Zoe’s Story (Sown in Weakness)

I always feel such a weakness in writing these stories. It feels like a huge mountain in front of me that just looks impossible to climb. And it’s always my feeble hope that the power of God might burn bright through my very real weakness. I have felt compelled to write this story for quite a long time, compelled to share God’s love in what He has done for me. Because this is yet again another story of God’s kind pursuit of my heart, to make it more like Jesus, and to prune every branch in me that isn’t bearing fruit. His banner over me is love.

Many will know of our struggle to have kids. Olivia’s arrival was a big waiting game, full of the deepest anguish, a lot of tears and heartache. But also, so much strength and growth in faith. God revealed to us so much more of who He is and what He does and taught us to trust in and rely upon His words and promises. But this next story leading up to Zoe was simply one of weakness. Deep and vast weakness which birthed the power and life of God in me.

What do you do when God has done the impossible once, you’ve heard Him speak, seen Him move mountains, experienced Him bringing dead things to life, only to go through another, LONGER season of Him NOT doing these very things? Hours of fasting and prayers going seemingly unanswered. Layer upon layer of disappointment. And more importantly (and painfully) seeing your own heart not manage to bear up under the weight of it all? Anybody who has gone through any length of time being infertile (unable to have children) knows that it is a season of disappointment, grief, longing, unfulfilled expectation and hope like no other. And it is RELENTLESS. It just comes again and again, deadening the heart, emphasizing the lies of that age-old enemy who whispers over and over again, “God doesn’t care about you or your desire for children. He’s not really that powerful, is He? Look around you, He’s blessing everyone else but you. Why love and serve a God like that? You’re never going to get what you’re asking and believing God for.” It is a time for battle, but so often you’ve got no strength to fight before the next hit is taken. It is EXHAUSTING.

We decided after Liv was 9 months old that we would start trying again, though I was nervous having such a little baby still. We knew it could take a while, but I didn’t actually believe it WOULD take a while. I think I really thought, “Oh we’ve been there, done that waiting thing, learned all our lessons about waiting on God and persevering. He’ll just give us kids now at appropriate time intervals…” And, obviously, I was totally wrong! I didn’t know it would be another 2 ½ years of waiting, of spiritual lows I’d never experienced, of lost strength that I could never recover on my own and what felt like lots and lots of defeat.

What happened next complicated the process further. I was praying to God about children all the time and one day while reading the Bible and praying I felt that God was giving me a timeline of when we would next have a baby, of when we could expect to receive an answer. I was delighted! Though I wasn’t asking for this, 4 different times in one month I perceived God speaking to me about the same timeline for our next child. Oh and by the way, this has happened in the Bible a handful of times, so it wasn’t totally unprecedented J But I did know I could get this whole thing wrong so I asked God to somehow reveal this same timeline to Alisdair if what I was hearing was indeed from Him. So, brave Alisdair began to pray and ask God for this timeline to be revealed to him, knowing literally nothing about it at all other than that word: “timeline”. But I was resolved. I felt so assured that if it was from God, then He would speak to Alisdair. And if He didn’t reveal anything to Alisdair, I felt a great peace to let it go and move on. Then one morning, Alisdair woke up and said the night before when he was falling asleep he saw the word “December” in his mind. Suddenly realising that this may be God revealing the timeline to him, he asked God for a day and saw the number “19”. Alisdair immediately took that as the 19^th of December. So he told me this date. Straight away, I went back to look at my journals and I was amazed to see what seemed to be a perfect connection and answer. I believed God had spoken to me beginning on the 18^th of December 2017 that we would have a baby in a year’s time. That was the exact answer! We were elated, amazed and just SO grateful to God! We couldn’t believe it. We were so excited, we actually felt as if we were pregnant. We excitedly told some of our closest friends what God was going to do and asked them to pray with us. Some were hesitant and cautious for us and others were super excited with us but we were just buzzing with confidence in what we had heard. So, we thought, we just wait now because in the next few months we’ll be pregnant and we’ll have a baby by the end of the year!

