Hope – A testimony for Easter

Ed and I were asked to share our 'faith story' about what we've been through in this last year at the Easter services today... thought you might like to see what we said!

Ed
Hi. I’m Ed and this is my wife Nicci. We moved to the Bay Area just over a year ago when I was transferred over here to my company’s head office in Redwood Shores. When we arrived, top of our list of things to get sorted (and the very thing we’d asked all our friends and family back home to be praying for) was for us to find a church. The first one we tried was CPC and we haven’t looked back!

We had great hopes for this new adventure in our lives, but had little idea what sort of an adventure the Lord had planned for us and what trials he would lead us through.

Nic
But before we give you the details about what we’ve been through, let me give you a bit of background about us! As you can tell from our accents, we are not from around here. We are English and, up until a year ago we didn’t know anyone in the States. We were both raised in very loving, Christian families. Both of us were encouraged and nurtured in secure and privileged homes. We both made a commitment to follow Christ when we were very young, and in His grace, we never strayed far from Him, even through our teenage years. We met at University and married when we were 21 (11 ½ years ago!).

Ed
Up until 6 years ago, life had been going just as we’d hoped it would. We were both doing well in our careers. We had lots of friends, a really happy marriage, reasonable financial security, a great family, and a great church.

Nic
We were comfortable and happy in this World. Our experience was that God answered prayer and that usually, He blessed us with exactly what we asked for.

Ed
But, 6 years ago, we started trying for a family. A year went by, then two, three, four years. After 5 long years we had pretty much given up on the idea of having children. By this time, most of our friends who had got married around the same time as us or even after us were having their second child. Although heart breaking, we knew that we had grown a lot through the chronic pain of infertility and we were confident in God’s good and sovereign plan for our lives...even if that meant that we were never going to be parents.

Nic
When we moved out here, with me not working, it seemed like the perfect time to try IVF. And, to our utter amazement and joy, I fell pregnant on our first attempt! And incredibly, I was pregnant with TWINS! It all seemed too good to be true. Everything went well at first but then, in week 9 of the pregnancy, I began to bleed. Although we didn’t lose the babies, this bleeding caused one of the sacks that one of the babies was in to burst. We were told we were going to lose at least one of the babies and I was put on strict bed rest, which lasted 4½ months.

Ed
On the day we found out the sack had burst, we phoned my parents. Once we’d told them our sad news, they had some news of their own. My Mum, the most colourful, vibrant and faith-filled woman told us that she had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and only had a few more months to live.

Nic
It felt as though our prayers were bouncing off the ceiling. It felt as though we had been abandoned and that God, just as He had done with Job, was allowing the evil one to do his worst with us.

It was hard to believe the scriptures like Romans 8:28, that God works for the GOOD of those who love Him, or Matthew 7:9-10, where it says that God will not give us a stone if we ask for bread or a snake when we ask Him for fish. It felt like we were being given stones and snakes. But, in the midst of that dark time, God held onto us and gave us the faith to decide to believe His word above our experience. If God says he will only do us good and that he will only give us good things, then, even though my experience is shouting the opposite, I will choose to believe that what I am going through IS good. God’s word trumps my experience.

Ed
In the weeks that followed, we prayed and prayed. I flew out to England on December 16th to spend Christmas with my Mum, Dad and sister. I arrived home in time for lunch and we had a happy afternoon together, but at 6pm that day my Mum died aged just 57: only 4 weeks from the day she was diagnosed.

Nic
And on 8th February, I gave birth in my 25th week of pregnancy. Our firstborn son, Joshua, who had hung onto life for much longer than anyone had predicted after his amniotic sack had burst, died after just 67 minutes. And Daniel, the other twin is still in the neonatal intensive care unit at Stanford.

Ed
Looking back, if we’d known what this last year was going to entail we wouldn’t have thought we’d be able to endure it with our faith intact. But God has held us and given us the strength we have needed each day.

Amazingly, we can see that God (as he promises He will!) has used this period of intense suffering to refine our faith and achieve in us the growth that we had prayed for in the past, but could not generate on our own...

Nic
One major thing that I am learning is that God wants me to be a woman of faith, not fear. I have been holding onto Romans 8:15 “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received a spirit of sonship. And by Him we cry “Abba, Father””.

Through the pregnancy and now, with Daniel in intensive care, there is SO much I could be fearful about. I find it is a daily battle to choose to cry out to my Heavenly Father, my ever-loving ‘Abba’. To lay all my fears before Him and then LEAVE them in His hands, trusting that He is sovereignly in control and that He will work His good purposes out.

I have been challenged to let go of what I think is best and to trust and embrace God’s best for me and for my family, even if that turns out to be the exact opposite of what I thought would be best!

Ed
The main thing for me is that my appetite for heaven has increased! Just 10 days after Mum had died I was reading the Psalms and found the verse that says: Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere. I did the maths: I had hoped that Mum would live another 30 years or so, and get to be a wonderful grandmother to our kids. But with one day in Heaven equalling roughly 3 years on Earth, I realised that after just 10 days with the Lord, Mum had already experienced more joy than she would have had with another 30 years on Earth. Heaven must be great! Jesus will be there, and so will my Mum and my firstborn son. I can’t wait to go there!

Whereas before I was satisfied with this life, I now see that this world is broken and that nothing in this life lasts, or will never truly satisfy. Everything this side of heaven is fragile and temporary. I can’t wait for heaven where moth, rust and death will not be able to destroy as they do here.

Nic
The theme of this service is ‘hope’. Throughout the last few months we ‘hoped’ the bleeding would stop, hoped that neither sack would burst, hoped I’d be able to carry the babies through to full term and hoped that Joshua and Ed’s Mum would not die... none of these ‘hopes’ were fulfilled.

Ed
As I said before, the things we ‘hope’ for in this life are fragile and temporary. The likelihood is that at some point, these hopes will disappoint us. The ONLY hope that won’t disappoint is the hope that is grounded in the fact of Jesus death and resurrection. Because Jesus died in our place, we can be sure that we no longer have to face God’s anger for our sin. Because Jesus rose again, we can be utterly confident that we will also be raised with him.

1 Peter 1 v3 says “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead”

Nic
A LIVING hope. That’s what’s on offer! A hope that CANNOT disappoint us!

It’s this hope that has anchored us through this season of trial. It is this hope that means we can stand here today, after all we have been through and state that God is good, He is wise and He is sovereignly in control.

Ed
He does ALL things well and even if we don’t understand the reasons for all that He has ordained for us, we will trust Him and trust that one day we WILL understand. God sets the standard for what is good, wise and loving. It’s not that he has failed to be any of these things or in any way ‘dropped the ball’ in the last few months. No, in all that we have been through, God has been working out His perfect, loving and altogether wise plan.

I’d like to finish with my Mum’s favourite poem that she knew off-by-heart and often quoted in her last days. It is so wise, and has helped us immensely to fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on the unseen reality of God’s perfect sovereign plan for our lives.

My life is but a weaving between my Lord and me;
I cannot choose the colours He worketh steadily.
Oft times He weaveth sorrow and I, in foolish pride,
forget He sees the upper, and I the underside.

Not 'til the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly,
shall God unroll the canvas and explain the reason why
the dark threads are as needful in the Weaver's skillful hand,
as the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He has planned.

He knows, He loves, He cares: nothing this truth can dim.
He gives His very best to those who choose to walk with Him