As a teenager, my limited insight misled me and I made choices that would cause me to face a decision at the age of 17 that I was not prepared to handle. I was instructed to pray about the decision to be made but I didn’t know the word of God, let alone his voice. Instead, what I heard and believed was the voice of fear and doubt, whispering to me, “I can’t. I can’t have this baby.” I made a choice to abort the life that had been formed inside of me.
Nineteen years later, the promising trajectory I was once set for as a teen was a hazy memory. I had morphed into something, someone different, and there was no one I knew to turn to with my pain, no one to talk to that understood my shame or could help me get back on the right path. Through those years, a darkness settled over me like a heavy fog that drifts into the early morning and impairs your view of your surroundings; a darkness that separated me from truth, from value, from identity and purpose. It was a suffocating, isolating darkness that pulled me further away from my hoped-for possibility. It was a thieving darkness that robbed me of joy and peace and covered those voids with confusion, anger, fear, and anxiety.
Sounds easy…right? Well, I think I had to learn the hard way that putting this verse into practice would not come so easy for me. “Delight” would not be a feeling, but would be a deliberate choice!
Exactly 8 years ago this month, I gave birth to my third child. Her name was Claire. She was stillborn. It was a faith walk like no other I had ever been on, and didn’t unfold the way I thought it would or should. 
As I prepare this piece of my story, the tv plays in the background and from a cartoon I hear, “If you never leap, you’ll never know what it is to fly.” I’m awestruck having just prayed for help to write this. Leap? Who me? The old me squeals, “No”. The new me says, “Now!! Take the leap, take the plunge—Christ is your life jacket and parachute. He’s everything you need.”
I have been in ministry with my husband for 50 years. Many of the years we spent fulfilling the calling to plant and pioneer churches. Often, this meant we had to be obedient to the call we lived by faith. Living by faith meant going forth without a promise from man of receiving any monetary support, yet being confident that God would never send us where His provision would not keep us. Our faith was tested time and again as we would run right up against a deadline that man had set. It seemed as though God was going to be late too, but there was never a time when we were not provided for in GOD’S timing. This taught us that 
Life doesn’t seem fair when your four-month-old baby boy is diagnosed with leukemia. It is something that absolutely brings your world as you know it crashing down. You question why this had to happen to him and to your family. You plead with God to turn back time. 
This scripture has seen me through some of my most trying days. I grew up in a religiously “split” home. My mother was very religious. She made my four siblings and I get on our knees every night and pray together. She prayed over us every single morning before we left for school. Religious phrases were in most sentences she spoke. It drove us crazy as kids. My father, on the other hand, was not very religious. He professed his faith and believed in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus but he just wasn’t into religion or religious tradition AT ALL. Growing up this way was very confusing to me. I was raised to think my father was “less” of a Christian than my mother since he didn’t do all the “outward things” she did. It wasn’t until much later (after I married) that I realized the danger of “religion” and how wonderful of a father I had grown up with. He helped those less fortunate and was an amazing provider for his wife and five children. He never bragged about his good deeds, but his actions were so loving.
Every story has a beginning, and my beginning started in January of 2014. Over the last four and half years, I have had 6 pregnancies that have ended in miscarriages. How could anyone be prepared for that?
My husband Tony was very sick at the time and we really didn’t know what was going to happen to him. Our children were worried, I was worried, and my mind immediately went to the worst. How will my kids survive without a dad? How would I deal on my own? We think we’re living this life for you, God; we’re believing for You to do amazing things in our life – why is life this hard?
ou have got to get ahold of the word of God and worship. That is what carried me and carries me still. Now, don’t think it was all easy. It was hard. God challenged me to serve Him, and I didn’t wait until everything was perfect to go plant seeds and live for Him. Some of the lies the enemy will tell you is that you are too far gone. He’ll convince you that you’re too messed up for God, that you’ve done too much wrong for Him to love you, and that you’ll be judged by others if you serve. THAT IS NOT TRUE!