But March came, then April, then May and still no positive test. In fact I even had a strange missed cycle in April and we thought, “This is it!” But very sadly it was not. By the time June came I was so disappointed, discouraged and just plain confused! I had no idea why this had all come about. Why even give me a timeline Lord? I wasn’t asking for one! Why seemingly confirm it through Alisdair? Was I really hearing from You God? Can I really hear from You at all? Or, even worse, why have You tricked me?! I felt hurt. I felt despondent. I was spiralling. I didn’t trust myself to hear from God about anything anymore and it affected everything. I didn’t know how to have a relationship with God where I couldn’t feel an assurance of His voice. And what was worse, I didn’t know how to trust God to get me through this wobble. This was compounded by the fact that I was SO sad we didn’t have another baby yet. ☹

While this was happening in the background many things were changing in our lives and circumstances. After 5 years of helping start a church in Glasgow and seeing it through an incredibly difficult season, we felt a leading from God to move on to something different. This was difficult because our friends at this church were more like family and we felt deeply connected to and invested in the relationships we had built there. But through a variety of different means we understood from God it was time to move on. So after many chats with Alisdair’s brother in Aberdeen who was leading a small church up here, we decided to move up and help get this church off the ground. I felt so raw and vulnerable making this decision as I didn’t trust myself to hear much from God on anything anymore but Ali was very confident, so I trusted that he was hearing from God and being led by Him. I was just to follow. I also felt conflicted about going to help with something new. Was I meant to do this? Is it disingenuous when I am feeling so weak and wounded spiritually myself? How could I help lead something? But again, all we felt confident of was that we were to go.

When we got to Aberdeen in the autumn, after all the disappointment, we decided to pursue adoption (again). This was a shared desire we had since before even being married and we wondered if now was the time. I desperately wanted out of the cycle of trying for babies. I wanted to focus on something different but still felt such a calling on my life to mother more children. So we got in touch with the council and set up our initial meeting in December of 2018. They were so enthused by us and were quite keen for us to get right into the next training session in January so that we could begin the lengthy process straight away. I was delighted! Finally we were moving toward something. Only, in early January we learned that our new church were all going to a conference that we were supposed to attend during the same week of our adoption training. I thought to myself, well of course we just won’t go to the conference. The adoption training and getting things going with this is obviously more important than some church conference! But Alisdair surprisingly felt very strongly that we should go and wait for the next adoption training when we could. We then learned that the next one wasn’t until May, almost half way through the year! The thought of waiting that long was shattering for me and I couldn’t help but feel this was another hit when my faith was just beginning to build again. I was angry, bitter, confused and just so hurt. Why God? Why must we wait even longer?! We tried to see if there was any way around it, but alas, there wasn’t. But niggling away at me was a still small voice saying, “Trust Me, you know this is My hand”, even though I was hurt and couldn’t see why. But it was rare for Ali to feel so strongly about something like this, so I knew God was up to something.

So the conference rolled around and my expectations were low, even though I was incredibly desperate for God to move over me and in me, to pour out fresh living water on me. My heart was like dry, cracked thirsty ground. I needed a miracle. I felt barren and dead on the inside, like no spiritual life was flowing out of me. But I see now that God was hiding seeds in that dry and thirsty ground, just waiting to pour out water (from His Spirit) and sun (from Jesus’ face) on them to cause them to grow.

And wow, the stories I could tell from that conference are countless! The way that God spoke, the way He moved, the powerful and supernatural ways that He met with me and healed my heart. But for the sake of brevity (and YOUR time) I will limit it to two things that happened:

On the first night during the ministry session the speaker spoke about those feeling barren, using those exact words and how God was bringing life. I knew this was for me because it was precisely what I felt. While folks were receiving prayer I was just standing quietly when a woman walked past me and then came back and put her hand on my shoulder and said, “This may sound strange, but I think God wants to give you a new name – the name is Aisha” (by the way, this also happens a handful of times in the Bible at significant events in people’s lives, so is not totally strange). She spelled the name for me and told me to go and find out what it means. Later that night I looked it up and was amazed to find that it means “life” or “alive”. The exact opposite of barren or dead. And to me it was a promise of what God would do in me spiritually. That this place of spiritual barrenness would not be the end for me, that He would again produce life in me. It was incredibly powerful.

