FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell

Episode 64: WHAT NAMES DO YOU LIKE TO CALL YOUR CHILDREN?

Rocky Barrett: Welcome to the podcast, From Our Home to Yours, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.

Nancy Campbell: Hello precious ladies. Last week I talked to you about you possibly, or hopefully, eradicating the word “kids” from your vocabulary. I wonder if you have tried to do it this past week. I hope so, because really, there are better names to call your children.

You say, “Well I am so used to calling them kids, what on earth do I call them?”

You can call them children. That’s a lovely word.

If we go back to the Hebrew, the most common word for children in the Bible is the word ben.  You are familiar with that word. You hear names such as Ben-Yehuda, Ben-Yohannan and so on. It just means “son of so-and-so.”

This word comes from the root word banah, which means “to build.”

That’s a word that’s spoken to us as mothers. In Proverbs 14:1 it says: “Every wise woman buildeth her house . . ..”

The word is banah and from the word banah comes the word ben, meaning children. The word for children literally means “the builder of the family name.”

I like that. I think that’s a wonderful meaning.

So when we’re saying, “Children, let’s go” it’s a more powerful thing to say than, “Okay kids, let’s go” because you are speaking that wonderful word, “The builder of the family name” into your children.

You can sit down with your children and say, “Children, I’m sorry I’ve been calling you kids. I just realized that’s not the right word. Kids belong to the goat company and they’re not the company that God is bringing into the eternal realm. “I want us as a family to be part of that company, so I’m changing my vocabulary. When I call you children, that means ‘the builder of the family name.’

“Children, every one of you are helping to build our family. You’re helping to build the honor of our family name.  Not only now, but in generations to come. I want you to know, children, you are very important in our family. We are all together building.”

They realize themselves that they are part of the building. They do not want to do anything that will bring destruction to the family and spoil the family name. No! They are part of building the family name.

This is the most common Hebrew word for children, but there are many others.

I wrote a chapter on all the names that God calls children in my book, The Power of Motherhood. I hope you have this book and if you don’t, I’d love for you to get it because this is a book for every mother.

It goes into the Bible to see what God says about you as a mother. Not what the world says, but what God says. It is filled with Scripture. You will be amazed at how much God says to you as a mother.

But in the chapter I talk about all the names that God calls children. God has such a love for children that I found 50 different Hebrew words in the Bible for children. Then I found 26 Greek words in the New Testament for children.  They add up to about 4,000 words.

As I realized this I was amazed. We know some of the very, very important doctrines of the faith. We expect our pastors and preachers to talk about them. We think of grace. The word grace, is used 39 times (although, including the New Testament it’s 170 times in the Bible).

Now love, oh love, is such a preeminent theme in the Bible. But it’s only used 131 times in the Old Testament and 310 altogether, including the New.

What about prayer? The word pray is used 240 times in the Old Testament and only 68 in the New Testament, yet we know what a powerful doctrine it is.

And yet, the Hebrew word for children and all the other words God uses for children add up to thousands! I thought, “Wow. How often do we hear a message on Sunday morning about having children or the blessing of children? Or how to train children?”

How often do you hear a message about children and yet these words, the words for children, there are thousands more than there are for some of the most predominant themes that are preached about in our churches.

Do you think we are a little bit imbalanced in our churches? I think it’s time that we heard more about children, raising children, training children, and having children, don’t you, because God speaks about it a lot more than they do in churches.

We can call our children “children,” that’s wonderful. But there are amazing words that God calls our children.

He calls them our GIFTS. In Psalm 127:3 in The Message Bible it says: “Don’t you see that children are God’s best gift? the fruit of the womb his generous legacy?”

In many other Scriptures it talks about our children being gifts, not only gifts to us, but gifts to the world.

Do you remember what it said of Jeremiah in Jeremiah 1:5? “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.”

That word “ordained” is a word meaning “to give.” God said, “I brought you into the world as a gift to the nations.”

But dear ladies, every child that God gives us is a gift to us, but every child is also a gift to the world. God gives this child—a new child, a unique child, a precious child that there’s never been anyone like them in the world before and there will never be anyone like them in the world again. Isn’t that incredible?

This child, full of unique, special, and amazing gifts, He’s given to the world to bring forth these gifts and to bless the world.

So your children are gifts. You can remind them: “You are a gift to Daddy and Mummy. You are a gift to the world. You are a gift to your brothers and sisters. They have another friend for life and there will never be anyone as precious as another brother or sister. Brothers and sisters are closer than anyone else on earth, apart from husband and wife.”

Secondly, God calls our children BLESSINGS. I remember a dear friend of mine; in fact her name is Heather. For those of you who live in New Zealand, you will know precious Evan and Heather Jones who look after Above Rubies in New Zealand.

Heather is now a grandmother, like me, but Heather and her sister, Val, and I were raising our children together in the early days in New Zealand.

When Heather’s children were little, they were quite a challenge. They needed lots of help. Oh goodness me, I can remember times when she was so overwhelmed and she would call her children her “little brats.” And they were brats!

Well, many children can be brats. Sometimes they would come to my home and, oh goodness me, I would think they were brats, too.

But, one day God spoke to Heather. He said, “Heather, what are you calling My children? They’re not just your children. I gave them to you, they’re My children and they’re not brats. They are blessings.”

She really heard God speak to her and Heather listened to the Lord. Heather always listens to the Lord. She changed her vocabulary. She stopped calling her children brats and she started calling them blessings, always referring to them as blessings.

Often she would be at my place and we would be enjoying fellowship together. It would be time to go and she would say, “Come on, blessings! It’s time to go.”

She always called them blessings, gathering them up as blessings. The amazing thing was, as she changed her vocabulary and as she began to call them her blessings, they became blessings. Children become what you call them.

I remember speaking about this subject many, many years ago. We were living in Australia at the time. I was asked to speak at this church in the part of the city where there were a lot of very poor families. There were families who had been through so much stuff.

This church was actually full of trophies of grace, of fathers and mothers and people just saved out of such terrible situations.

I remember one mother was one who had watched her own father shot in front of her eyes. She had been dragged up. She was a pretty rough sort. In fact, a lot of these were the rough sorts.

Any way, I went to speak there and I had just got this revelation of calling our children what God wants to call them and how I was eliminating the word “kids” from my vocabulary. So I challenged them about it.

I went back to speak there a few months later. As I came toward the church and was walking up the driveway, a number of these ladies came out to meet me. They said, “Nancy, Nancy, it works!”

I said, “What works?”

“Oh you know, what you talked to us about last time. We’ve stopped calling our children ‘kids’ and we’re calling them ‘lambs’ and it’s changed our motherhood. We’re no longer yelling and screaming at our children every day. When we call them lambs, we’re soft and tender towards them. It’s changed our mothering.”

That was such a beautiful testimony, and this was coming from these mothers who had been dragged up themselves, who were pretty rough and raw around the edges.

But as they changed their vocabulary it was changing their mothering.

So be careful what you call your children. Start calling them these wonderful Biblical names: Gifts, blessings, the heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb.

The Bible even calls our children “THE BELOVED FRUIT OF THE WOMB.” This is how God feels about them.

In Hosea 9:16, that’s where we read “the beloved fruit of their womb.”  

Other translations say: “cherished offspring,” “precious ones,” “dearest offspring,” “darlings,” “much loved little ones.”

You can use these words—they’re Biblical. You can say:

“Oh, my much-loved little ones, how I love you?”

“My little darlings, come to Mummy.”

“Oh my precious ones, it’s time to sit at the table. Come and get up now, my cherished offspring.”

This is Biblical vocabulary. Do you want to start changing your vocabulary?

Another one is REWARDS. “The fruit of the womb is the reward.” You could say, “Children, you are my precious rewards. I have got a prize from God. He gave me you! You are my prize!”

Now some of these words are going to be a bit much to call your growing young people, your teens. You’ll have to change your vocabulary as they get older.

You may want to call them your ARROWS. Psalm 127:4 says: “As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.”

Arrows, those are mighty weapons of war so I’m sure your young people won’t mind you calling them a weapon of war! You can remind them, “Yes, you are an arrow in God’s army and this is what we are training you for.”

One of our children, Evangeline and her husband Howard, they named one of their sons, Arrow. I’ve talked to you about Arrow. He was the one who had a very, very bad burn recently and God has so wondrously healed his face. I think his skin looks more beautiful and perfect than before the burn.

He is Arrow and when he was young Howard would be cutting all the boys hair and he would shave Arrow’s head so that the shape of his hair was in an arrow. He was reminded continually that he was an arrow in God’s army.

Our children are also called OLIVE PLANTS in Psalm 128:3. They’re called MATURE PLANTS in Psalm 144:12, talking about our sons growing up as mature plants, even in their youth.

God doesn’t want our children to stay babyish and foolish. He wants them to grow up to be mature young plants, sturdy young trees, trees of righteousness.

It talks about our daughters as POLISHED CORNERSTONES. They are princesses in a palace. You can call your daughters PRINCESSES! That’s a beautiful word for them and it’s a Biblical word.

They are associated with a palace (Psalm 144;12) and they are princesses and daughters of the King of kings, Lord of lords, and God of gods. They belong to a royal Kingdom.

So remember to call them princesses. As you call them princesses they are going to want to be like princesses. Our daughters should want to be like princesses. You find that our little daughters want to be like princesses.

Have you found that when they want to dress up, they want to dress up like a princess? I have found that my little granddaughters and my older granddaughters if it’s a dress up party, or the little ones are playing dress up, that’s what they choose.

They don’t choose to dress up like some career woman going out into her career. No, they always want to be a princess or a queen. They want to be someone beautiful, with their beautiful long dress. They want to be so glorious.

As they get older, sometimes or mostly, they don’t think about being like that any longer because they get used to being like everyone else in society and they look the opposite to a princess.

They take on the vogue of the day, which are usually jeans and a top. It doesn’t look very much like a princess. Of course it’s always fun when it’s a dress up night. They can dress up for something special and when they do that they always dress up like a princess.