“At 56 you have lots of stories, but this one is definitely a favorite. This is a story about how God moved in my life and in my marriage, before I even spoke a word. I had accepted Christ when I was twelve, but I had no one in my life to feed and nourish that walk with me. I got married. My husband and I grew up in different churches, so we kind of bounced back and forth to each church. About 2 years into our marriage, it exploded. I had screwed up my marriage. Growing up, we raised ourselves. My dad passed away of a heart attack when I was just 4 months old, and my husband Chip’s mom passed from cancer when he was in middle school. Nothing was truly wrong with me except that I had an orphan spirit.I never knew how to identify with God as my Father because I had never had one. Growing up, we kind of just figured out what to do and how we should be raised, but we never truly identified with God as our Father. The day that my orphan spirit met his orphan spirit is when everything changed. Doing life on our own was fine for a while, but after the first two years of marriage, this mentality really caused a lot of issues in our marriage. I wasn’t getting what I thought I needed at home and our marriage was suffering. By what the world says, we shouldn’t have made it– and they were right. However, the difference with our story is that God was in the midst of it. Not once in our struggle did we think about divorce. Not once in our marriage did we end things and rekindle later. We kept sacred places in our marriage, not because we loved each other an insane amount, but because we remembered the promise we made. Now, this decision to stay together had nothing to do with us and everything to do with allowing God to rest in our covenant. It was because of Him that we had the desire to do whatever it took to make this work.
together. Chip and I fell madly in love through this process and we now are more like honeymooners. God became center of our lives and has remained there for many years.
“I guess the root of my entire story is that I never felt enough. No matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I never felt enough for anyone. I wanted to be bubbly, happy-go-lucky, outgoing, but I just wasn’t. I was shy, awkward, and had zero friends. My mom came from the Philippines, so she was raised in a totally different culture than we are in America. There you’re taught to get things done, make everyone satisfied and that’s how you succeed. We always had full bellies, clean clothes, and a clean house, but there was hardly a relationship there. This was so hard for me! I was caught in a place of thankfulness for what my mom did for us. Yet, I was so empty because I felt like I never had an intentional, meaningful and nurturing relationship with my mom or my dad. So, picture this: braces, glasses, awkward, lonely…. That was me at 14. I had a shy personality. You could barely get me to tell anyone my name, much less have an actual conversation with them. Even in the midst of that shy shell, I knew that my deepest desire was to be enough. I never knew what it was like to be chased after or pursued; not by my parents, not by boys, not by anyone, but I knew that I wanted it. A couple months later, I got my braces off and traded my glasses for contacts. This was HUGE for me. I felt confident to break out of my shell. There was a boldness in me that was different than before. This was it. I was becoming who I always wanted to be. My freshman year of High School, I met my first boyfriend. To go even further, my first everything. As I mentioned earlier, I’d never had someone pursue me. So you can imagine, the idea of someone loving me ‘unconditionally’ and promising ‘forever’ was something I was not letting go of. Within a month of us dating, I gave my virginity to him, started partying, and really fell into that lifestyle. There was always something inside of me that made me feel guilty and ashamed. However, I loved the attention and the worth I felt from my boyfriend and friends. Due to the attention, I ignored the guilt and shame. My life SEEMED like it was perfect, but truly it was so far from that.
was probably the loneliest and darkest place of my life. I sat there on the empty floor and asked myself, ‘Asia, when was the last time you were truly happy?’ No matter what I drank, I had no substance. No matter how hard I tried, I had no friends. No matter what I gave up, I had no boyfriend and no identity. How was I going to fix this?
to talk with my husband, and my sister who’s my best friend about it. Everyone thought I was rocking the mom life, but truthfully, I had nothing. I felt so unworthy to be a mom. I would repeatedly ask God to take care of her for me. Everyone was telling me, “your baby is so cute!” but no one asked me, “are you okay?” and I certainly wouldn’t tell people I wasn’t. I prayed bigger, harder and louder than I had ever prayed before in these moments. During prayer, Isaiah 41:10 would come to me. My favorite part of the verse says, “Do not fear for I AM YOUR GOD.” If happiness was trying to be taken from me, I could speak this verse over in my life. I got stronger the more I was praying but I still battled depression. Truly, I felt like I was so far gone and had done so much damage that no matter how hard I prayed, I wouldn’t be good enough.
A couple years later, when I got pregnant with my second little, I was so scared that I was going to go through the same thing. With my son Ace, I again had a traumatic childbirth. He wasn’t breathing, they were scared he wouldn’t make it. But, I knew God had a different plan. I spoke in confidence saying, “God take care of this baby” and right then, he started crying and breathing on his own. One of the nurses said “You’re so lucky.” But the second nurse said, “That’s not luck, she called God into this room.” People could SEE the power of God from me speaking LIFE in faith of His power to heal my child.
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