God's work in my birth story

I want to record my birth story, not just for the sake of sharing the details of how my son was born, but more because of what God did through a very testing and unexpected time. It’s taken quite a few months to really process it (he’s 5 months old at the time of writing), but as I’ve looked back through my diary entries I’ve been able to see with even more clarity how much God was at work through it all, and I hope that by sharing this you will be blessed and encouraged to trust God more and more in your own life.

Backing up a little for context, my previous labour and delivery with my first child was a very traumatic one. It took 3 days of stop start labour with no sleep for 3 nights, and ended in several hours of unsuccessful pushing, emergency delivery in theatre via forceps, my baby needing oxygen after she was born and a lack of initial bonding due to all of these traumatic factors.

It took me a long time to realise how negative this experience had actually been though, as I went into autopilot for a few months, and it was really only when I became pregnant for a second time that I started reflecting on my first birth and realising how much I wanted this one to be different. (And praise God, I’ve been able to receive ministry for this and continue to pray for restoration of what was lost for myself and my daughter as a result of what we went through).

Probably around 20 weeks into my second pregnancy, I started thinking about labour and delivery (as any expectant mum does!) but I felt quite filled with trepidation and anxiety. I began analysing what had happened previously and wondering how I could prevent this from repeating itself. I had a wonderful chat with my mum who shared some of her birth stories (from her 5 children!) and, in particular, how the Lord taught her much about spiritual warfare through her last 2 births. She encouraged me to prepare myself spiritually, as much as I did physically for the birth (and little did I realise how vital this was going to be).

It was from then on that I really began to seek the Lord and ask Him for scriptures that I could hold onto during my labour. He began to give me a number of psalms that I wrote down and meditated on in preparation.

The third trimester arrived and what had been a straightforward pregnancy started to get a little more complicated than I would have liked - not with anything particularly serious, but just more scans and checkups were required than I’d had the first time round due to concerns over his growth and heart rate. Although I was obviously slightly concerned and upset at having to go for these checkups, I felt that actually these were the Lord giving me a chance to practise handling difficult situations and to take captive negative words spoken over my baby. (Again, for context, with my first labour there were a number of very fear-inducing things spoken over me by medical staff which had a big impact on how labour progressed).

Anyway, back to my second pregnancy. Because of this previous experience, I was learning that this time round I didn't need to passively accept these words, but could take them captive and counter them with truth from scripture. When the midwife told me she was concerned about his growth and sent me for a checkup scan, I chose to proclaim that God was knitting him together in my womb. The scan later showed he was bang on the 50th centile, where he’d always been tracking. When the midwife said his heart rate sounded strange, I proclaimed that by Jesus' stripes we are healed. The check up again showed there was nothing wrong.

As I said, I believed these little blips were actually a great chance to take up my spiritual weapons and learn to wage spiritual warfare and proclaim truth which was to become so important in the coming weeks.

As they often do, the challenges got slightly bigger, allowing me to grow my spiritual muscles a little more. At my 37 week appointment the midwife identified that the baby was lying ‘transverse’ which just means he was sideways across me, instead of head down. At the time I didn’t think this was a big deal until I got home and googled it and realised that this wasn’t good at this point in the pregnancy. Essentially, I had one week to get him to move head down, after which they would deem it too risky to continue with the pregnancy and want to go for a cesarean. In the natural, it is possible but unlikely for a baby to turn at this late stage, due to the limited space.

That weekend, my husband and I went away for our two night ‘babymoon’, during which we spent a lot of time praying (and I spent a lot of time upside down - google ‘Spinning Babies’ if you don’t know why!). One of the evenings I was praying and decided to read and declare Psalm 18 out loud (one of the psalms God had previously given me). One verse, in particular stood out, especially as my friend had provided an alternative translation for one of the words (given in brackets):

In my distress (‘tight place’) I called upon the Lord; and cried out to my God (Psalm 18:6).

It suddenly hit me that the exact problem causing my baby to be transverse was because of a ‘tight place’ - ie. my pelvic area and the surrounding muscles being too tight for him to get his head down (which is what exercises such as Spinning Babies aim to alleviate).