We always have lots of parties here at our place, birthday parties, and different functions. A lot of them we make them dress up parties.

In fact when Serene’s little girl, Breeze, was only four years old, she always loved to be a princess. She loved to dance like a princess. She loved to dress up like a princess. She wanted to marry a prince.

So when she was four years old, for her party Serene decided that we would have a ball—a princess ball for Breezy. She called it “Breezy’s Ball.”

Now when we have parties here, if it’s a birthday party for one of the little ones, maybe they’re only three, four, or five years of age, we don’t say to the other cousins, “This is a party just for the little girls” and ask the other cousins and friends that age to come.

No, we don’t do it like that here. It doesn’t matter what age they are; the party is for everybody in the family. So everybody comes—mums and dads, uncles and aunties, grandparents, and all the cousins.

So Serene said, “Okay, this is Breezy’s ball, I want everyone coming dressed as a princess. The boys and the men are to come dressed as a prince or knight or something pretty cool as a man.”

Well, it turned out to be the most amazing dress up party. Our family knows how to dress up.

The girls dressed up so magnificently from the oldest right down to the youngest and all the little girls in their princess dresses and Breezy in her princess dress.

Then we had all the beautiful, lovely dancing. It was so wonderful that it has now become tradition. We have Breezy’s ball every year. Everyone get’s dressed up and it is just part of our tradition now.

And now, how many have we had? The one coming up soon, just before Thanksgiving will be her tenth birthday and we will be having another Breezy’s ball.

Now, in one of the rooms in our house that we use for visitors we have a wardrobe in that room where we have all these evening gowns and princess dresses. When it’s time for a ball or a dress up party they can come and hopefully find something they want to wear. That is all there for them.

Of course they are always going to Goodwill and finding more and more princess dresses that they can always get more cheaply.

So that is a beautiful thing to call your daughters and it’s Biblical. I think the more you call them that the more they want to be who they’re meant to be, a princess in a palace as it says in Psalm 144:12.

Another name the Bible calls our children is SIGNS AND WONDERS. Isaiah 8:18: “Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for signs and for wonders in Israel from the Lord of hosts . . ..”

Everyone of the precious children that God has given to you are given to you for signs and for wonders to show forth the power of God. Everyone is a miracle.

Many of you have had miracle births and miracle pregnancies. You know that your child or your children are only here by a miracle, but apart from that they’re a miracle.

I mean, God created them. They are miraculous, unique, one of a kind, AN UNREPEATABLE MIRACLE.

You have miracles around you. Sometimes you say, “I haven’t seen God do any miracles in my life lately.” Well open your eyes, lovely mothers, and look at your children. They are divine miracles from God.

Embrace them as miracles. Call them your MIRACLES. Say to them, “You are my little miracle child!” Let them know they are a miracle from God. They’re a miracle in your life and you have yet to see the wonders and the miracles that God is going to do in their lives.

The more your mothering years go on, the more you will see the miracles. When you get to my season, looking back on the lives of our children and even the lives of our grandchildren who are now getting married and starting their families, we have seen and are seeing miracle after miracle.

Not only are they miracles, but we’re constantly seeing miracles that God does in their lives.

We see the miracle in Arden’s life. He just popped in this morning to bring the computer. It is incredible just to look at him and see him and what God has done in his life and how wonderful, healthy, and amazing he looks. God has brought him from stage four cancer and to now see the miracle he is today.

Last night Isaiah popped in to say hi. He’s another miracle. In fact, it was at the very same time that we were facing Arden with stage four cancer that Isaiah had a terrible head injury in a car accident. The surgeon said that he didn’t believe he would ever come out of a nursing home or ever be normal again.

Yet here he is, walking around just so wonderful, healthy, and glorious. God is continuously doing miracles. Those are just some of the big ones. We see little and middling ones every day. Some of them we don’t even see what God is doing.

He is such a wonderful God.

What about our LAMBS? Isaiah 40:11: “ He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.”

God is using the analogy of a shepherd with sheep, but He is talking about people here. He calls the little ones the lambs.

God calls our children lambs. He doesn’t call them kids. That’s not in the Bible. He calls them lambs so we can call them lambs or lambkins.

Another name is the WORK OF GOD’S HANDS. Isaiah 29:23: “When I see My children, the work of My hands . . ..”

Yes, that’s what they are. Not the work of our hands, the work of His hands.

In Malachi 2:15 they are called the GODLY SEED, the GODLY OFFSPRING.

In Hosea 9:11 they are called GLORY. Did you know that our children are called glory, the glory of the nation? Yes, that’s what God calls them—the glory.

Even Paul called his children in the Lord, ”glory,” saying: “For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing? Are not even ye in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his coming? For ye are our GLORY and joy” (1 Thessalonians 2:19, 20).

This is what our children will be as we raise them in the ways of the Lord. This should be one of the things that we seek after that when we stand before the Lord that we will present our children before Him and they would be our joy and our glory as we present them before Him.

And to any grandparents listening, your grandchildren are called your CROWN! Isn’t that wonderful?

Well, there are just a few of the words used in the Bible. You don’t have to keep to them; there are so many words you can make up yourself.

You can call your children:

 “My amazing children,”

“My darlings,”

 “My incredible children,” or

“My precious ones.”

You call them all these wonderful, positive, loving, and endearing names. Amen?

Even naming your children. When you’re naming your children, think about the name. It’s great to think of a lovely sounding name, but it’s even more important to think of names that have great a meaning so that you can tell your children the meaning of their name and they can live out their meaning.

We called one of our daughters Evangeline. That means “evangel, the bearer of the Good News of the Gospel.”

We’ve told Evangeline the meaning of her name from the time she was a little girl. She knew that’s who she was. She was a bearer of the good tidings of the Gospel, so that’s what she’s always done.

Ever since she was a little girl she’s talked about Jesus. Now she’s 54 years old. Wherever she goes she still talks about Jesus. You can’t go anywhere and not hear her talking about Jesus. She is her name.

She has ten children. Every one of their names has a specific meaning. My time is running out, but here is just one: Zadok. He is the oldest and his name in Hebrew means “turning many to righteousness.”

He’s known that’s the meaning of his name since he was a little boy and that anointing has been on his life since he was a little boy and now at nearing 27 years of age, it’s still on him. He is constantly leading people to Jesus, leading people to righteousness just by his lifestyle.

There is something powerful about the names we call our children.

“Dear Father, we thank You for the power of words. Help us to realize the power of words, even how we speak to our children, even the names we call our children.

 

“Help us, Lord God, to call them the positive names. Even if we’re calling them children, which is so powerful, ‘the builder of the family name.’

 

“Give us a vision of the power of what we speak in to our children and what we call our children. We ask this in the precious name of Jesus, Amen.”

To purchase the manual, THE POWER OF MOTHERHOOD, What the bible says about you as Mother, go to:

http://bit.ly/PowerOfMotherhoodUS

Every mother needs THE POWER OF MOTHERHOOD at her side.

Young mothers desperately need the encouragement! Middling mothers need it! And even older mothers need it. Older mothers need a refresher course in God’s plan for mothering, so they can take their place as the older mothers who teach the next generation.

You will be amazed at what God has to say to you as a mother! You will receive wonderful understanding through the 245 pages of this manual. 

Mothers can use it as a study guide for their older daughters. Many women use this manual as a guide for their Motherhood Bible Study groups.

Women say:

 

“A dynamic tool.”

 

“Rich with powerful information that has opened my eyes and heart about my calling as a mother.”

 

“My favorite mom book. Wonderful, awesome, and encouraging!”

 

"The Power of Motherhood" has changed my life and is sooooo "right on!”

 

“I have decided to give The Power of Motherhood as baby gifts … Bibs and diapers will quickly be used up, but these manuals will plant seeds and change lives forever.”

 

“I couldn’t put it down!”

 

“The Power of Motherhood is God’s gift to mothers and points us back to God’s unrefutable Word.”

 

 

FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell

EPISODE 63- WHICH ARE THE SHEEP AND WHICH ARE THE GOATS?

Rocky Barrett: Welcome to the podcast, From Our Home to Yours, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.

Nancy Campbell: Hello lovely ladies. I trust that you are walking in the joy of the Lord in your home.

Maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re going through a bit of a tough time. Well I am here to encourage you today. That’s what these podcasts are all about: to encourage you as a wife and mother. So I trust you’ll be encouraged here today.

Don’t forget to tell other mothers and other friends about this podcast because every mother needs encouraging. We need one another. So let them know about it so they can be encouraged too.

I’d like to begin again today with a lovely poem. I actually posted this on my Above Rubies Facebook page. I think it is a very powerful poem.

It says:

I ran into a stranger as he passed by,
"Oh excuse me, please" was my reply.
He said, "Please excuse me too;
I wasn't watching for you."
We were very polite, this stranger and I,
We went on our way and we said good-bye.

But at home a different story is told,
How we treat our loved ones, young and old.
Later that day, cooking the evening meal,
My son stood beside me very still.

When I turned, I nearly knocked him down.
“Move out of the way,” I said with a frown,
He walked away, his little heart broken,
I didn't realize how harshly I'd spoken.

While I lay awake in bed,
God's still small voice came to me and said,

“While dealing with a stranger, common courtesy you use,
But the family you love, you seem to abuse.”

“Go and look on the kitchen floor,
You'll find some flowers there by the door.
Those are the flowers he brought for you,
He picked them himself, pink, yellow, and blue.”

“He stood very quietly not to spoil the surprise,
You never saw the tears that filled his little eyes.’
By this time, I felt very small,
And now my tears began to fall.

I quietly went and knelt by his bed;
“Wake up, little one, wake up,” I said.
“Are these the flowers you picked for me?”
He smiled, “I found 'em, out by the tree.”

“I picked 'em because they're pretty like you,
I knew you'd like 'em, especially the blue.”
I said, “Son, I'm very sorry for the way I acted today,
I shouldn't have yelled at you that way.”

