This story happened almost nine years ago.  I was just finishing up my final year in college.  Nick and I had been married only a few short months, but we had plans.  I was to take a year off of school, then go back to get my masters and begin a teaching career.  It was a beautiful plan for my life. 

Only one problem: I might be pregnant.  It was possible, but not likely.  I remember worrying about the possibility one Sunday morning, when I heard God speak to me.  Only a few times in my life have I actually audibly heard the voice of God.  This was one of those times.  What He said was, “It will be okay.  I will take care of you.” So naturally I believed this meant that I was not pregnant.  It threw off my whole life plan to be pregnant now.  Surely God knew that.

Do you ever take the words God says and twist them to mean what you want them to?  I was pregnant, I discovered to my shock a few weeks later.  Now you have to know that we had no way to provide for this child.  Nick has just left a terrible job situation and was looking for employment.  I had just graduated and was working at a retail store as a temporary thing.  We had planned to move back closer to our families after a year.  How could we continue to live this way when we were going to be responsible for another human life?

But I remembered the words of God “It will be okay.  I will take care of you.”  Piece by piece, things started falling into place.  Nick got a job, our church family supported us as well, if not better than our biological family.  Although it was a new plan, I recognized that it was God’s plan and relinquished my own timetable. 

At 8 months, my child stopped growing and the doctor became concerned.  Something was wrong and we went through several tests to find the problem.  For some reason, her intestines hadn’t fully developed and the chance that she would need surgery right after birth was high.  I was terrified.  God had told me that everything would be okay.  I changed my stubborn heart and rejoiced in this child, this gift from God that just might be taken away.  What was God playing at?

36 hours after our Kaeldra was born, she began to throw up everything she had eaten.  Our worst fears were confirmed.  We would have to fly her to Spokane for surgery.  I was, as you can imagine, a complete mess:  seeing my daughter in the incubator bed, knowing that her life was in jeopardy and that there was nothing I could do about it.  My family came to support us during this time and the church rallied and prayed.  But nothing changes that moment when you’re all alone with this helpless child, facing the thought of losing her just after you’ve met her.  You ask God why, not an angry why or a justified why or even a self righteous why.  This is the honest confused cry of a human to her maker because she cannot see around the corner.  But God had promised me that it would be okay.  This was not in my definition of okay, but it was in God’s.

Since many of you know Kaeldra, you know that this story has a happy ending, though not all stories do.  She is well and healthy and a blessing to my life.  Because of her, we stayed here in Walla Walla and I have found a calling and a passion that was never part of my original plans.  Two years after her birth, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis – another story for another time.  But I know that God gave me my child at the healthiest time in my life when I could have a baby without severe pain.  That was a gift that I didn’t know I needed.  My greatest crisis produced a new grateful time in my life and I know that I am no longer the person I was.

I don’t know where you are in life, but I guarantee that there will be a time when your back is against the wall; when you find yourself in dangerous circumstances not necessarily of your own making.  At that time I want you to know that God’s promises never fail.   He may speak a word to you, or you may read it in the fabulous promises of the Bible.  But either way, that promise is just for you and is the strength you will need to stand through the storm.  God knows what He is doing, even and especially when it looks like all hope is lost.  Trust who God is and His care for you and He will carry you through.  I don’t know the answer to the question why, but I do know that God will be there with me, and use who he’s made me to be for his good and his glory.  Somehow that makes the why not so important. 

That’s how you can bloom where you’re planted.  You see, for a seed, the planting process is traumatic.  You are buried underground, unable to see the light of day.  Then you get drowned, drowned so much that you begin to break apart.  You are dying.  You die completely and form your death new life sprouts forth.  This new life grows and grows and looks completely different than the seed, though they both share the same DNA.  But a seed is just a seed, full of unrealized potential.  A living plant is realizing its true potential and producing fruit – fruit that nourishes others.  It also produces more seeds. 

This is a concept Jesus taught with his life.  He died to bring us a new kind of life, so we can grow into the kind of people God had in mind in the Garden of Eden. People who die to their seeds, and sprout up with his life, bearing fruit and new seeds, until soon you have a whole garden of blooming, living, nourishing people.