s plans for the events in my life especially. Sarah also suffered from infertility and Abraham had been told that he would be the father of many nations so Sarah got impatient and offered the servant to him. It resulted in heartache for her as she endured her husband having a child with another woman. She didn’t wait on God’s timing and tried to take matters into her own hands, isn’t that so like us? I know I do that!

We have expectations and although we know He is God, we are still hurt when we feel like he hasn’t met the request like we want.  It’s sometimes hard to pray for His will to be done because we all know that sometimes the Lord’s way isn’t our way and really there are blessings in that. He knows far more about our lives and the way they will play out than we do.

I’m sure you have had your fair share of hurt and times when you are upset with God, but know that he sees us in our grief and hurt. After all, even Jesus wept while He was here on Earth.  There may not be answers to the things you or I struggle with. I believe that He is an almighty God and He can do things that are unimaginable but He doesn’t always answer things the way we want. So the belief that needs to stand firm is that when the things don’t turn out good or how we planned, that one day it will be perfect. And I pray for the promise of that perfect eternity to be etched into our hearts and minds so that we may go on. A quote from Angie Smith’s book “I Will Carry You”, When the wind blows through my soul and tempts me to despair over the lot I have been given, I cling to the truth that the Lord has something better for me. It won’t always be like this. You will know Him fully one day and all the hurts that consume you in this moment will vanish and be forgotten.”- Angie Smith 

A friend of mine told me to look up verses that coincide with days of importance to me and see if a scripture fits that day, so it peaked my interest and I looked and found 2^nd Corinthians 1:7,

And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort. I sat and thought about that verse and I knew it went perfectly with his birth and that time in my life, because he shared that suffering with me and He also shared in the comfort that eventually came and still to this day is sharing in all of it.

The bottom line of all that I have shared with you today and I hope that you remember and take away with you is that we are not alone. He walks with us and stands by us when no one else does. He understands more about you than you do. I wasn’t alone in the delivery room, wasn’t alone as I watched the breath leave him, wasn’t alone when I cried tears that I thought would never stop, wasn’t alone when I felt as if my heart was literally going to break free of my chest…I’m not alone now as I think every moment of another positive pregnancy test, as I think about all the love that I have left to give another child…   as I go through every awful and joyful moment of this journey He stands right there. He knows every inch of my journey (my emotions, my struggles, my strengths, everything) because He made me.