losing baby #8

We got some horrible news at my doctor today. The baby who was growing inside of me no longer has a heartbeat. Before we had a chance to tell the whole world about our newest surprise, we lost the baby.

I went to my OB last Tuesday for my first prenatal visit. It's amazing how things change from one pregnancy to the next. With my other babies we had to wait until around 15 or 18 weeks before we got to see our little blessing on screen. Now my doctor does an ultrasound to confirm a pregnancy on the first prenatal visit. So I got to see our little peanut on the ultrasound machine. He or she was measuring 6 weeks. I could see the heartbeat. The heartbeat measured at 128 beats per minute, which is right where it should be at 6 weeks gestation. It's the smallest little heartbeat I ever did see!

This Tuesday I woke up and saw that I was bleeding. I've had two miscarriages before. I knew this was not a good sign. I called my doctor's office and was told to come in Thursday for an ultrasound.

Today I am 7 weeks along. Before the ultrasound technician even looked for a heartbeat, she measured the baby's size. I saw on the screen that it measured at 6 weeks 1 day. Same as last week. My heart sank but I still held on to hope. Within seconds the ultrasound tech looked for the heartbeat but found none. I cried and held on to my husband.

The option of doing a DNC was offered, but I chose to go through the process of miscarrying naturally. My second miscarriage was at 6 weeks, and I somewhat know what to expect. Over the next week or so my body will cast aside the life that once was.

Today I have such a heavy heart. Over the last two days I've had ample opportunity to go through the questions wondering if I did something to cause this. Did I drink too much caffeine? Is this due to my age? Was I not thankful enough for this gift who was growing inside of me, too focused on the part of my self that I would have to give up to love another baby?

There is one thing I know to be true. My God is a good God. He creates life; He doesn't destroy it. The loss we are suffering now is because sin entered the world. The nature of this world was altered to include death when Adam and Eve believed a lie and brought sin into this world. Some mysteries of this life we will not understand until we get to Heaven. This will be one that we will have to wait on to fully understand.

We had already told our kids that we would be welcoming another baby into our family. So tonight we had to tell them that I had a miscarriage. Our oldest son, Todd, took it the hardest. He loves having brothers and a sister so much, and he was obviously looking forward to loving another sibling. He also understands that "we'll see him or her when we get to Heaven" can feel like an awful. long. time.  He even asked us tonight if we can adopt a brother or sister for him. He's trying to fill the space in his heart that was left now that his baby brother or baby sister is gone.

My husband is my dearest friend. I am so thankful that my husband and I are on the same page when it comes to being open to life. We want to be smart about having more children (whatever that means). Maybe we shouldn't have any more. Maybe we should. We know that right now isn't the time to lament over these decisions, but to mourn our loss and count our blessings. We have been so blessed with five gorgeous, perfectly healthy children. And we will have the opportunity to get to know the souls of our other three children when we meet them in Heaven. 

You can be sure that my kids got extra kisses from me tonight!

Kyrie eleison!
Christe eleison!
Kyrie eleison!

kristy

Agápe

Nearly 16 years ago I exchanged marriage vows with my husband. They were traditional vows, promising to love each other no matter what. Yet, I didn't know what love was at that point in my life.

Although I had been a Christian for several years and tried to live my life like Jesus, I bought into the world's view of love. I believed love was more of a give and take. As long as my husband was meeting my needs, I loved him.

We went to a Christian marriage retreat weekend the first year or two of our marriage. The speakers reminded us not to buy into the world's view of marriage. The world's view of marriage is that it should be 50/50 - fifty percent of the love and responsibilities should be covered by the husband and the wife should assume the other fifty percent. The problem with this is that someone will always be coming up short, likely leading each other to frustration and disappointment. Instead, we learned that God calls us to be 100% the spouse that we can be. When we are both giving 100% of ourselves to our spouse, never asking for anything in return, that is when marriage works according to God's plan. This made perfect sense to us, and we tried to live this way in our marriage. Still, I don't think I had opened my heart to the fullness of this message. I understood it in theory, but unfortunately it didn't "click" with me until much, much later.

The world's understanding today seems to be, "as long as my spouse makes me happy, I will love him/her". But this isn't true love at all. At it's very core it is self-seeking. Me, me, me. And a marriage will not work if the object of my love is me.