He said, “Oh, Mom, that's okay.
I love you anyway.”
I said, “Son, I love you too,
And I do like the flowers, especially the blue.”

~ Unknown

 

Isn’t that so true? We can be so quick, so terse, and so indifferent to our loved ones around us. May God help us to remember that our words have such power.

They have the power to bring death. They have the power to give life. We all know the Scripture in Proverbs 18:21 where it says: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue . . ..” Every time we open our mouths, we either speak life or we speak death. So we need to be encouraged, don’t we?

Thinking about the power of our words, I think of a word that we most probably all use every single day of our lives and that is what we call our children. I think the most common word that parents and people call children today is the word “kids.”

We talk about our “kids.” We call our children “kids.”

Well, I don’t use that word anymore and I stopped using that word years and years ago.

I started off using it when I started raising our family and I really didn’t like the word. It was just coming into vogue when I started raising our children. I fell in with the vogue, just with what everyone else was doing.

Isn’t it amazing how we can be victims of the system? We do what everybody else does. We say what everyone else says. So I also called my children that word and got into a habit.

I began our life of raising our children in New Zealand because I am originally a New Zealander, although now I am a US citizen. We later moved to Australia.

It was when we were in Australia that I read an article about a sheep farmer in New Zealand. Now New Zealand is a sheep country. We don’t have so many today, but back in the prime, New Zealand had about 50 million sheep and only 3 or 4 million people.

I was very familiar with sheep because my father was a sheep man. He was the one who designed the way that sheering sheep is done across the world. It is called “The Bowen Technique.” His name was Ivan Bowen. He was the fastest sheerer in the world in that day. He has since passed away. So I knew lots about sheep.

Anyway, I read this article and it was about this farmer in New Zealand. He said that he had diversified into farming goats. But he noticed a difference in the way the goats mothered. He noticed that the goats mothered their little kids differently than sheep. He noticed that the goats would herd their little kids together and off they’d go foraging for hours, leaving their little kids.

He was very surprised by this because he noticed that the sheep were always with their little lambs.

Now as I read those words something clicked in my brain and I thought, “Wow, this is interesting!”

But before I got carried away with my thoughts, I thought I had better check it out if it was really true.

So I went to my father. I thought that he would be someone very knowledgeable on this, seeing he had shorn about a million sheep in his lifetime and really knew about sheep.

I said to him, “Is this true?”

He said, “Yes, it is true, Nancy, about the goats and also sheep. A mother ewe, will never ever go any further than ear shot from her little lambs.”

I thought as I realized this: Is this why we call our children “kids” today? We have become a goat mothering society!

This is what so many mothers are doing today. They gather up their little children and drop them off at daycare and school and everywhere. They’re dropping off their little children for the day while they go out to their career or their job and do their thing.

Now that is goat mothering. The word “kids” was not originally in the dictionary to mean the word for children. Go back to Webster’s 1828 dictionary and you will not find it there. Of course it is now in our dictionary today as we have continued to add so many new words and of course so many humanistic words to our dictionary and this is one of them.

This is a word that now just fits with our society of goat mothers who will leave their children and come back to them later on in the day.

I have actually experienced this with my own eyes. I remember going back to New Zealand, and of course I have been back so many times since originally leaving.

One time I was walking around the fields with my father and he was checking out the sheep as a real shepherd does. He was always watching over the sheep. It was lambing time, springtime, so he was checking out the lambs.

He said to me, “Oh Nancy, if the ewes are in good health, we have no problem with the lambs. They just birth their babies and we come out and we find the little lambs are born. They’re all safe and they’re all wonderful. It’s only when the ewes are in bad shape and they have not been on good grass that we have problems with the birthing. We have to go and help them pull out their little lambs. We have little babies that die.”

I thought that was an interesting statement too. I think if that’s true in the animal world, that it’s true in the human world.

The healthier the mother is, the better she will enjoy her birth and have a more natural birth without intervention and be more able to give birth. So I think it is very important that we as mothers, childbearing mothers of course, that you do look after your health.

Dear lovely mothers, who are still in your childbearing years, please look after your health. Eat wholesome foods. Throw away the junk, all the white flour. I hope you don’t have white flour in your pantry, and I hope you don’t have white sugar. I mean, that is a poison. It’s known to be a poison and it destroys the B vitamins in your body and you as a mother need all the nutrients you can have because you have a huge job as you mother your children, nurse your babies, and give birth.

Your body was created for this task, but you are meant to be in good shape. Maybe you’re listening to me and you notice my voice. I do have a cold, but I’ll get rid of it. I always say, “Things come, and things go!”

But I do feel that it is important for all of us, especially you childbearing mums, that you keep up your immune system and you don’t eat the junk foods and all the white processed foods and all the packaged foods. Keep to good wholesome foods out of your garden if you can and eat lots of vegetables and fruit. You just don’t fill your pantry with all this other junk.

When I go to the grocery shop, I rarely ever go down the isles with all the packaged food and the tin food. There’s hardly a thing that I get from those isles, only certain basic foods that are healthy.

I don’t even go looking because you can be tempted by this and that.  In fact, I can get my groceries very quickly. I know what I want, and I whiz down those isles and I get what I want, mainly in the frozen section and the fruits and vegetables section, maybe one or two other things. I just get them and I’m out of there. I don’t like to be tempted by all these other things.

Actually, when you get home and you have time to read the ingredients, wow! You can’t even read half those words and if you can’t read those words, they’ll be bad for you. They’ll be cancer forming.

Often you will read “fructose corn syrup” and all those kinds of words. Look, if you see fructose corn syrup there on the ingredients, you throw it back on the shelf and never buy it. It’s just not good for you at all.

In fact, you never want anything with sugar in your house. I just don’t have it and I haven’t had it for years and years and years.

Anyway, that was a little by and by about the healthy sheep. When they are healthy, they give birth to their lambs no problem.

My father also said to me, “Nancy, the sheep will never go any more than ear shot away from their little lambs.” That’s sheep mothering, ladies. We have to decide who are we? Are we a sheep mother or are we a goat mother?

Now when I realized this I thought, “Oh my, I don’t want to be part of the goat mothering company so I’m going to get rid of that word ‘kids.’” So I made a point in my mind that I would not use that word again and I haven’t used it for years and years and years and years. I’m glad to have it out of my vocabulary because I believe when we speak that word, for every word has power, we are speaking into our precious children the character of the goat.

The goat has different character than the sheep. Of all the animals in the whole of the world, what animal did God use to call us, His people? He chose the sheep. Isn’t that amazing? Of all the animals God made, why did He choose sheep, to call us His sheep?

Oh my, I haven’t got time to tell you everything today, there is so much! You can go on to my webpage. I think I have a title of articles called “Sheep and Shepherding.” There are a number of articles there that you can read about shepherding and how we as mothers are shepherding mothers.

And we also are meant to be sheep. Sheep are very submissive animals, opposite to the goats. The goats are independent, and they are proud and destructive.

I wonder if any of you have ever had a goat. Some of you may farm goats.

I remember when we grew up, we had a pet goat. It was my brother’s goat and he called her Jilly. He had this goat for years and years and years.

I don’t know why we kept it because this goat was always getting us into trouble with the neighbors. We were the most unpopular neighbors because of this goat. But somehow my father had a soft spot for my brother and he just didn’t want to hurt him, and he kept this goat.

Well this goat, it would get into the neighbor’s gardens. It would eat their beautiful trees, and it would even tear the clothes off their clotheslines.

Oh goodness me, you can’t believe how destructive goats are! Goats will eat anything. They eat the shrubs and they’ll eat anything they see, whereas the sheep they will only eat the fresh tender grass.

They also need a shepherd to look after them because if they get stuck in a thorn bush or something happens to them, they don’t know how to look out for themselves. They don’t know how to get out of a problem.

I can remember walking through the fields with my father and there was a sheep. It was stuck in a thorn bush. My father said, “Come on, Nanc, we’ve got to get this sheep out of here! Come on, help me pull it out!”

Because that sheep was stuck, it didn’t know how to get out. We had to pull it out and when we got it out, it just got up on its four legs and off it trotted away. It was fine. But if the shepherd had not come along, if we had not come along, that sheep would just have stayed there till it died.

And so sheep need a shepherd. These are some of the reasons we are called sheep.

Another reason is that sheep always want to gather in a flock. We are also not only called sheep; we are called God’s flock. We are the sheep of His pasture, the flock of His pasture. He wants us to be together.

God wants us as a flock. He doesn’t want us to be independent like the goat. The goat not only is very independent and destructive, but proud. They always want the highest place.

We used to keep our goat out in our back paddock. “Paddock” is not an American word, but it is a field or a grassy place. Jilly used to be out there. Of course, she was always getting through the fence or jumping through the fence or getting out to the neighbors and doing something. In fact there were times when my mother would come into my brother’s room and find this goat lying on my brother’s bed. This goat could get anywhere!

Well, usually though, you could look out to the paddock or the field and this goat would be standing out on the highest place in the field. If there was some sort of little thing it could stand on, well it would get up and stand on it because that’s where they want to be—top dog. They want to be in the highest place.

And so, what are we speaking into our children when we call them kids? Not only are we aligning with the goat mothers, but also, we are speaking that character into our children.

I believe God wants us to speak His character into our children. The sheep, the little ones, are called lambs. There was a time when mothers used to call their little children “lambkins” or “little lambies” until the word “kids” came into vogue.

Really, it’s a much nicer word. Somehow, have you noticed, that it’s very easy to yell at “kids”— “Oh, you stupid kids, what are you doing?”

Somehow you can yell at them. Have you ever tried to yell at lambs?— “You stupid lambs!” No, it doesn’t work. Those words don’t go together because when you speak the word lambs it brings tenderness, it brings softness.

But more than all these things, we really need to go to the Word of God. That’s really what got me convicted.

We go to Matthew 25:31-46. It would be good to read this whole chapter sometime after you’ve gone through this podcast, but I will just read you these words:

“When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left . . .. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous [the sheep] into life eternal.”