Further down in the psalm it says:

‘He sent from above, He took me; He drew me out of many waters…

‘He also brought me out into a broad place; He delivered me because He delighted in me’. (Ps 18:19) (emphasis mine).

I realised that I needed the Lord to deliver my son and bring him into a broad place, physically speaking. However, as I began praying in earnest about this, the Lord showed me that before He moved my baby into a broad place in my body, He actually wanted to bring me into a spiritually ‘broad place’.

The word ‘broad’ here can also mean ‘a place free from anxiety and fear’. Without going off on too many tangents, for some time the Lord has been showing me that I have an issue with anxiety and fear. I have tried to deal with it in the past, but in this moment, God showed me again that I am still in a ‘tight place’ and that He wanted to deliver me from this. As He gave me this revelation, I cried out to Him for deliverance and I just felt this huge weight lifting off of me - I knew He was delivering me from my anxieties! My tears of crying out to Him became tears of joy as I realised the wonderful work He was doing in my heart!

We went home praising God for this and although I didn’t feel that the baby had turned round yet, I knew that ultimately the work God had wanted to do in my heart was perhaps His primary purpose in all of this and so I could trust Him to sort out the physical side of things.

It got to an hour before the scan and he still hadn’t moved so we cried out to the Lord again. We arrived at the appointment not entirely sure what to expect. The sonographer very calmly announced ‘he’s where he should be!’. I shouldn’t have been as shocked as I was, given that I was asking and trusting the Lord to move Him - but I was still amazed! Our God does mighty things!

With this hurdle overcome, I felt I was on the home stretch and excited to have a straightforward birth. However, there was a LOT more to come

My due date came and went and no signs of labour. My mum came and stayed with us from this point on so that she could provide childcare, and whilst I felt bad with each day passing that there wasn’t actually much for her to do, I was so grateful for the time to rest and spend quality time together after what had been an exhausting summer.

4 days after my due date, with my body feeling very much like it was ready to go into labour at any minute, I wrote in my diary:

Last night, I wondered if perhaps the Lord is delaying his birth because there are spiritual battles being fought that need to be won before he can enter this world.

Immediately after writing this I started having some mild contractions which continued all evening. I didn’t want to get too excited, but was also aware things could move quickly. The contractions continued all evening and I prepared to call my husband home from work but then the contractions stopped about 6 hours later. I was obviously disappointed but my midwife suggested that they would probably start up the next evening (as this tends to happen).

I felt God encourage me with the scripture:

‘And the Lord, He is the One who goes before you. He will be with you, He will not leave you nor forsake you; do not fear nor be dismayed’ (Deut 31:8). This was written by Moses as he handed over the mantle of leadership to Joshua.

Again, in my diary, I wrote:

Am I remaining strong and secure in the Lord or am I allowing fear to come in? If there are battles that need to be fought, the Lord is going ahead of me to fight them for me. He will show me what I need to do, which battles I need to fight and how to dispossess the enemy.

The contractions didn’t start up again, which, naturally speaking, seemed quite odd.

As the days wore on, and with my body feeling on the cusp of labour all the time but never actually starting the process, I became weary of waiting. In my discouragement, I decided to reflect on all that God had done in the month prior, which felt like one of the hardest periods I’d been through.

As I did so, I realised that this had simultaneously been one of the most fruitful periods of my life spiritually speaking, with God dealing with issues in my heart, teaching me to stand in faith, both for myself and for others (that week we’d been able to pray with two people and seen them receive healing!) and allowing us the chance to pray through spiritual bondage over our children. Although the thing we were waiting for hadn’t yet arrived, I could see God’s hand in this time of waiting already!

The days continued to tick by and I went through a rollercoaster of emotions. It was very hard not to let anxiety and discouragement set in, but I held on to the scriptures God had been giving me, as well as those various people sent me. One in particular that felt very key was Isaiah 66:9:

‘Shall I bring forth to the time of birth and not cause delivery?’, says the Lord. Shall I who cause delivery shut up the womb?’