Then on the last day, I was in a prophecy training session and at the end the speaker asked us to pair up with someone we didn’t know to practice and immediately I caught the eyes of a woman sitting just across the aisle from me. She was my mother’s age and we nodded as if to say that we could be a pair. As we sat together, I was feeling quite nervous, knowing that I needed so much healing in this area, especially as I still didn’t really trust myself to hear from God anymore (which is the basis for prophecy). Then surprisingly, before we began she said to me she thinks she already knows what she’s to speak to me, that God told her before we even paired up and so I of course gave her the go ahead to share. She then told me that she felt God was saying I am like Peter when Jesus is walking on the water and Peter is keen to get out of the boat and walk on the water too. This story immediately resonated with me and I explained to her that it was dead on. God had used this passage in the Bible to very clearly speak to me just weeks before. I was exactly like Peter, full of zeal to believe God for and to walk in the supernaturally impossible (for us – having children) and did at first. But at the sight of the waves (natural) I immediately sunk and was going under spiritually. Now I found myself in the position of Peter, drowning and crying out to Jesus for help! I explained all of this to her while leaving out the details about what it was all revolved around – my inability to have more children. She listened quietly and then calmly, looking as if she could see into me, began to ask me a series of questions. “Are you married?” she asked. I said yes. “Do you have any children?” She followed. I said yes, I had one. And then she said leadingly, “Do you want more children?” At which point I just began crying my eyes out confirming that that is precisely what this is all about. She knew all about it! And she knew all about it because GOD knew all about it! He had sent her to me to prove that very thing. She went on to explain that she too had had a very similar experience. She had one child, but was desperate for more, struggling with infertility for years. God had spoken very powerfully to her that her future with children was in His hands and He led them down the road of IVF by faith in which she ended up having triplets! She comforted me, remembering and saying just how disappointing that season of barrenness was for her and she prayed for me. But her prayers didn’t only bring comfort! They brought healing and they breathed fresh new life in me. She obviously asked God to give us more children too. The very healing I needed from God had come. He knew me, He saw me, He loved me and He had the matter in hand. I was finally, totally at peace and at rest. My heart felt whole, no more broken bits. I had strength to wait on God afresh for whatever He wanted to do next.

So we went home, happy and changed and had 4 months until we were to either begin the journey towards adoption or to get pregnant. And they were the most peaceful, freeing months ever! In the end I genuinely didn’t feel tied to one outcome or another, I just wanted whatever was in God’s heart for me, and more importantly, I just wanted HIM more than anything else.

A few months later, in April, our church was hosting a ministry night with a team from Bethel (Redding, CA) and they offered to pray for those who needed healing. I didn’t think to go for prayer but one of the words of knowledge they shared was for those who had had “reproductive trauma”. That word hit me as it seemed to describe perfectly what happened when we lost our first baby (read more about that here). So Ali and I both felt prompted to go for prayer. The lovely girl who prayed for us was full of simple faith and joy in the Holy Spirit. And as a spoiler alert (though you know how this story ends), we got pregnant that week!

So finally, the weekend before our adoption training was here so we decided to take a pregnancy test on the Sunday morning before. And of course, I was pregnant! Calling to cancel our adoption training felt very much like Olivia’s story when we phoned to cancel our infertility investigations appointment on the morning of because we had miraculously gotten pregnant and tested positive (you can find that amazing story here)! God leaves it right down to the wire! Honestly, this blog post is so short and doesn’t do justice to even half of the things that God said and did during those 2 ½ years of waiting for Zoe. Perhaps one day I’ll write a book to recount everything He did and show His wondrous love to me. But for now, this will have to do 😊 We decided to call our precious girl Zoe Grace. Zoe means “life of God” and Grace means “undeserved gift”. For me it captured perfectly the work God has done in me. He has indeed brought new life in me, life from Him and in Him and it was very much an undeserved gift of love. First the spiritual and then the physical.

And to come full circle, our sweet Zoe came exactly on the 19^th of December, 2019! The date God had given Alisdair was totally correct, I had just misheard the year. There’s a whole blog post yet to be written on the humility of learning to hear from God and what happens when you get it wrong, but all that matters now is that God, in His grace, kept His beautiful word to us even and especially when we got it wrong and couldn’t see or believe. We are forever grateful to Him and Zoe is the sweetest, most feisty and fun girl ever. She is a precious treasure and there is not one day that I don’t thank God for her life and the spiritual life He has given me proceeding her. To God be the glory!