And so we see in this Scripture how there is coming a day when God is going to separate the goats from the sheep.

If we go to the Middle East, the Middle Eastern shepherd often has goats and sheep together. In fact mostly they will have a little flock of goats and sheep. I have been to Israel many times and looked out and seen the Bedouin shepherd’s little flock of goats and sheep following on behind them. That’s a typical Middle Eastern scene and a typical Biblical scene.

The shepherd always goes out in front of his sheep. He leads his sheep. That’s the Bible picture. It is a little different from how we shepherd in New Zealand where we have huge flocks of sheep and thousands and thousands of sheep. The shepherds have to go out on their horses to round up all the sheep to bring them in for shearing, and for dipping, and for branding, and so on.

But the Middle Eastern shepherd, he just has a little flock. As you look out, because you’re not right up close, you can’t tell the difference between the goats and the sheep.

The goats over there are little bit hairier. Unless you are right up close, you couldn’t really tell the difference.

God is speaking here, and He says the goats and the sheep, they’re all together and often people don’t so much notice the difference.

In fact growing up in the church, there are sheep and there are the goats, but in the end time God is going to separate the sheep and the goats. The sheep go to eternal life, the goats go to everlasting punishment.

God uses many different illustrations. He uses the tares and the wheat. The wheat is growing up, but along with the wheat, the tares are growing up with it. They’re not the wheat, but they look a little bit like the wheat.

In fact, in one of Jesus’ parables, they said, “Why don’t we pull out these tares and get rid of them?”

Jesus said, “No, if you pull them out now, you’ll upset the wheat and pull them out, too. Wait till the end of time and I will separate them.”

He also talks about the separating of the good fish and the bad fish. So throughout the New Testament there are these stories of how there are the good and the bad together and often the bad is not too bad because it looks pretty much like the good. But in the end God is going to separate.

Now, I want to be part of the right company. So I thought, “Okay, I’m just not having anything to do with the goat company so I will get rid of that word ‘kids.’”

Here’s another Scripture, back in the Old Testament, Ezekiel 34:17 (GNT): “‘Now then, my flock, I, the Sovereign Lord, tell you that I will judge each of you and separate the good from the bad, the sheep from the goats.”

Zechariah 10:3: “ . . .I punished the goats: for the Lord of hosts hath visited his flock,”

There’s a day coming where God visits and does this separation.

Anyway, that’s my reasons, lovely ladies, of why I decided to kick that habit.

I wonder, do you want to do that with me? Maybe you could just talk about it with your friends and say, “Hey, why don’t we try and help one another and when we hear each other calling our children ‘kids,’ well, we can say, ‘Hey, why don’t we call them children or something else’”?

Sometimes we do need help to knock a habit. Really, that’s all it is. It’s just a habit that we’ve gotten in to because that’s what everyone else calls them, but we don’t have to be like everybody else, do we?

Now one of the good things about sheep I mentioned before and that is that they love to be together. They are a flock. God loves us also to be together. He loves us to be together as families. He loves us to be together as God’s people.

He says, “I want you to come together and not forsake the assembling of yourselves with one another’ (Hebrews 10:25). God loves that togetherness because we are a flock.

But that good point of wanting togetherness and remember that’s the opposite to the goats who want independence, so do remember in our families, lovely ladies, as we are building godly families, remember that togetherness is how we build.

I often think as we are deciding, “Well, what should we do about this?” or “What should we do about that?” One of the ways you can make a good and wise decision is to say, “Will this keep our family together?”

If it’s something that will keep your family together, do it. It’s a good thing. God loves family togetherness. He wants us to be a flock. We are mothers of our little flock.

But if this thing you’re thinking about doing, or someone is trying to get you to do it, or your feeling pressured from people to do it or even society to do it, if it’s something that’s going to fragment your family or cause your family to go in all different directions I would say don’t do it.

The wise decision is the decision that keeps your family together. The foolish decision is to go ahead with that which will fragment your family.

We often find in a little practical way we face this at our family meal tables. Oh, Satan doesn’t want us to sit together around our tables as families. He doesn’t want that. Goodness me, that’s just too much of familyness and he doesn’t want familyness!

But God wants it. That’s the picture He gives of the family, the mother in the home and the children all sitting around the table. That’s the picture of Psalm 128:3. But, the devil doesn’t like it and he’s going to try and stop you from doing it.

There will be so many things, oh goodness me, I think you could count ten things on your fingers now of things that are going to pull you away from trying to sit together as a family every evening and even for breakfast and every meal in your home.

You’ve got to watch out. This is why we have to be strong as mothers. Look, to be a great mother you can’t be wimpy. You can’t just let people take over. You can’t let society take over what you’re going to do.

You decide what is best for your family and you do it, no matter what. We have to make the wise decisions and the right decisions.

But this wonderful and positive thing about sheep and being a flock and that they want to be together can also have a very negative situation too.

Let me just end with this story. I read recently how years and years ago in 2005 the BBC announced a story on their media program of 400 sheep in East Turkey that all fell over a cliff to their destruction.

Can you imagine 400 sheep all falling over a cliff? I mean, you can imagine one having to fall over a cliff, but how come 400?

That wasn’t the end of the story because it wasn’t only 400 that fell, it was another 1100. It was a flock of 1500 sheep and every single sheep fell over that cliff.

Now the 1100, actually they were able to save, because when they fell over the cliff their fall was cushioned by the sheep that already had fallen to their destruction.

So dear ladies, how come 1500 sheep all fell over the cliff? I’ll tell you why. Because sheep are followers. Sheep follow one another. Sheep become victims of what all the other sheep are doing.

Did you know that we, because we are sheep, and God knows we are sheep, we are also prone to do that?

That’s why in John chapter 10 Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice and they run from the stranger.”

We’ve got to be sheep who are so sharp and so close to our Shepherd that we hear His voice and will go the right way. Because if we get away from the Shepherd, then we start to listen to the voice of the stranger, the alien, the society around us. Then we can start going the wrong way.

So what happened here is most probably one of those sheep were getting close to the edge of a cliff. He didn’t realize it and probably got too close and he just fell over.

These sheep didn’t just fall over all together, no, one by one.

But you see, because the sheep are a flock they are close and the next sheep goes over to see what happened to the poor sheep he was next to and oops, he’s over the cliff, then the next one it just comes over the cliff.

So the sheep, because there’s 1500 of them, they are away, away out there, but their gravitating to that cliff, not knowing they are gravitating to destruction. They’re following each other and don’t even realize where they’re going so in the end, they were all over the cliff.

My husband has told me a very similar story because, although I was the daughter of a world champion sheep sheerer in his day, my husband was part of a sheep farming family. They also farmed cows, they were dairy farming, but they were sheep farming as well.

When they had this big sheep farm in Waitotara in New Zealand, my husband told of how amazing it was how if one little sheep found a hole in the fence, that eventually all the sheep would get through that hole.

So the sheep can be grazing on the hillside, eating the beautiful green grass that grows in New Zealand and one little sheep finds a hole in the fence and goes through into the next paddock, or as you would say, pasture or field.

The other sheep a way, way out there on the hillside, because we have thousands of sheep in New Zealand in a flock, they have no clue what’s happening to that little sheep. But because they’re together, because they’re a flock, they are gravitating slowly, little by little towards that hole in the fence. It may even take a day or two or three days, depending how many sheep are in the flock.

But eventually all of the flock, all those sheep, will be in a different pasture. They will have all gone through that little fence because they just followed one another.

Dear, darling ladies, isn’t that just like us today? Many of us don’t know we’re even living a humanistic lifestyle because that’s what everyone’s doing. That’s what is going on around us.

That’s what everybody is doing in the church. We just follow one another. We don’t check out the Word. Oh my, if we check out the Word of God, sometimes we find, oops! I’m in a wrong field. I’m in a wrong pasture. I better get back to where I’m meant to be.

Let’s be sheep who follow the Shepherd closely to hear His voice. Let’s not get too far away because then we’ll be listening to the stranger and we’ll get in the wrong pasture and be following everyone else.

“Lord Jesus, we thank You so much for the way You teach us. “Thank You for teaching us that You want us to be sheep. You don’t want us to be goats. The goats don’t belong to You, it’s the sheep who belong to You. We want to be Your sheep, Your true sheep who listen to Your voice.

“We want our little lambs to grow up to be Your sheep. We don’t want them to be goats. We don’t want them to be part of the goat company. We don’t want to be part of the goat mothering company. Lord God, help us to be sheep mothers, tending to our flocks, never leaving them, always close, never ear shot from our little lambs.

“Help us to be who You want us to be. We ask it in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.”

 

FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell

Episode 62: THE JOYS AND CHALLENGES OF ADOPTION

Rocky Barrett: Welcome to the podcast, From Our Home to Yours, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.

Nancy Campbell: Hello ladies! Today I have Melissa with me again because we didn’t even finish her story from last week. So we’re going to continue that today.

But let me start off with a poem again. I hope you love these poems. I’ve got into the idea now of beginning each session with a poem for you as mothers.

This one is called “Help!” I know lots of times you’re calling that out, aren’t you? “Help, what do I do? Help, what do I do with these children, they’re all screaming at once? Help!”

Anyway, this poem was written by a friend of mine when we were all raising our children together.

This is what it says:

“Sometimes, dear Lord, it seems as though the children never stop,

They ask and ask and ask again until my ears near pop.

“‘Mum, fix my shoe, help brush my hair, I want another drink!

Come quickly, Mum, I think the cat has fallen in the sink!’”

“Demands, demands, and more demands, help, Lord, it’s getting tough!

I know that mothers should be kind, but this one’s had enough!

“What’s that, Lord? You mean to say these children are in your plan

To help me grow into a more mature woman?

“Dear Lord, I know You gave and gave, You had so much patience too.

Help me to see a mother’s job can make me more like You.”

Amen.

I mentioned at the end of our last session that I wanted to share a Scripture with you. So I’m going to share it with you now.