Not only did this spur me on to continue waiting for baby to be born naturally, rather than going down the route of induction, but I was also very encouraged by an alternative translation to this verse which said ‘I will not cause pain (break) without allowing something new to be born’. This strengthened my belief that through this painful time of waiting, God was doing something new in me and that it wasn’t just about the physical birth of my child.

Another scripture that I felt was a piece in the puzzle of what was going on was Isaiah 65:23:

‘They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth children for trouble, for they shall be the descendants of the blessed of the LORD, and their offspring with them. It shall come to pass, that before they call I will answer, and while they are still speaking I will hear'.

I felt very strongly that the Lord was saying several things through this:

• I wasn’t going to labour in vain (like I had with my first birth, where it had gone on for days)

• My baby wasn’t going to be brought forth for trouble - ie. the Lord would bring him forth, not the enemy - and therefore there were certain spiritual battles that needed to be won before that could happen

• God was listening and knew the struggle I was going through and He was at work to destroy the plans of the enemy in our lives, in our baby’s life and in other people’s lives.

That Sunday, I felt very strongly that we should visit my brother’s church. I didn’t particularly want to go anywhere as I found social interaction quite hard by this point (questions about how pregnant I was were getting tiresome!) but I knew we should go.

As the preacher announced the title of the sermon, I had this strong premonition of what it would be about. It exactly matched my expectations - it was called: ‘Having a warrior spirit’.

The sermon couldn't have been more applicable - it was like he was speaking directly to me! He talked about the 12 spies going into the land and their response to the challenges and battles they faced. He talked about fighting to overcome the enemy, not running away from difficulty, and how God sometimes ‘backs us into a corner’ so that we have the choice to either run away or grow. This all fitted with so much of what we had been going through, and also what God had been teaching me in my quiet times - all about being a ‘mighty woman of valour’ (in Hebrew: ‘Eshet Chayil’).

I knew without a shadow of a doubt that God was in the process of training me for war and making me more courageous and willing to stand in a spiritual battle than I’ve ever had to be before. It strengthened and encouraged me to keep pressing on and to not give in to the temptation to just ‘get things going’ with an induction. (Again, I’m not saying it’s wrong to be induced, but I felt convicted that for me, this wasn't the answer and would bypass what God was wanting to do in this time of waiting).

However, because the hospital insists on having an induction scheduled for 41+6 days (which you can still choose to decline on the day), I agreed to this.

A day before this date, I realised I had come to a place of complete peace and surrender over this birth. All the fears, all the lack of trust had gone and God had done a big work in my heart, bringing me to a place of trust and peace. Where there had previously been stress, anxiety and a desperation for things to go a certain way, I now felt complete trust in what He had done and was doing. My worst nightmare of going 2 weeks overdue had actually turned out to be such a huge blessing to me, us as a family, our unborn child and others around us. Now I was ready to see God work in bringing this child out of my womb.

That day I wrote in my diary:

I think back to that Isaiah verse again that says ‘shall I bring to the time of delivery (or ‘cause pain’) and not cause new birth?’ (Is 66:9) There has indeed been much pain and I have been broken a lot through this time but the Lord has caused new birth in me. He has done a new thing in my life right before He brings a physical new birth into this world. Praise Him! I believe He will bring this baby forth very soon now.

The next day I called up and declined the induction, continuing to trust the Lord to ‘cause delivery’ as He had told me He would.

The same night I had a very odd, supernatural experience. As I lay in bed, I felt suddenly that my body was on the cusp of going into labour and that it was about to happen very fast (I can’t tell you exactly how I knew, but I did).

Then, just as contractions were about to start, I suddenly felt my body being taken over by something that wasn’t me. I initially thought ‘whoa, this is it! This must be what it feels like to have a sudden, rapid onset of labour!’. But then, fully awake, I immediately started hearing this cacophony of voices all talking over each other, like a train announcement gone wrong. I thought it was my husband’s phone suddenly acting up (in the middle of the night?!) and so I tried to tell him to turn it off but my voice wouldn’t come out. Eventually I managed to hit him (!) and said ‘turn your phone off!’ but he told me it wasn’t his phone and that he hadn’t heard anything. Confused, we immediately started praying and I realised that what I had heard was actually a tiny snippet of the battle that was going on in the heavenlies over our son.

