Satan Lived Next Door

Right before Alex's illness, we had moved into our new home in Green Bay. On the day of our move-in, one of the neighbors came to introduce themselves, and told us that the man who rented the house next door was a sex offender. We were horrified, and over the course of the next 3 years, found out more horrible things that had happened in what we thought was a good neighborhood. We found out that our home had formerly been owned by drug dealers, and that the house next door had been the scene of a horrible crime. One of the tenants had committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree in the front yard on Halloween night. What was even more horrible was that the entire neighborhood thought the body was just a Halloween decoration, and no one realized it was real for some time. I was conviced Satan lurked in the house next door, and for 3 years I prayed that God would bring us another house.

It was then that Ben was born, boy number 3. I was 3 weeks past my due date when the doctor finially decided to induce labor. He was a posterior delivery (face up in the birth canal instead of face down), which is considered high risk for the mother. I remember having extreme back pain along with other difficulties of delivery. After being in labor for hours I remember thinking " You know Lord, I've been trying here, but I just can't do this alone." And wouldn't you know, but just then he flipped around and popped out. The doctor had a shocked expression on his face when he said "DID YOU SEE THAT?" Ben was a whopping 11 lbs. at birth, he always does things the hard way. He was just a few ounces short of the hospital record for a vaginal delivery. I felt like I should have won a trophy, but after all what did I do? God did all the real work.

Because our family was growing, it was time to find yet another larger house, and soon we moved again. The Lord brought us a different home despite all of our prior financial troubles. The money we needed for the down payment miraculously arrived in the mail he day we needed it from my Grandmother in Colorado. Remember how I had been praying for a different house for 3 years? Well, be careful what you pray for, you might get it. Our new home was definately a gift from God. Once again we were in that Sweet Spot, and life was good. I had it all figured out, parenting was getting easier, and once again it seemed like nothing could ever go wrong.

Are you noticing a pattern here? Every time I think I have life all figured out, God decides to prove me wrong. Every time, I say I am never going to do that, He changes my feelings on the subject. Every time I think I am in control, He decides to show me who is really in charge. Every time I KNOW who I am and where I am going, the Lord takes my path in unexpected directions.

 

 

A year or two after our move, I became pregnant again with our fourth son James. Two days before my scheduled delivery date, my doctor performed the one and only ultra-sound I had ever had during all four of my pregnancies. It was at this time they found James had a large tumor or cyst. They had no idea what kind of tumor it was, cancerous or not, or even exactly where it was located. They told us that many times these things appear on necks, or faces of the newborn. They were relatively sure it wasn't a vital organ that was outside his body, but they couldn't be certian. Now, I ask you, if you were a new mother, 9 months pregnant, what would you think? It seemed like we had just been through one medical ordeal, and here we were going through another one. It almost felt like we were being punished.

"Okay Lord, what did we do wrong this time?" The next day via C-section, we were blessed with James. He was born with a grapefruit size cyst under his arm, a football, as the doctors described it. Shortly after birth he went into surgery to have the cyst removed. It was something of an ordeal to perform this type of surgery in little Green Bay, WI. The same surgeon who performed Alex's surgeries 6 years earlier, operated on James. There were doctors that came from all over the state to watch. The surgery was video taped for future reference and classroom study. Apparenly this had never been done before on a newborn. God always brings something good out of the bad doesn't He? James' cyst was not cancerous. They were able to remove it in one grapefruit sized ball. It had not encompassed any of his important lymph nodes or other vital organs because of it's location under his arm. God is sure good, isn't he? It's nothing short of a miralce to us. James was able to return home within 2 weeks, and once again we were living in the Sweet Spot.