I love to give you the Word because we can talk and talk and talk, but it’s the Word that really fills us, strengthens us, and helps us get through. I couldn’t do without the Word of God. I don’t know about you, but I need it every day.

I’m so glad that we make time each day to have our family devotions every morning and every evening. When my husband is reading, so often the words come to convict me again, to speak to me, and keep me on track.

If I didn’t have the Word of God, I know I would get way off track. I’d be off on the wrong road. But every time we read the Word it brings us back.

I was thinking of this Scripture found in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18. I’ve always loved this Scripture and I’m reading it because we were talking last week with Melissa about the challenges she has faced on her motherhood journey. The challenges of not being able to keep a baby, then the challenges of a Down syndrome child, the challenges of adoption. We didn’t even get to speak about that, Melissa, did we?

We’ll see what happens in this session because Melissa also adopted as well. But we were saying how that this life we are living now, we think it’s the real life. But it’s not the real life. Our real life is in the eternal world and we were born for the eternal world. This is our destination.

This is why Jesus became human, died upon the cross, shed His precious blood to redeem us back to Himself, save us from our sin, and prepare us for this eternal world with Him which shall be forever and ever and ever.

In this world, this sinful and deceived world, we go through many problems, challenges, sufferings, and afflictions, every one of us in different ways. We face problems, we face challenges, and we face difficulties. It’s a part of life.

Sometimes these things can get us down if we let them. We can let our difficulty, affliction, and our suffering just take over our lives or we can live above it if we can only just see that these things that we go through are temporary. They are only for a season.

This life, what does the Bible say, it’s just a vapor. A vapor! It’s here and it’s gone. We think we’re here forever, no! This life is just a vapor and it’s preparing us for the eternal world. So even our difficulties and our sufferings, they will work in us, preparing us for the real world.

Here is the Scripture: “For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

So often we look at the things which are seen, don’t we? Well of course, here we are, we’re facing them. They maybe all on top of us. We feel overwhelmed. Maybe even today you feel overwhelmed. You may think, “How do I get through this motherhood thing. I just don’t know how to do it.” Everything seems on top of us.

But we’re just looking at the situation. Sometimes we’ve got to get our eyes off of all the difficulties and put them on Jesus. Put them on the eternal world because when we lift our eyes from our difficulties something happens. It changes. Our attitude changes.

Often, we’re still going through the difficulties, but we can go through them. We live above them; we live through them in the power of Christ Who dwells within us because we’re looking up. We’re looking to Him and we’re looking beyond into the eternal world.

Anyway, I just love verse 17 where it gives all these adjectives. You know how I have so often told you that the Word of God is filled with adjectives. I want you keep looking for them when you’re reading the Bible because it makes it so exciting.

Nothing in the Word is normal. It’s more than normal. It’s above normal.

Here it says: “For our light affliction.” We think it’s, oh, so heavy. But God says when you put your affliction on My balances, the balances of eternity, the scale goes right up. Your affliction is just light.

The scale down here of what it’s working in us, it just goes right down. It’s so powerful.

It’s only for a moment. We think it’s forever. We say, “Oh, how can I endure this, it seems as though it’s forever.”

No, in light of eternity, it’s just for a moment. It’s working for us a FAR MORE EXCEEDING and ETERNAL WEIGHT of glory. That is five adjectives to describe the glory that God is working in us. Isn’t that amazing? Wow!

That word “far” in the Greek is the word hyperbolē and it comes from a root word that means “far beyond the usual, more than anyone can actually throw; to surpass, exceeding, super eminence, beyond measure.”

So that’s what it means when it’s saying “far.”

Then, the next word is  and it’s the same word, hyperbolē, again. In fact it uses it twice to try and describe it. It’s unbelievable!

In fact, I have The Amplified Version here that describes the original Greek words. I’m going to read it to you. I want you to just take it in and let the enormity of these words fill you, especially if you’re going through a trial or a difficulty, even the everyday challenges that seem to get on top of you.

Just hear these words because, dear mothers, these words are God’s words to you. They are alive, they are powerful, l and they will impact your life if you embrace them.

Here it goes:

“Therefore we do not become discouraged (utterly spiritless, exhausted, and wearied out through fear). Though our outer man is [progressively] decaying  and wasting away, yet our inner self is being [progressively] renewed day after day.

[And here is verse seventeen!] For our light, momentary affliction (this slight distress of the passing hour) is ever more and more abundantly preparing  and  producing  and  achieving for us an everlasting weight of glory [beyond all measure, excessively surpassing all comparisons and all calculations, a vast and transcendent glory and blessedness never to cease!]

Can you take all that in? Wow, I don’t think I can take all that in. This is what it’s doing in us, ladies, more and more abundantly, producing, preparing, and achieving for us an everlasting weight of glory beyond all measure, excessively surpassing all comparisons and all calculations, a vast and transcendent glory and blessedness never to cease!

This is how we’re to think when we’re going through our trials because if we let God work in us His patience, His glory, His meekness, and His humility in all that we’re going through, this is what it’s going to do for us in the eternal realm.

“Since we consider  and  look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are visible are temporal (brief and fleeting), but the things that are invisible are deathless  and  everlasting.”

Amen?

Well I’ve got Melissa here. Goodness me, you’ve got to share!

Now we didn’t even get on to the subject of adoption last week. Melissa has also adopted two children from Liberia. Tell us about that, Melissa.

Melissa Calhoon: Oh yes, well that was actually a result of your encouragement.

NC: Oh yes, when I went to Liberia and saw the plight of these thousands of orphans I came home, and I wrote about it in Above Rubies. God must have just anointed that article because hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of parents began to adopt these precious children.

MC: Yes, yes! We were stationed in Hawaii and you came to visit us soon after you had been to Liberia. You had a photo album with all these letters that children had written asking for parents.

NC:  Yes! They said, “Please adopt me!”

MC: Yes and we had planned to adopt. We kept thinking, “Later on, after we’ve had some children.” We did have three by then, I think.

I looked at my husband and said, “What are we waiting for? These children need parents now. We keep just saying, ‘We’ll wait, we’ll wait.’”

My husband was actually about to deploy to Iraq. He said, “When I get back, we’ll start the home study and all the proceedings.”

NC: I remember that when you went through all the proceedings and so on and you went to get them, wasn’t Cal deployed again?

MC: Well, no, he wasn’t deployed. We had all kinds of delays with our Liberian children waiting for their passports. You never know when you’re going to get the call, “Okay, you can go now.”

We were just waiting on the passports and meanwhile my husband had to go to Officer Training School. That’s only a three-month school I think it was.

Whenever we could we always went with him, so we moved to Virginia just for a few months. Unfortunately his father passed away during that school. They had let us take off one day to go to the funeral and you’re not allowed to have any time off.

So when we got the word that we could go pick Jeremiah and Jemima up, he still had six weeks left in the school. There was no way he could ever leave, and we had intended for him to go pick them up.

We thought, well we can make them wait six more weeks or I can go.

NC: So you went all the way to Liberia by yourself!

MC: And I was pregnant!

NC: You were pregnant?

MC: Yes, I was six months pregnant.

NC: You were pregnant, and you went all the way to Liberia on your own.

MC: Yes, and I was so thankful because I really wanted to go! It worked out to my advantage.

NC: So you brought those lovely children home. Of course now they’re growing up now. Jeremiah’s even left home now!

MC: Yes, yes, he’s 20 years old.

NC: And Jemima’s growing up into the beautiful queen.

But your adoption didn’t stop there. You then were getting to no more babies were coming.

MC: If I rewind, when I met my husband, we both said we had always wanted to adopt. We both agreed, “Yes, yay, let’s do that.”

Then God had changed my heart to adopt a child with Down syndrome. He said, “I don’t think I could handle a special needs child. I don’t think I could do that.”

Then of course God blessed us with Jahna, and she has Down syndrome. She then became Daddy’s little darling and that totally changed his heart too.

Somewhere in those years I came across a website called reecesrainbow.org and the lady who runs it has a son named Reece with Down syndrome. She began advocating for children with Down syndrome all over the world.

It’s so fun to look on that website. It is fun and heartbreaking because they have photo listings of children in orphanages. Some of the orphanages are pretty horrific and those children are very delayed.

So I came across that website and we supported them. I spent hours scrolling those beautiful little faces. That is when we thought, Yes, we will adopt a little girl with Down syndrome some time.

But the years kept going by. We kept having babies. The timing was never right. They don’t usually let you continue in adoption if you get pregnant. So the years just kept going by.

Then we got to the end, I guess, of having babies and we were here at church here, worshipping one Sunday. It was my birthday and I remember just feeling like God saying, “Okay Melissa, now’s the time.”

NC: Wow.

MC: At that point I was transitioning out of babies and thinking, “Really? Are you sure about that now? I don’t know if I want to!”

Very quickly, though, I became excited about it. That afternoon I told my husband and he is always so supportive of everything and he said, “Okay. Let’s do it!”

NC: How amazing. But it was a miracle because here you are a mother of eleven children and how are they going to let you adopt?

MC: Yes, and when I had looked at the photo listings, I had always assumed we would adopt a child or baby from Ukraine because they allow large family adoptions.

That afternoon I went on to Reece’s Rainbow, looked at their photo listings and all the children seemed to be from Asian countries. I looked at them and thought, “No, they’re not going to let us adopt. We have too many children.”

So I called a few different places and asked, “Can a large family adopt from China?”

They never said Yes or No. They just said, “You can adopt from this country and that country.”

I was getting frustrated and I’m like, “Just tell me, can we, or can’t we? Why the division?”

Finally I found in the middle of the night one time while I was online some form, I could fill in that asked my question. They sent it to every agency they have on their listing.

So I typed in, “Here’s our family dynamics, can we adopt from China?”

The next morning I had like 30 emails. Some said yes, some said no. Some said that you could have, but China just recently has become more strict.

But one lady, she actually called me. I asked her my question and she said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. China has recently become more strict. You would have been able to, but not now.”