God was so gracious in protecting me from the full revelation of the spiritual battle but I had heard enough to know something significant was going on. I spoke Isaiah 65:23 out loud - ‘you will not labour in vain, neither will you bring forth children into trouble’ and as peace returned we both went back off to sleep.

I had a sense that if this had indeed been a spiritual attack (and not just my mind!), someone would confirm that the next day, and, right enough, a friend of my mum’s got in touch the next morning to say the Lord had prompted her to intercede for me at midnight - the same time this had occurred - and that she sensed a spirit of resistance coming down through the blood line. This totally confirmed what I felt.

As I look back on this experience, I believe I would have gone into labour then, but there were spiritual forces at work to prevent this child from being born safely into the world. This is how the whole of this two week period felt - but this was the strongest awareness I had of this resistance.

2 days later we went to the hospital for a checkup, as I was now 42 weeks - the point at which they like to see you for daily checkups. I felt well rested and at peace, and we left our daughter at home with my mum, fully expecting to be home an hour or so later.

However, things happened fast. The CTG monitoring showed that his heart rate was very high and was dropping to an alarmingly low rate whenever I had a mild cramp (not even a contraction). Because of this, I was put on the labour ward for continuous monitoring and then had my waters broken. This revealed a lot of blood, which is a concerning sign as it shows the placenta could be abrupting. Although this could have very serious implications, I felt no fear. I knew the Lord was totally in control, and despite feeling pretty disappointed that I was definitely not going to have the smooth delivery I had been praying and holding out for, I knew by this point that God had SO much more for me and my baby than just a certain type of birth, so I accepted the situation and felt absolute peace.

I was told that the loss of blood necessitated an emergency caesarean - in a sense the thing I had most feared or dreaded having - but again, I felt totally peaceful. I recited all the scriptures I had been memorising (as I said earlier, I didn’t realise how vital this was going to be!). As I was taken into theatre with my husband, we both looked at each other in slight disbelief and amazement that our baby was finally going to be born - and that it was happening this way - but we knew God had it all in His hands.

About 30 minutes later our precious son was born. We didn’t see him for the first few minutes, but when we heard his strong cry only seconds after coming out, we knew he was healthy and well and we praised God for him. God had done mighty things in His life and we were glad. We named him Seth Gideon - Seth meaning 'appointed' and Gideon was called a 'mighty man of valour' by the angel who appeared to him. We believe that the Lord has appointed him to accomplish great things through Him!

As I said at the start, so much took place in the lead up to the birth that I felt I could see and understand God’s hand in, but when it came to the final outcome of the birth, I felt very confused for a long time as to why it had gone the way it did, after standing in faith for so long and choosing not to have an induction.

It was only in praying through it several months later that God showed me that it was actually in His mercy that my son was born the way he was. I really felt a strong sense that, although a C section wasn’t His ideal, it was really His mercy for me and for my child, and that He stepped in, pulling him out of my womb, and delivering him from the plans of the enemy to steal, kill and destroy. I don't want to dwell on the works of the enemy here or glorify them in any way but neither am I naive to the fact that his plans are always to bring death and destruction. I praise God that He comes to bring life in abundance and has defeated the works of the enemy! Not only did God bring about life and deliverance in the lead up to the birth, but He also stepped in and rescued my son, bringing life and freedom to him through his birth.

There is so much more I could say but I pray that this testimony has encouraged you to trust God, who is always at work in our lives bringing about peace, wholeness, freedom and life, even when we face circumstances that seem out of our control, incredibly challenging and not what we would choose or expect. God is wanting to make each of us a mighty woman of valour (‘eshet chayil’). He uses the circumstances in our life to do this, but only if we allow Him to work through them, taking up the full armour of God (Ephesians 6) as we do so. Let's be mighty women of valour!