Getting Here Part XII: Impossible Isn't in God's Vocabulary

Do you believe your life can change on a dime? It certainly can change on a ten-minute prayer. Before the month was out our old friends had decided we needn't come visit anymore. We were different, they told us. I guess they meant we weren't fun now.

After September 1975 we were pretty busy. In a rather short time I was assisting in controlling the sound equipment on Sunday Morning, ushering, on the visitation committee, teaching Vacation Bible school, acting as a leader for Boys' Brigade and Lois and I were elected to lead the Adult fellowship.

In 1976 Campus Crusade for Christ launched the international outreach called, "I Found It!" It found me and named me the Publicity Coordinator for South Jersey. This entailed meeting with ministers of various churches and with media outlets. I also found it involved making cold calls and door-to-door evangelism, things way out of my comfort zone.  A few years earlier I had been visiting churches to tell ministers they were preaching a lie and now I was knocking on doors of perfect strangers to explain what Christ could mean in their lives.

By 1977, Lois and I were Youth Ministers for Word of Life international. That is we in the photo at the top. I'm the guy in sunglasses toward the left and Lois is resting her head on my shoulder. With us are other leaders and some of the kids we served. No one here is lifting any glass in a toast. What is being held are paper towels and Windex. We were headed out to a parking lot to clean window shields, not as a fund raiser. No, we never took money for our Christian Service outings. We simply washed car windows and left a tract or if possible spoke to the driver.

If anyone reading this has ever been a youth leader they will confirm it is a very time consuming endeavor. Most of our time outside of our jobs was taken up planning and conducting meetings and outings for these teenagers. All this activity was beginning to overwhelm my wife. We weren't to learn until more than a decade later that my wife suffered from a problem that made life often difficult for her to deal with. Nonetheless she had committed to this because she knew I wanted to do it. There was also that factor that we would never be parents ourselves, so why not devote our time to these children?

God has impeccable timing. Between September 1975 through September 1977 we had been deeply involved in a lot for new babes in Christ. You talk about a crash course in James 1:22-25, this was it. But sometimes in youthful enthusiasm we did more than is healthy. But God found a way to slow us down.

Lois said, "I think I'm pregnant."

"How?" Not as dumb a question as it sounds. "I thought you had your tubes tied?"

"No, I didn't."

There was a problem. When we visited her gynecologist he refused to take her case. It was impossible for her to carry a baby to term. She was foolish getting pregnant again. It was a risk to her own life and there was no way with her history and scarring that this baby could survive.

There was a doctor at the church who heard of this situation and he arranged for her care. It was going to be difficult. She was going to have to stay in bed for the term. She could walk from the bedroom to the living room and to the bathroom when necessary, but nothing else. She had to stay off her feet, no cooking, no housework, no going out. And no guarantees this would work.

So I arranged a control center in the living room. From the sofa, where she would lay, she could control the TV. I put a cooler next to her with some food and drink so she could have lunch or snack. I took care of the housekeeping and making meals.

Fortunately, on the meal front, a group of people at Laurel Hill Bible Church formed a prayer group to pray for Lois and the baby. The women began bringing us meals in the evening.

In the dreaded fifth month, late February 1978, Lois called for me. She was losing it. I drove her the several miles to the hospital in a snow storm. Here we go again, this was a movie I'd seen too many times. There she was, in a labor room, a monitor beeping off the little heartbeats and an IV in her arm with chemicals to retard labor.

This went on a few days. A doctor came to us and said there was an experimental drug he would like to try if we agreed. It was something new called Steroids. He thought it might help strengthen the baby's lungs, but it was experimental and he couldn't say there weren't risks.

We said do it.

A couple more days passed and then the doctors came to me and said my wife was risking infection if they tried to retard delivery any longer. This baby had to come out.

And out she came yelling her little head off. The Steroids may have worked, they could hear her crying long before her head appeared. She just didn't like being wakened up so early in the morning and never would. She weighted just over 5 pounds and went right into an incubator. Her weight would drop and so Lois came home leaving the baby behind. She couldn't be released until she got back to five pounds.

Oh, how the nursery staff laughed at us when that day came and we tried to dress that little bitty girl for the first time. We had gotten the smallest baby clothes we could find, but even this was too large. We should have gotten doll dresses, I guess.

We named her Laurel Christine. Laurel in honor of those at Laurel Hill Bible Church who prayed her into this world and Christine (Little Christian) as her middle name because Christ was central to our lives.

Laurel was a person that it was said could not be born. She was and she is a very nice young lady now with a passion for helping those who can't help themselves, both human and animal. (Right - Laurel aiding Sandy victims.) Yet some may credit this to the doctor's putting Lois to bed or the injection of steroids or some other aspect of modern medicine. Some may, but Laurel's birth is not the end of this story.

To be continued...

 Laurel as VetTech at SPCA