I've been reading Theology of the Body for Beginners by Christopher West. This is crazy good stuff (and from the title it apparently gets even deeper after you've grasped the "beginner" part!) West describes how original sin twisted our hearts and the focus of our love. God made Adam in his image. God is self-giving, so Adam was designed to give himself to another human being. Yet Adam had no other human to whom he could give himself. So God made Eve. Adam and Eve were made naked and were not ashamed. Their passion for each other was pure and mirrored God's perfect love. They gave themselves freely to each other. Along came sin, and they immediately covered their bodies. Their nature and hearts had changed. They went from self-giving to self-seeking. Instinctively they knew they could be used as objects, and they had to cover themselves to protect themselves from being used and hurt.

I was self-seeking in my marriage. I wanted it to please me, to make me happy. I got married for my "happily ever after". One day God revealed to me that my life was not meant to just be about me, me, me. If I were to truly live out the way I was designed to live, I must give, give and give of myself. Jesus gave himself fully to us in his Passion. We beat him. We mocked him. We betrayed him. But he loved us anyways. Not only is his Love patient and kind and gentle, but it also is perfect in giving no matter what.

I am called to love like Christ. Once I allowed this reality of what true Love is, I became a better wife and a better mother and better person. My attempts to love are not perfect by any means. Loving by giving of myself is one of the hardest things for me to do. When it's late in the evening and I've finally sat down after a day full of chores, my body aching for some rest, and one of the little guys asks for some milk - love gets back up out of the oh-so-comfy chair and gets the glass of milk for my son. When my husband and I have a disagreement, love doesn't insist on being right. Love embraces humility and gives from the innermost depth of ourselves. Love does for others instead of taking from others.

What would Love do? It's not easy, but then again being a slave to self-seeking desires is a prison in and of itself. So it's not easy, but it brings peace and joy that we were intended for.

kristy

dreams waking up (a.k.a. my conversion story)

My journey back to the Catholic Church started in mid-2008, although I had no idea at the time that the Catholic Church is where my journey would lead me. That isn't to say there weren't seeds planted before then, but the seeds began to take root when a popular flamboyant preacher named Todd Bentley gained popularity within the Pentecostal faith traditions. This tattooed preacher was seen as a fresh breath of air, with his unconventional and theatrical style. He was asked to lead the Lakeland, Florida Revival for one week. The revival became a phenomenon that lasted much longer than one week, and Pentecostal Christians all over the country were buzzing about the rock-star style revival meetings. The meetings aired on GOD TV, and there were numerous healings claimed by the evangelist.

Some Pentecostals we knew were head over heels excited about what God was doing through Todd Bentley. Others were cautiously optimistic and dove into their Bibles to verify what was happening on the TV screens wasn't in conflict with the Word of God. Generally, my experience was that those who dove into their Bibles to check the revival came to the same conclusion - this guy doesn't jive with Scripture.

Still others that we frequently talked to and greatly respected couldn't stop talking about how everything that was happening at the Lakeland Revival was amazing. So we were sort of left scratching our heads. My husband watched several of the revival meetings on TV to see for himself. He prayed and watched. His report to me, his feelings toward what he had witnessed - this cannot be of God. It's a fraud.

We waited and watched. In August 2008 it came out that Todd Bentley had an affair on his wife, his marriage was ended in divorce. The Lakeland Revival meetings ended and when the truth came out, guess what? It was all about money the whole. The whole thing was a sham.

My husband and I were greatly bothered by the stark disagreements of the two camps of people we talked to - those who were "all in" on the goings on at the Lakeland Revival - even after the thing came to a screetching halt - and those who saw the Lakeland Revivals and Todd Bentley for what is was - a wolf in sheep's clothing. Or in this case a rock-star's clothing.

God, this can't be what you have for your church. There must be truth out there somewhere that doesn't contradict itself from one day to another.

We prayed together, "Lord show us your will for your church. We are open to anything outside of our current experiences. We just want something real."

We asked ourselves - why do we believe what we believe? Because of what we were taught growing up? What if those over us while we were growing up were wrong? There are many different denominations that we've never looked into; what if one of those denominations were more accurately teaching truth and we never knew it just because we were taught that our denomination - or lack of denomination as sometimes had been the case in our lives - was the correct one? What if the people teaching us that our denomination was correct...were wrong? What if Methodists interpreted the Bible more accurately and we just never knew it because we were never taught what the Methodist faith taught? Or Baptist? Or Church of Christ? Or something else?