I was just about to say good-bye and then I said, “Well it’s a real shame because we really want to adopt a little girl with Down syndrome and I really hope they might make an exception.”

She was like, “Oh! I’m so excited! I have a little girl on my listing who I really want to find a home for. Let’s just try! Let’s put in the paperwork and ask.”

You do this initial form, I forget the name, where you’re basically asking the Chinese government for permission for that specific child. If they say Yes, then you can move forward.

We did that. The next day she said, “Wait two weeks. They take two weeks.”

The very next day she called—they approve!

NC: Praise the Lord! That was an amazing miracle, wasn’t it?

MC: Yes, yes!

NC: When we heard about this little one and you named her right away, didn’t you?

MC: Yes!

NC: Another “J” of course, Jewel! I love the name, what a beautiful name!

It still took time, didn’t it?

MC: It took eighteen months.

NC: I don’t know how you could wait because I was so impatient waiting to see this little Jewel!

And then she came! She just has bonded so amazingly, hasn’t she? Tell us about that.

MC: Yes. It’s always nerve-wracking when they hand over this child to you.

NC: You both went to China, didn’t you?

MC: Yes, we both had to go. We met in the hotel lobby, the director of the orphanage and her Nanny walked in with her. She was four years old when we adopted her in November. Since then she’s turned five.

NC: She doesn’t seem that age, does she?

MC: No, she’s so much younger.

So they walked in with her and I took her by the hand. She was looking up at all these lights in the hotel lobby. I talked to her for just a minute and then I picked her up.

My husband went with them to do more paperwork signing, thumb prints everywhere, and I just sat to the side with her on my lap and started playing with her. She was giggling and laughing.

NC: How beautiful.

MC: She never showed any sign of sadness or anything.

I think there is an advantage to having Down syndrome in that. They’re not really processing the loss and the uncertainties. They’re living in the now. Now someone’s playing with me. This is wonderful!

NC: Yes, and she comes into this wonderful family of brothers and sisters all wanting to love her, hug her, and play with her. I mean, it’s a great life for her, isn’t it?

MC: Oh yes! Everybody loves her.

NC: She loves music, doesn’t she? I noticed that night she was here, keeping rhythm with the songs and everything.

MC: Yes, yes, when the music comes on, she gets happy. She sings little songs.

NC: That is just so amazing.

So what would you say to mothers who are, perhaps, interested in adopting, especially little Down syndrome children?

MC: Well obviously children with Down syndrome are close to my heart. I follow Reece’s Rainbow on Instagram.

NC: Oh, so you think that would be a good website to go to?

MC: Absolutely! You can follow people’s stories. A lot of people link their blogs to that. You can make donations for specific children. You can just look at their pictures and read their little biographies.

NC: So you see other people’s stories and their children they have adopted?

MC: Yes. There is such a need. On Instagram, daily, I see new faces.

People might look at you and think, “Wow, you’ve done this amazing thing. You’ve adopted this little girl with Down syndrome” and I just think, “It’s nothing. It’s not even a drop in the bucket. There’s hundreds and thousands of babies and children sitting in orphanages.”

Reece’s Rainbow also advocates children with other kinds of special needs, too.

NC: A lot of people have a heart to adopt. I think there are a few things to think about with adoption.

One is, is that we don’t stop having our own children in order to adopt other children. I think that is actually principle number one.

I have met families that have said, “We’re not going to have any children of our own because we’re going to adopt.”

It is a wonderful thing, of course, to adopt children and take children into your family because that is God’s heart. He says He sets the solitary in families. God wants every child to be in a family.

Sadly in this world it’s not really going to happen because there’s just so many without families today. But the ultimate plan God has is for everyone to be in a family.

Family life is healthy. In a family, that’s where you can grow to health in your soul, mind, and body. It’s healthy.

I think with children who are not in families there is so much missing. They’re out of where God intends them to be.

So you’re in the will of God to bring someone into your family. But I don’t believe we do it at the expense of having our own children because then we are disobeying the very first words that God ever gave, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

He was talking about coming from our womb. God wants to bring forth the children that He wants to give us from our loins and from our wombs. This is His plan.

But we can adopt, along with having other children, as the Lord leads us. I think it’s maybe a good idea to not do that too early in the beginning of your family.

What do you think, Melissa?

MC: Yes, I think definitely. I think we went into adoption pretty naively, assuming it would be easy, and we would love them like all of our children.

NC: I began to share with families about all these children in orphanages pining away in Liberia. Because of the Civil War that had been going on for years there were many orphans.

I felt that I couldn’t tell other families to adopt unless I’m prepared to do it myself. Colin and I were in our mid-sixties when we adopted, and we adopted four children from Liberia. And I think like you, our hearts were bigger than our brains.

I mean, you have this heart of love and you have this wonderful family life and you think, “Oh, I just want to bring other children in to embrace and enjoy this family life that we have.”

But often when they come in, they’re not so excited to enjoy your family life as you are about bringing them into it.

Did you find that?

MC: That’s right, yes, and our children were three and eight years old. I think that them being younger was definitely way easier than your experience.

But I remember calling you once, just feeling like I thought I would love them exactly the same way.

I had spoken to adoptive mothers who say they do feel that way, but I also have spoken to more who say they don’t. You feel guilty because you really want to and yet you don’t.

So I was talking to you about that once and you said, “Melissa, it’s not natural mothering. It’s supernatural mothering.”

NC: And it is, because you are going beyond the natural. Because when you have a child from your womb it just is so very automatically natural, isn’t it?

MC: Yes, yes.

NC: It’s just there. No matter what that child does, you’re going to love that child through anything.

MC: Yes, you don’t have to choose it, yes.

NC: But then when children come, often what it is, is I think the rejection of your love that makes it harder. It’s not that you don’t love those children, but it happens a lot in adoptions . . . there is even a subconscious rejection of your love.

I remember reading a book. I didn’t read it before adoption, though I wish I had. I read it later; it’s called “The Primal Wound.”

If you’re thinking about adoption, I would encourage you to read that book. In this book it reveals that in every child there is something there within them that longs for their mother. It’s a very powerful, powerful, powerful connection.

Even mothers who are evil, who could have murdered, that child could . . .  still thinks that mother is the most amazing person in the world. I mean, they don’t know them, and they could have been a murderer, but they just have in their brain that this mother must be so amazing because it’s just there.

Often, too, these precious children can subconsciously take out on you, their adoptive mother, all the rejection on you that they had from their mother growing up (or that they never received from their mother because she wasn’t there). So you bear the brunt of that.

Looking back, we went through lots of challenges. Our children have grown, and we love them. They’re now out of the home with their own children now.

I look back and yes, we went through challenges, but I would do it all over again. I would never not have done it.

What would you say?

MC: I would absolutely do it again!

NC: You would never not have done it?

MC: Yes.  And we didn’t go through nearly any major struggles, just what you said.

It’s difficult because our children didn’t really act out in any behaviors or anything. But you do sense, what you said, that rejection. And that’s what makes it easier with Jewel because she’s just arms wide open, lapping up any affection and love you give her.

NC: And that’s something about motherhood is the reciprocal love. You get that at times from your adopted children, but you know, and you sense that they’re going through difficult times. You know there’s that thing there because it’s just natural.

You have to be prepared for that when you adopt so you’ve got to love beyond that.

You’re loving beyond what you’re getting from them. That’s where it becomes that supernatural mothering.

But it’s still worth doing. Amen?

MC: Yes!

NC: Oh, bless you, ladies. Let’s pray.

“Father, we thank You that we’ve been able to talk about something that’s so precious to Your heart because You want every child in a family.

“We thank You that You’ve adopted us into Your family. You have the heart of adoption.

“Father, I pray for mothers today who have adopted children. Some of them are going through difficulties and trials. We have our beautiful times, but then there are the difficult times.

“So many of these precious children have been abused, hurt, and rejected. They often just take all these emotions out on the one that’s the closest to them and loves them the most.

“I pray You will give them strength. I pray that You will give them wisdom. I pray that You will help them to see that, Lord, they are doing something that is beyond natural mothering. They’re supernaturally mothering. Lord, that You would anoint them to do this in the power of Your Holy Spirit I pray.

“And those who are thinking about it, I pray that You would lead them and guide them. Give them wisdom; show them the right time because You have the right time for everything, Lord.

“Give them Your wisdom I pray, in the name of Jesus, Amen.”

 

P.S.

To learn more about

REECE’S RAINBOW – SPECIAL NEEDS ADOPTION SUPPORT

THIRTEEN YEARS and 2065+ children HOME!

Go to: https://reecesrainbow.org/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/officialreecesrainbow/

Instagram: Reece’s Rainbow

To order the book of poems:

QUIET REFLECTIONS FOR MOTHERS

Go to: http://aboverubiesbookstore.mybigcommerce.com/quiet-reflections-for-mothers-101-poems/

THE PRIMAL WOUND

Understanding the Adopted Child

By Nancy Newton Verrier

 

FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell

Episode 61: A Motherhood Journey: Miscarriages, Ectopic Pregnancies, Down Syndrome Child

Rocky: Welcome to the podcast, FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.

Nancy: Good morning, precious ladies or good night. Maybe you're listening as you're going off to bed. Anyway, great to be with you again today. Let me start with a poem. I love poems about motherhood. Here's another poem from my book that I do have available in Above Rubies. It's called, Quiet Reflections for Mothers. It has poems I have saved over the years. This one is called, “I love Johnny.”

"I LOVE YOU, JOHNNY!"

I love you, Johnny, said mother one day,
I love you more than I can say,
Then she answered his questions with,
“Don't bother me now!"
And just didn't have time to show him how
To tie his truck to his tractor and plough,
But she washed her windows and scrubbed the floor
And baked and cooked and cleaned some more.

"Bring the boy next door in?" "Well, I should say not,
You'll mess up the floors and I don't want a spot."
"No, we don't have time for a story today,
Mother's too busy cooking, so run out and play,
Maybe tomorrow," she said with a sigh,
And Johnny went out almost ready to cry.

