JAMES

 

James

 

GOD THE HEALER – GOD THE PROVIDER 

Thanksgiving Day in 1987 started out as normally as any other, with one exception – I had invited some friends from our church in Seattle round for lunch and I had never cooked a Thanksgiving meal before! I had my whole menu planned out to the last detail and was happily pottering around in my little kitchen whilst Rob was out, and our two children. Robert and Nick were playing together. They were only 2 and 9 months old respectively and I was about 10 weeks along in my 3^rd pregnancy. 

I remember when this remarkable story began, that I was mashing the potatoes (spuds where I come from) for our lunch and started to feel sharp jabs of pain in my abdomen. I ignored them for a while, because they felt very similar to the pain that I felt in my other pregnancies when my ligaments were stretching as my uterus grew. This seemed to be the same kind of pain, but I was feeling it much earlier. I thought that due to the fact that this was my 3^rd pregnancy, and that I had had my children so close together that my ligaments were just stretching a little earlier than before, so there was nothing to worry about. So, I just kept on mashing. Soon, I couldn’t stand up any more. The pain was so intense that I began to pray for healing and strength. I prayed in the spirit and in English for quite a while, but still the pains increased. I needed some paracetamol from the bathroom but I had to crawl very slowly along the corridor to the bathroom on my hands and knees because that was the only position that I could feel comfortable in. As I crawled, I was rebuking the enemy in the name of Jesus and I was in tears because I hurt so much. By the time I reached the bathroom I had started to bleed. I was losing the baby. I didn’t feel frightened or concerned in any way, I just felt very angry. This was MY baby and I was not going to let Satan hurt it.  I sat on the bathroom floor screaming at the devil and telling him that he was NOT having my precious baby. He was in for a fight!!  By that evening, I was lying on my back in the sitting room with friends from church round the sofa all praying for my healing. The Thanksgiving meal had gone cold but that didn’t matter.  

My midwife put me on bed rest for 2 weeks and I was not allowed to move. It seemed to work, the bleeding slowed down a lot but didn’t stop completely.  Friends were very helpful with cooking, cleaning, looking after the boys and regularly praying and believing for my complete healing, but the greatest strength came from Rob. He was up at 5am each morning so that he could get the boys ready and take them to whoever was going to look after them that day, then he would go to work, but also came home in his lunch hours to feed me, tidy up, help me to the bathroom and in the evenings after collecting the boys, he did everything that the 2 of us would normally do together. He never complained, he just got on with it. I was only allowed to lie on my back and couldn’t even sit up in bed. I had to be washed by Rob and when I needed a hair wash I had to hang my head over the edge of the bed so that he could wash it in a plastic bowl! I ate on my back and did everything horizontally!  By mid December I felt much better so my midwife said that I could get up and to gently increase my activity level but the bleeding soon got much worse and I ended up in intensive care.  Some tests and scans showed that my placenta had detached itself from the uterus wall, and this is where the bleeding came from, but the doctors couldn’t understand why I hadn’t either stopped bleeding or lost the baby by now. They decided that I had been in this situation for so long that if I was going to lose the baby, I would have done so by now. They told me that I wasn’t in any danger of losing the baby, but that I would probably bleed throughout my whole pregnancy and that I should just get on with life, but take things easy.  So I did. 

In January I started hemorrhaging and ended up in intensive care again. The doctor tried to find the baby’s heart beat but couldn’t. He told me that my baby had died because there was no way that it could survive that amount of blood loss.  He seemed very cold and harsh about the whole thing but was obviously concerned about keeping me alive.  He said that I needed to have a D & C (a medical procedure that cleans out the uterus and removes the fetus) because it was the only way that he could stop the heavy bleeding and he wouldn’t risk losing me through hemorrhaging to death – off he went to prepare for the surgery. I just lay there and cried my heart out. I was exhausted emotionally and spiritually.  I felt as though all my prayers were being ignored and that God was playing a game with me. My anger with Satan turned to frustration with God because I just couldn’t understand why He hadn’t healed me by now, and why I was going through all this emotional and physical turmoil.  I had been fighting to keep my baby alive all this time and it had all been futile.  What was the point of going through all this, if at the end of it you lost the battle anyway?  I then remember the Holy Spirit telling me that it wasn’t my battle, it was His. He told me to call the church and tell them what had happened. A friend of mine answered the phone, and when I told her what was going on, she explained things to me in a way that made sense. She said that Satan was a liar, and that I had to imagine that everything that was happening to me was a lie because God had already promised me in His word that I was already healed by Jesus’ stripes. God doesn’t lie, so who was I going to believe? It all became clear.  The way that she had explained everything really made sense and I felt a new sense of strength from the Lord to keep up the fight. We prayed again that God would heal me and save the baby. I hung up and waited to see what would happen next… 