We were attending a wonderful small Assemblies of God church with wonderful people. I mean wonderful in the kind of authentic Christ-like mercy-giving loving kind of people that we never wanted to think about leaving. But what if the Assemblies of God church wasn't what God wanted His church to be? Which church should we look at first? I mean, as we would soon find out in one History Channel program, there are 8,000 Protestant denominations. I don't have the ability to research 8,000 different sets of beliefs. My mind was spinning.

My husband had an idea. To find out what God wanted for His church, my husband would look back at the beginning...before Jesus was born, died and resurrected...he would study Judaism to find out what the earliest church would have been like. But it had to be Orthodox Judaism, as Reform and Conservative Judaism seemed to be evolutions of the Judaism that would have been on Earth 2,000 years ago. 

I wasn't quite convinced my husband's idea would work, but I didn't have any plan at all as to how I would look into 8,000 different Protestant faiths, so going back to the beginning - way before 8,000 Protestant denominations came about - sounded like an acceptable plan. I went through a kind of burned out period where - although I loved Jesus - I was feeling disillusioned by all of the divisions within Christianity. God, isn't your Truth out there somewhere?

So my husband turned started attending Orthodox Jewish services. It turns out an Orthodox Jewish service is about 3 hours long. I was pregnant with our third son, and a three-hour long service did not sound like the kind of research I was up for. So he went alone. He loved it. He soaked it in. He was excited about everything he learned. He started going to daily morning prayer services whenever he could find time in his schedule. People thought he was crazy, but we were OK with it. We knew the unsettled feeling we were dealing with, and we were OK with crazy for a while if it meant finding God's true desire for His church.

Now, my husband wasn't interested in denying Christ at all, so he took the knowledge he found to look for something similar in Christianity. Maybe it was the Messianic Judaism movement? We went to a couple of Messianic Judaism services. They were...long. And too many things just didn't add up to me. It just seemed like another Protestant division denomination to me. I couldn't see how something that started as a movement 30 years ago could be anything remotely similar to what God's church was like 2,000 years ago. Plus, in the Messianic Judaism services we went to, we never met anyone who had actually been to a Jewish synagogue. It was almost like they were making it up as they went and trying to base things on what someone told them happens in a Jewish synagogue service. 

All this time my husband would go and spend three hours every Saturday morning at the only Orthodox Jewish synagogue in our area. He begged me and begged me to go. In December 2008 I finally agreed to endure the three-hour long service with him one Saturday. I dragged my month-and-a-half-away-from-delivery butt over to the synagogue to please my husband. I didn't think anything would come out of it except maybe getting the best wife in the world medal for a day.

What I experienced made my palms sweaty and and heart race. What I saw was very...Catholic...except without Jesus. From the prayer book to the tabernacle to the chanting to the singing of the Psalms even to what the leader of the service was wearing and the way he kept bowing at the altar and the way the leader and the others read written prayers - it was more like what I remembered from my childhood days in a Catholic Church than any Protestant church I had ever been in.

No. Not the Catholic Church. I'm sure truth couldn't possibly be in the...but what if...

No. I was sure that's not what God is showing me. I started to look into what the Catholic Church taught. And it made sense. A lot of it was difficult for me to understand right away. I had to mentally chew on it. And I would get these moments of repulsion at the very thought of considering that the Catholic Church most accurately contained the truth that God wanted for His people. (I had, after all, very thorough and deep training in anti-Catholicism since becoming Protestant at age 15. And we were still fresh in the news of the priest sex scandals.) I even looked into the Lutheran church, since it was a direct shoot off of the Catholic Church and was very similar in liturgy and doctrine. So if it were a directly branch off of the Catholic Church, I thought, then it would be most like the original thing - sort of like a copy from an original is less contaminated than a copy from a copy from a copy from a copy...

I had a dream one night. I can't remember any of the dream except this - a Bible opened up in front of me, and there was such an amazing light and the most wonderful colors that you could ever imagine beaming out of the pages of the Bible. And there was such a joy and peace that only comes from knowing God and His holy Word. I knew during the dream that God was trying to tell me that there is more in His Word than we will ever be able to comprehend with our natural minds. That's what the incredible colors beaming out of the pages represented - all that God has for us in the Bible that we cannot fathom.

It's funny when you have a dream like that. There was such a joy and excitement in my heart and I tried to tell a few people about the dream only to get a nice smile from them and a, "that's nice, dear" response. But I knew the dream was a promise from God that He had more for me. More for us.

