Sparks of Courage

Living under my parents’ roof appeared good for a few months. However, waking up under my parents’ roof was not what I expected when I got married. Then it started. I was pregnant with my daughter. My emotions started to mess with me. I felt ugly. I was thirsting for attention and love. But instead, my husband gave me less attention which really placed me in the confused state of mind. One thing expecting moms need is attention; they also need beautiful words of recognition, pampering from their husbands, and most of all Love.

During my pregnancy, I questioned my relationship with my husband. I did not feel the connection between us anymore. In all truth, I felt ugly, jealous, angry, and unappreciated. My mom said my feelings were normal because I was pregnant. Nevertheless, my husband did not try hard to show me that I was loved and appreciated.

Here was the problem; neither of us had the real love in our hearts: we were not one. There was a process we had to go through before we would have been able to be united as a couple. First, both of us should have hungered for God’s love; our hearts should have felt how much God loves us “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John3:16 NIV). Second, we had to “submit [ourselves], then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from [us]” (James 4:7 NIV). Thirdly, after having a relationship with God, we would have been able to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands, as to the Lord. Husbands love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Ephesians 5:21-22, 25, 31 NIV). So neither of us knew how to communicate the love we needed because we really did not have it. Our hearts were not under the spiritual rebirth. As “Jesus declared, ‘I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again’” (John3:3 NIV). We had not been born again; we first needed a deep relationship with God, be reborn, and only then would we have been able to share love or see if it had been God’s plan for us to be together.

Now, where was I? Now I remember. My husband did not show me love. My heart filled with pain because I was not feeling loved during my pregnancy. However, becoming a first time mother is a beautiful miracle and love was growing inside of me. A mother’s love for her baby is precious. A mother will protect her baby the best way possible. In the Bible, the special love of a mother for her child is written.

In the book of Exodus 1:15-16 (NIV), “the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives … Shiphrah and Puah. ‘When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.’” In Exodus 2: 1-4 (NIV), a Levite woman “gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.” But God had already set out a plan; as we read in Exodus 2: 5 (NIV), King Pharaoh’s daughter “... saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it.” Then “Pharaoh’s daughter said [without knowledge that it was the baby’s sister], ‘take this baby and nurse him for me’” (Exodus 2:9 NIV), and she kept him as her son and named him Moses (Exodus 2:10 NIV).

As the Levite woman did what she had to do to protect her son, I would also do anything to protect my baby. About a month after giving birth to my baby girl Liana, my husband Cain got home red eye drunk, and he wanted to carry Liana. I tried to tell him he was not in the right state of mind to carry her. I was scared he would drop her. I placed Liana on the bed. We argued and scuffled. He reached for her, and I blocked him. Without a warning, WHAM! His hand hit me in the face so hard that the strike severely injured my nose. My mother and my brother, David, came into the room, and they took him off of me. Cain left the house ranting on with a slurred speech and with an unbalanced walk.

I could not tune into his slurred speech rampage because I was crying and holding a baby blanket to my painful and bleeding nose. I covered my bleeding nose with a towel. Finally, the bleeding stopped, and I looked at my nose in a mirror. My nose was black and blue and in pain! I really felt that my nose was broken. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out the truth about my nose. I went to see the nose doctor. I was sent to take some x-rays of my nose. After the doctor saw the x-rays, he said “let me see what happened.” The doctor studied and touched my nose bone, and then a SNAP! My nose was back in place. The doctor said, “There will be swelling around the nose for about a week, but when the swelling comes down, your nose will be ok. Your nose was not broken; it was fractured.”