"I love you, Johnny," again she said,
As she washed his face and sent him to bed.
Now how do you think that Johnny guessed
Whether 'twas he or the house that
   she really loved best?   

That's a real challenge to us all, isn't it?

Today, I have a very special guest. This guest is my wonderful niece, Melissa. Melissa is the daughter of my brother. I come from a very small family, sadly. My sister lives not very far from me here in Tennessee. My brother is way over in New Zealand where we all originally came from. In fact, I often think that I was deprived. I only had two siblings and then as we grew up, we hardly saw one another. My sister immigrated to Canada, and my brother joined Youth with A Mission (YWAM) and traveled the world. I didn't see him for years. We really missed one another.

Anyway, now Melissa lives right here, just around the corner and a bit further down the road from us. I always think that Melissa actually looks more like me than my own three daughters. She has always been a bit special to me. Melissa has twelve children, twelve wonderful children. I want to tell you the names because I love names. All of Melissa's children start with J. I love it when people do that. Did you plan to do that, Melissa?

Melissa: We didn't plan to initially but the first two names we liked started with J, so we thought, Oh, I guess we'll just carry it on.

Nancy: Yes. Here I am, asking you a question before I've even said, “Say Hi” to the ladies. Anyway, here's Melissa.

Melissa: Hello.

Nancy: She has Josiah, Joshua, Jahna, then their four boys. I always think of them in a row. Jonathan, James, Jesse, and Joseph. Then she has Joycie and Joanie (Joyce and Joan). Two little princesses with beautiful, blonde curly hair, and I love them. Every time I see them, “Oh, here's my princesses.” That's your nine biological children, but you've got more.

Melissa: That's right.

Nancy: Yes! She has an amazing story. She also has three other children, two adopted from Liberia, Jeremiah and Jemima. Jemima, oh goodness me, she's like a queen. How old is Jemima now?

Melissa: Fifteen.

Nancy: Fifteen, yes, she carries herself like a queen. I think she must have come from some royal stock somewhere because right from the time you got her, she's always had this queenliness about her. They have two adopted from Liberia, then at the very tail end, no more children were coming along, so Melissa and her husband, Cal went to China and adopted a darling little Down syndrome girl from China. We are going to hear about her story.

Anyway, Melissa, your story really starts before you were married, doesn't it? Tell us what you were doing before you were married, in Hong Kong, wasn't it?

Melissa: Yes, well, as a young girl, I think I always wanted to work in an orphanage, so after I finished high school, I did some nanny work for different people, a theater company, and then I still wasn't married so I thought, What am I going to do with my life? My sister had been in Hong Kong, so I heard about a place called Mother's Choice. It's an orphanage, so I worked there for a year and a half.

Nancy: Yes, while you were there, I think you began to love some special little children, didn't you?

Melissa: Yes, I always wanted to adopt children after I married. While in Hong Kong, we had a lot of special needs children and most of those children had Down syndrome. The babies that were “normal” had a waiting list of parents who were waiting for their babies, but our special needs children sort of languished there for several years while people searched for a family for them.

I became very attached to a little girl who had Down syndrome, and I took her everywhere with me on my time off, and that's when I looked into her eyes and said, “If you're still here when I get married, I'm going to adopt you.” That's where God changed my heart to adopt a child specifically with Down syndrome

Nancy: Yes, and then when you got married, did you ever find out about that little girl again?

Melissa: She did get adopted.

Nancy: She did?

Melissa: Yes

Nancy: How wonderful. Anyway, you started off, you got married to your wonderful, handsome prince, Cal. Well, his name is actually Dean, but he's always called Cal, short for Calhoon, their last name. That didn't start too well either. You weren't conceiving. Tell us about that.

Melissa: Yes, well, we both wanted to have a large family, and we were both open to adoption too, but we thought we would have biological children first. I got pregnant without any problem, and I continued to get pregnant without any problem, but I couldn't keep the babies. I miscarried the first three and then I had an ectopic pregnancy.

Nancy: Yes, tell us what happened with that.

Melissa: That was a desperately hard time because my husband was actually away in Japan.

Nancy: He's in the Marines.

Melissa: Yes, he was in the Marine corps, so he was away, and the doctors weren't sure if it was a miscarriage or an ectopic. I was reluctant to do a D&C in case it was going to be a miracle and the baby would be fine. Finally, they saw the embryo in my fallopian tube, so I had to have emergency surgery. They ended up removing that tube because they couldn't stop the bleeding. I remember sitting in the hospital. I was fine. I was all composed. I was going to accept it.

Nancy: You're all by yourself, without your husband?

Melissa: Yes, that's when I lost it. They said, “Do you have anyone to call?” I couldn't stop crying after that because I thought, “I have no one to call.” We were newly married in Hawaii, and I didn't really know anybody yet.

Nancy: Your parents were in another country and your husband in another country.

Melissa: Yes. Thankfully, some ladies from the church we were going to came, and looked after me and took me home.

Nancy: Here you are, desperate for children and now you've had a fallopian tube taken. Wow. Now, what happens next?

Melissa: Well, I got pregnant again and because of my history with the ectopic pregnancy, I needed to go right away and make sure this one wasn't going be ectopic and unfortunately, it was. Then they realized that that tube also had a problem, so they referred us to the IVF clinic. That's when Cal and I thought, “Well, that's why God gave us a heart to adopt. It must be what He wants us to do.”

Nancy: Then you started the adoption procedures.

Melissa: Yes, we started the proceedings, and I should have known I would get pregnant again and at that time I was so demoralized, and I thought, “This is going to be the same result.” I did my duty and made the appointment to go and have an ultrasound to make sure it wasn't in my tube again because that can be life threatening.

 My husband asked me if I wanted him to come to the appointment. I said, “No, don't even bother. I know what's going to happen. Stay home.” When I went, they did the ultrasound, I was six weeks along, and they saw Josiah in my womb, and they saw his heart beating, and I remember the doctor saying, “Once we see a heartbeat, you're almost guaranteed you'll have a baby in nine months. I started crying so much, and the nurse started patting my arm asking, “Is this a good thing for you, dear?” I was like, “Yes! I just can’t believe it.”

Nancy: How wonderful.

Melissa: When I came home, it was like an hour drive, I came home and I had that little picture of the ultrasound, and Cal met me at the door and I was like, “Look at this!” We broke down and dropped to our knees and thanked God.

Nancy: How wonderful. Now, Josiah has his own baby, and you're a grandmother. Isn't that incredible? Isn't he the most adorable little child?

Melissa: I know. I saw him on the way here walking around. So cute.

Nancy: Yes. Dear precious mothers, there could be some of you listening today and you're struggling to get pregnant. Maybe you're having miscarriage after miscarriage. Maybe you've even had an ectopic pregnancy but don't ever despair. God is good. Keep trusting Him. You never know what God can do, and you always keep trusting Him. I believe that that is our responsibility. We are to trust God, walk in faith, and then let God do what He will do. Amen?

Then God blessed you with nine precious babies from your womb, with one fallopian tube.

Melissa: Yes! The first few times I went and made sure the baby wasn't in my tube, but after that, I thought, No. I think God has a special journey and relationship with each of us, and He wants to teach us things. Before I was pregnant with Josiah, I remember walking one day, angry with God. This is not fair. This is all I ever wanted, to have children. Women who abuse their bodies are able to carry a baby and what's wrong with me? Why can't I? I remember God saying, “Melissa, can you have joy if you never have children? Am I enough for you?”

Nancy: Wow. That's a challenge, isn't it?

Melissa: Yes. I couldn't answer immediately. I really had to think, and I realized, yes, I can have joy even if God never blesses me with children. He is enough. God is enough for me.

Nancy: Yes and I had a little thought. You mentioned how that when you were pregnant with Josiah, yes the baby was in your womb, not in the fallopian tube and the doctor said, “When we can see a heartbeat, we know that you're going to have a baby in nine months.” That's a powerful statement because when they see that heartbeat, they know, right then, that it is alive. Josiah was Josiah right then, not when he was born!

Melissa: That's right.

Nancy: I was talking to a lady the other day who came and visited us last weekend, and she was raised a feminist. She was raised to believe that the baby in the womb was a bit of nothing. She had no idea. She was totally brainwashed that a baby in the womb was a bit of tissue and didn't have any value at all.

She also had a miracle. Her three children she does have are all miracles. When her first baby was born, and she held this baby in her arms, she said, “The first thing that came out of my mouth was, “This baby is alive, alive?” The nurses said, “Well, of course she's alive.”

She said, “You don't realize what I'm saying. This baby came out alive. It was alive in me all that time?” That was the first revelation she knew of being raised a feminist that this baby in her womb had been alive all that time, from the moment of conception. It was a huge revelation to her. From that moment, she knew that abortion is murder and that the baby in the womb is alive. That baby is that person, that same person when they are ninety years old than when they were first conceived!

Melissa: That's right.

Nancy: It's amazing. Anyway, your journey is quite incredible. You had Josiah and Joshua. That's another interesting thing. I look at Josiah and I look at Joshy, and I can't believe it.

Melissa: They are opposite people.

Nancy: Yes, you couldn't believe they are brothers. Here's Josiah, the real hardworking cowboy. He's got his cowboy hat on, looks so handsome in it. Joshy with all his curly hair everywhere, and he's a computer nerd. I mean, it's where his brilliance is. They are so opposite, aren't they?

Melissa: They are so opposite.

Nancy: You can't believe it. It is amazing, dear mothers with little ones, to see what God will do with your children. We have to say, I guess you feel like this too, Melissa, I know I do. I'm further down the line with grandchildren and now great grandchildren coming on. You look at what God is doing in their lives, you look at the gifts God has given them, and you realize, it's God. I couldn't have made my child like that or I couldn't have given them that gift. No, God makes everyone unique.

Melissa: That's right. If we were to make them, we would probably make them all the same way.