I kid you not - becoming Catholic has made that dream of Biblical awesomeness come alive to me. I never even knew the Catholic Church believed in the Bible. It's true! I thought the Catholic Church didn't want its laity reading the Bible. It was a lie told to me years ago and I believed it. The Bible brought me home to the Catholic Church. Apostolic succession, the papacy, their view of marriage (it's deeper than any Protestant has ever been able to explain to me) as a sacrament, confession (yes - confession!), visible unity of believers (a.k.a. the Jesus' church being ONE as opposed to 8,000 divisions), and the Eucharist (this is where I give a big shout out to John 6 - why had I never seen that whole chapter before?!), oh the Eucharist! It turns out 

(And have I mentioned - the Catholic Church doesn't teach that a person can go to Heaven by works!)

I'm not Catholic because of RELIGION!
I'm not Catholic because of old family ties.
I'm not Catholic because I went through a difficult time and "lost my faith" along the way.
I'm Catholic because God's grace touched my heart and opened the Bible up in a way that had never happened before.
I'm Catholic because of the Bible.
(Just in case anyone had to stand on their head backwards to not read that last statement I'll say it again.)
I'm Catholic because of the Bible!

I often imagine what people think of my conversion. I know the mindset I was in before. I would've thought someone who converted to Catholicism just didn't understand the love God had for them and the freedom from religion that His love provided. "Religion" had become a dirty word in our faith circles. It implied a faith void of any relationship with God, only rules and rituals. Mostly the word "religion" referred to Catholicism when I thought of it in a negative sense. But that's not at all what has happened to me. My relationship with Jesus has amplified since becoming Catholic. I know this is such an oxymoron to many.

I guess I can be thankful that Todd Bentley ignited a fire within me for my faith. I have been through a revival of my spirit through the washing of the Word. And I will never be the same again.

To God be the glory!

kristy

why on Earth would Catholics be having better sex?

I was honestly surprised when I read the US News and World Report article that "Devout Catholics Have Better Sex, Study Says" that came out last week. Who knew that a bunch of devout religious people were the ones who knew how to have the most fun in bed?! I mean, this goes against all "conventional wisdom" of the world's view of married sex, especially Christian sex. The study shows that weekly church-goers have better, more frequent sex than couple who do not attend church weekly.

Devout, married Catholics have the best sex of any demographic group, the Family Research Council said at an event Wednesday, pointing to a collection of studies from the last several decades.

As a Christian, this makes complete sense. When couples are sitting in church pews week after week, they are learning about Jesus and the way He loves us. Jesus' love is total giving of self.  Couples also hear ways they can mirror their love to Christ's love. Only when we understand the author of love, God himself, can we begin to show love to others. 

But why would Catholics be leading this group in the amount and quality of sex? It must be in the way they understand Jesus' love. One way that devout Catholics are different than any other Christians when it comes to marital sex is the absence of contraception. God designed sex to be the total and complete physical and spiritual given of one another. If you hold back your fertility from your spouse (contracept), you are holding back a part of your self and therefore changing what God designed sex to be.

Believe me, I know this doesn't make sense at first. How could holding back your fertility - something you can see or touch - hinder sex with your spouse? Even if you put all of the side effects of hormonal birth control (nausea, weight gain, abdominal pain, chest paid, headaches, eye problems, blood clots, cancer, and chemical abortion just to name a few) aside for argument's sake, contraception goes against God's design of the marital act. You are mutilating your body in some form in order to experience the pleasure of sex without the God-designed life creating potential that is intrinsic to sex.

Come on! Is contraception really that big of a deal? The Catholic Church teaches as an infallible doctrine (my friend Leila at Little Catholic Bubble explains infallible doctrine concisely here) that contraception is intrinsically evil. That is, in its very design, in its very makeup, it is evil. I don't know about you, but when someone calls something evil, they aren't playing with words. (And since this is infallible doctrine, no one - not even the Pope - can change it.) 

My point is that contraception is no trite matter. It is sin, and sin separates us from God. So if we are separating ourselves from God, how could we experience the full potential of the God-designed marital act? The marital act is not only physical, but it is also spiritual. Not contracepting allows couples to open themselves to the full physical and full spiritual benefits of the God-designed martial act. And when we open ourselves up to the fullness of God in any in life - especially in marriage and sex - we experience tremendous freedom and joy and peace.

Peace to all!

kristy