A nurse came in after a few minutes, and said to me that she had heard about my situation and wanted to try one more time to find the baby’s heart beat.  I felt so relieved. She listened carefully and after a short while, a big smile crept across her face. She didn’t say anything, she just turned up the sound on the machine that she was using and I started to cry. There, very faintly, was a tiny little heart beat. My baby was still alive!

The doctor was dumbfounded. No one could believe that the baby was still hanging on to life with such determination!  The only thing that could be done now was to stay in intensive care and keep an eye on the bleeding. Once it slowed down, I was to be moved to another ward and stay in hospital for the rest of my pregnancy, or I had to have 24 hour nursing care at home. We had no medical coverage at the time and knew that the medical bills would already be high although we hadn’t actually received any yet so home I went with Rob, my faithful nursemaid.  We returned to the familiar routine of Rob getting up 5 am to sort the kids out before going to work.  Days turned to weeks and soon the feelings of frustration and helplessness filled my heart as I watched Rob care for his family and be a nurse to me. I felt useless as I lay there and watched my husband grow more tired as the days went on and I was incredibly bored! 

I began to study the book of James. I loved it. Everything I read could be applied to my situation, I felt as if the Lord was really speaking to me through His word and I learnt a lot about faith, how faith works and what it means to have true faith. I learnt how to pray in faith for my healing and also how to strengthen my faith through prayer and action. I would meditate on James every day and our home group continued to support us in prayer and practical help. One day a friend from our home group gave me a word from the Lord that He was going to replace my placenta with a new one. I felt on top of the world and knew that things would be OK so I started to praise God for His faithfulness and healing and felt my strength return.  However, by now we had received our medical bills in the mail and they had already had gone over $10,000!  So, as well as having faith for our baby’s safe arrival we also needed faith that the Lord would cover our bills.  It was a time of mixed emotions and differing levels of spiritual strength. Rob and I fluctuated between feeling very stressed and frightened to feeling calm and full of faith. 

By the time I was 7 months along I was still bleeding slightly and was still resting. Rob continued to faithfully care for the house and family on top of a full day’s work.  He was getting tired and finding it hard to keep going. The kids were getting frustrated and tired of being shipped off to a different home each day and because I still couldn’t pick them up or let them crawl on me. It was taking its toll on all of us. I was still studying James and believing God for complete healing but boredom, depression, frustration and uselessness plagued me so much that one day I got really angry again and told God that I wanted Him to either take my baby away now, or heal me completely – I just wanted to get on with life normally.  In His gentle voice He said to me that I had been learning that faith without works is dead and that He wouldn’t heal me until I acted in faith. I asked Him what he meant by that, to which he replied “Get out of your bed in faith. You are still lying in bed believing that you’re still sick. Get up and care for your family as you are meant to”.   I did as He told me to do, and my bleeding stopped completely at that very moment! I was amazed and overjoyed! Later that day, I received a phone call from the University of Washington Hospital, saying that they had heard about me and that they wanted to do some tests on me to see why I had continued to bleed but not lose the baby.  They also needed to use me as a guinea-pig for training their staff because the tests they needed to do were unique and that if I allowed them to do this, they would pay all my previous medical debts off and would deliver my baby free of charge if I had it at their hospital! What an answer to prayer! Both prayers answered on the same day! Praise the Lord!

 Our baby was born without any complications on May 26^th 1988 after only one and a half hours of labor! After the placenta was delivered, one of the nurses was amazed to find that it was very fresh and healthy. Her comment to me was ‘this looks like a new placenta, not old and worn like a 9 month old one”.  Just as God had promised!  Praise the Lord for his faithfulness and provision.   Yes ,we had another son and guess what?   His name is James!