Our QF Story

From before we married we were open to having children as the Lord gave them to us and purposed to avoid all chemical birth control. We had our first two children 16 months apart -very close together. Their conception was 5 months after marriage and 5 months after birth of first baby. I was called a ” fertile Mertle.” Everyone was surprised we ‘let conception happen’ especially because they were eventful pregnancies with hypermesis, pre-term labor, and bed-rest in the mix. We also were not financially stable and found ourselves moving more than once a year in search of an affordable living situation. Then at 18 months old our eldest boy lost all his early speech and our second son proved to be on the strong willed hyper side. All that to say we had more than the terrible twos to deal with. Nothing was easy -at one point I even found myself living in the upstairs rooms of an elderly friend -pregnant with a toddler, doing dishes in the bath tub, fighting the summer heat with no air-conditioning on an upper floor all day and night, laundry was being done at the laundry mat… my husband was trying to go to school and work and was not home much.
Finally my husband found a job that would support us okay and a townhouse apartment. We made the move but this left us with no local friends or relatives as it was many miles west of where we were from. This was the beginning of years of being pretty much alone in life accept for our relationship with the Lord.

We were using the barrier method ’sometimes’ after my second son -when we were stretched to our limits in all these circumstances. Finally we felt at ease and desired another baby very much- though things weren’t perfect. We became pregnant! But within the first week of recognizing the baby we lost him/her. We had decided we were so fertile that we needed to be in control when circumstances dictated! And now we were faced with the reality that we had little control of these things. If it were up to us we would not ever ‘loose’ a baby. We decided I must need to let my body heal and continued in use of barrier method for 3-4 months. In my frustration I thought maybe the Lord let that happen because we needed to make more of an effort to get out of the apartment living that was not ideal for raising a family. So we tried to make that happen and the Lord let many unusual things happen to postpone finding a home. We’d lost a deal on a house I had my heart set on! and finally we just gave up trying to control things -it wasn’t really what we ever wanted to do anyway. The circumstances kinda scared us into clinging to ‘being responsible’ and taking charge of our lives. We conceived again and delivered our first girl within a year of the miscarriage! Then and only then did the Lord make the way for our move to our first home. We then conceived our second daughter 5 months after our move. And this only happened because we listened to our hearts and the Lord not our emotions and circumstances.
As I type this while holding my eighth baby -the fifth to be in my arms. I realize that in those earlier days were lessons that we needed to be forced to go through. If we had not I doubt we would be so strongly QF minded. And I doubt we could have come through the last few years as close to the Lord -by far more trying years than our earlier marriage.
Looking at our life as a whole makes the reality of the Lord’s work in our lives powerful and enables us to let go of the tendency to try to control the future more easily.

To read more click here as I write more chapters about our journey.

Tags: babies, birth, birth control, children, faith, marriage, miscarriage