Nancy: Yes, the way we wanted. Our children are so different to us, aren't they? I mean, could you be a computer nerd like Joshy?

Melissa: Absolutely not.

Nancy: No, I couldn't do one quarter of the things my children are doing. It's unbelievable, isn't it? Anyway, your next baby was Jahna, a little girl. What happened then?

Melissa: Yes, she was our first and only hospital birth. That happened because we had moved to Hawaii again, and there was no birthing center like we had had our two boys in, and my husband wasn't comfortable with a home birth. We went to the hospital. We had Jahna . . .  the birth, we waited outside, went in, had her in ten minutes.

Nancy: You had all your babies so quickly, didn't you? Just like your mom. Must be in the genes. I think, in your genes. Didn't come through mine, it came through your side. Your mom had her babies quick, even big ten pounders. She popped them out.

Melissa: Yes and she said she didn't feel any pain at all. I didn't inherit that part. I felt it. She was born very quickly and fine and she nursed right away. I thought there was no problem, but the midwife came over and told me that they had called the pediatricians to come and check on her. She was sort of skirting the issue, looked very uncomfortable.

I don't why I even said it, but I said, “Do you think she has Down syndrome?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Ok.” The pediatricians came ad looked at her, and they fussed around looking for the signs of creases in her hand and things like that, but she was very healthy. The pediatrician said nothing to us. I think that the fact that she had Down syndrome sort of became overlooked because I wanted to go home.

Cal and I had birthing center births where we could leave after a few hours. We wanted to go home, and they didn't want to let us. Being in the military, in a military hospital, there's the rank situation, so my husband felt like he couldn't really demand of the officers that we were leaving. It became a big thing. It took several hours of them lecturing us and telling us off basically while we sat  there continually saying, “We want to go home. We are fine. We want to go home.” But they never once said, “We think she has Down syndrome. Can you stay and we will do the karyotype blood test?”

Nancy: Really?

Melissa: Never did it. Finally, we had to sign against medical advice papers, and it was Sunday, so they had to call in the doctor to sign the paper, and she was very upset with us. Jahna was wrapped in the hospital blanket, and I said, “Do you want me to take that off and put on my own blanket?” They said, “No, just go. Take the blanket and leave.” They were so angry with us.

We came home and I do remember saying to my friend who was watching the boys, “Do you think she has Down syndrome?” She said, “No, she doesn't.”

We had to take Jahna to the pediatrician the next day per our arrangement of leaving the hospital early. I asked that doctor, “Do you think she has Down syndrome?” It's interesting. In the military, you have a lot of doctors who don't speak English very well. This lady didn't. She kind of clucked around and then said, “No.” We just carried on life like normal.

Nancy: Yes, which was a good thing.

Melissa: Yes! I would think it sometimes. I had worked for a year and a half with babies with Down syndrome, you would think I would recognize it. When I look back in pictures, I absolutely recognize it. Nobody said anything to us. Jahna was feeding well and doing well and meeting milestones pretty normally.

When she was about five, almost six months old, we had a work picnic, and the commanding officer had a sibling with Down syndrome. He looked at us from afar and said to himself, “Their daughter has Down syndrome I think, and they don't seem to know.” He didn't say anything because even he wasn't sure. Then, a month later, there was another picnic and then he was like, “That little girl definitely has Down syndrome, and they don't know it.” On Monday morning, he called Cal to his office and said, “Do you realize your daughter has Down syndrome?” Cal called me and as soon as he said that, I knew. Absolutely she does. We did the karyotype blood testing and of course, she did. I think God blessed us with that beautiful time of just enjoying her and being normal.

Nancy: I think that's wonderful because then you continued to treat her normally, didn't you? You treated her like one of the other children and for many of those years, she grew up very normally, didn't she? She was the perfect Down syndrome child with all this love oozing out of her. I can remember every time she would come to the door . . . so lovely to love a Down syndrome child and get all the love that they have. It was amazing. You had quite a long honeymoon time with Jahna, didn't you?

Melissa: Yes. She's very high functioning, and she never had any health issues which really helps.

Nancy: You had a honeymoon for how many years?

Melissa: Twelve, almost thirteen.

Nancy: Yes, about twelve or thirteen years, until she reached puberty.

Melissa: Yes, we still don't know what caused the change in her. Someone described it to me, and they said it's like a perfect storm. It could be puberty, could be the fact that we moved a lot of times. It could be something in the environment. It could be anything, and we still don't know what caused the change in her. Now I know it’s depression, but she started to not want to get out of bed, and flop around everywhere. She would laugh or cry hysterically in the middle of the night. We were living in a very small house, but we slept sort of away from everyone because she would wake everyone up, just loud screaming laughter or screaming crying.

Then she started getting a lot of different ticks and walking in circles and leaping up and running out the door. We were living on fifteen acres that backed to a forest. She would run off into the forest, and once, I couldn't find her for hours. I finally called Cal to come home from work thinking we are going to have to call the police. What are we going to do? Thankfully, he was able to find her. She had just been wandering around in the woods.

Nancy: This was an amazing, difficult, challenging thing for you to face because she had been so normal and perfect for all those years, hadn't she? Even for me. Suddenly, what's happened to my Jahna? This gorgeous darling, lovable girl and suddenly, she's not relating to you.

Melissa: No, she was absolutely in her own world.  She would stare off into the corner, up to the ceiling and have angry conversations at nobody. You'd ask her who she was talking to, and she would say “Nobody” and go back to her crazy talking. Things were always changing. Something would get better and something would get worse. The worst was when we moved her, and you guys saw her like that, where she would throw screaming tantrums for absolutely no reason. She did a lot of repetitive scribbling on papers until the whole paper would be covered in ink, the  pens run out. She could be doing that and then leap up from the chair, screaming at the top of her lungs in a massive tantrum and kicking and thrashing. You never knew when that would happen. She would do that several times a day.

Nancy: You kind of put up with it for a while and tried things?

Melissa: We were always trying special diets. We have a more alternative approach to medicine so putting her on any kind of drug, we had thought about it but then you think about the side effects. We tried this diet and that diet. Finally, we got her in to see a child psychologist. That appointment took about a year to wait for. She was wonderful, and she gave her a diagnosis of autism and depression. She had a lot of autistic behaviors, a lot.

Nancy: Yes, it had never appeared until that time.

Melissa: No, never. None at all. I don't like labels, but they do open doors. By her being labeled autistic, she was able to get ABA therapy. She has a therapist come to the home twice a week now which is wonderful. Even the therapist agrees now that she doesn't really need her. It's just someone to come and visit. At that time, she was also labeled that she was suffering with depression.

Nancy: These were all apart from the Down syndrome, weren't they?

Melissa: Yes, she had a dual diagnosis. We said, “Look, this is terrible. It can't get worse. We might as well try medication,” so we put her on an antidepressant. Within a month or two, we suddenly started thinking, she's not screaming any more or she actually gets out of bed. She comes out and says, “I'm here! Good morning.” Now, it's been such a blessing. There's a lot of stigma with antidepressants, but I think there's definitely a place for them. It brought Jahna back.

Nancy: Of course, it wasn't what you ever planned.

Melissa: No, but it brought her back to who she is.

Nancy: Yes but that is so great. Another interesting thing too, when we are talking about Down syndrome is you had Jahna when you were young. Then you never had any more Down syndrome children, even as you were getting older having babies. A lot of people think, “Well, I can't really have another baby now. I'm getting into my late thirties, maybe forties. What if I have a Down syndrome baby?” You know, you had Jahna when you were young.

I have another niece in Australia. She had a Down syndrome baby, I think it was their first baby right when she was young. It's not really determined on age. In fact, this is what gets me. How do they say that? Apart from those who have learned to know God's truth, that we are in our childbearing years until we reach menopause or until God doesn't give us anymore, out there in the secular world and in the Christian world, most women are not having children in their forties. They have stopped having children much earlier than that so how do they have any statistics anyway?

I know hundreds and hundreds of mothers who have babies in their forties, and they have perfect children. Of course, every now and then, someone has a Down syndrome baby. You've talked about the challenges you faced with Jahna, what about blessings? There's always challenges in everything. Tell me how you feel about the challenges at this moment.

Melissa: The challenges now? Well, it's wonderful now because we don't have any challenges. But during that time, we did face that, and Cal and I would often think, “What if this is how she's going to be for the rest of her life?” There were still blessings, even though she was totally out in La La Land, there were still moments. As Cal said once, there were enough moments where she would be affectionate or show some spark of joy in something, even that was enough to carry us through.

Nancy: Yes, well God has brought you right through. Well, our time is up again so can you stay on for the next session because we haven't even gotten to talk about Jewel yet?

Melissa: Yes, I can stay

Nancy: We will close this session, and I know it’s been a blessing to you because not everybody's journey is perfect, and I know that many of you face different issues in your lives and with your children. Not all of you have “perfect children.” We put that in quotation marks because why is it that we think our children have to be perfect children and how we want them. Children are eternal souls. They might not all be perfect on the outside and may not be doing everything correctly. A lot of children have autism today, and they have this or that, either mentally or physically, but even in having a child that is like this, God comes through.

I think it's in the challenging and difficult times that we really find God more than when everything is wonderful and perfect. Wouldn't you agree? You are going through a difficult, challenging time. You have a child who is a challenge because of their disabilities, either mentally or physically, know that God is with you. Know that this child has as much worth as any other child in your family, and this child is an eternal soul, and this child is going to one day live forever. That is the amazing thing, isn't it? You are preparing this child for eternity. I think we have to often be reminded that this is the real world. I've got a wonderful Scripture to talk to you about. We will do it in the next session.

Let's pray, shall we?

“Lord, we thank You so much that we can hear another story today from Melissa of the ways You deal with each family individually. We thank You that in whatever we face, You are with us. You are bigger than every challenge we face, every circumstance we are in. We thank You and we praise You with all our hearts. We give You thanks for whatever circumstances we are in now, whatever we are facing, we give You praise. We worship You, our Lord, in the name of Jesus.” Amen.