Yup, that is my reality. I was sitting in my office, in the middle of a meeting, when my wife sent me a text with a picture.
I don’t know about you, but when I see my wife’s name on my phone, I stop everything to see what the message is. And in this moment, I wish I hadn’t. I was not prepared. It wasn’t even on my radar. I thought it was a joke. I couldn’t hide my disbelief to those in the room. My wife texted me in the middle of my meeting that she’s pregnant.
Now before we get to far into that story, let me back up a bit, let’s say 18 years. That’s when my wife and I were married in our early 20s. She is a gorgeous and cute curly hair blond. Noticed I said she is, she still hasn’t lost it. Honey if you are reading this, add these to my husband reward points.
Where was I? Oh yes, 16 years ago we welcomed our first son into the world. We were excited, terrified, and self-aware that we were in way over our heads. At least I was. My wife was a pro. Again, points.
Seriously, though. It was the greatest feeling in the world. Not only bringing life into this world, but just the idea that we could raise him up to be a better person than we were. That he could make a mark on this world that we couldn’t. To try all the things that I thought other parent should be doing. And so our journey began of building our family. 13 years ago, we were blessed to welcome our second son into this world. We were so excited to be able to get it right this time around. Just joking. This was bitter sweet. We were excited to have another son, but for our other son to have a brother. To watch them grow up together, take care of each other, fight each other, and become men together. On the other hand, it was marking the end of our family. You see my wife has blood condition that worsened with this pregnancy and we were advised by our doctors that it was not safe to have any more children.
And so, for 13 years that has been our story. Raising two incredible boys to love God, respect those around them, and to leave this world a better place than they found it. And I have to admit, as over our heads as we were, my wife is a really good mother. Despite my best efforts to screw them up, she has raised two outstanding young men (point). My youngest turned 13 a few months ago and we turned a corner. There are moments every parent celebrates with strange dances, screams of joy, or just that quite simmer of satisfaction. The last diaper change, ever. Throwing away that cumbersome, annoying , inconvenient car seat. Every pain inducing when you step on them Legos. The day your last kid becomes a teenager, isn’t totally screwed up, and the finish line is in sight. The moment you get rid of anything resembling childhood from your house.
This was us just a few months ago. We had just given away our last Lego and last kids bike that we owned. We were preparing for the home stretch. In five years we were going to be empty nesters in our mid 40ss. We were preparing for driving lessons, college applications, graduations, 401ks. We were handing down our family SUV to our son and finally bought a nicer model that we weren’t worried was going to get trashed by our kids. The next kid in our future was hopefully a grandchild within the next 10 years.
And it is in that context, that my wife sent me this text that we were going to bring another life into this world. See, we didn’t think it was possible. In fact, statistically, we had less that 1% chance of this happening. It was supposed to happen. My wife has a blood issue. It’s not safe. We are getting old. We had moved on to the next phase of life. So I did what only a rational man would do. I went and bought two more pregnancy tests for my wife to take. And to our surprise, they confirmed the inevitable, we were going to have another baby at 42 years of age.
I cannot express how much of a shock this was. When we were trying, we were excited with success. When we weren’t trying, we were shocked by the reality. I would be lying if I didn’t say I had to mourn a little bit. I had to mourn the future we thought we were moving into and were preparing for. I mean, I had a lot of cool things cued up to buy over the next few years. We began to wrap our minds around having a new little one in our lives again; baby proofing a house again, baby names, staying up all night, remembering how to parent a baby again. How are we going to tell our boys? How are they going to even respond?
It was at that moment, that even though there are risks, even though life is going to change dramatically, even though this seems crazy, God has a plan for this little one and he has found us worthy to be a part of it. We were going to be blessed by God’s provision in our life. God would provide safety for my wife and our new child. God would give us what we needed as we rebooted our family. We became extremely excited. We are excited to see our two teenagers get to experience seeing a new life brought into this world. I will be able to give them a firsthand look into early fatherhood that they will remember and hopefully learn from. I believe they will be even better fathers some day because of what they will experience with us. We were so excited about this, that we decided they needed to know from day one about the new baby, the changes that were going to happen, and they needed to be involved in the decisions we had to make. We got excited about buying all the baby stuff, again. Everything! As a gadget guy, it is amazing what has changed in 13 years. There is some really cool stuff out there.
And so we have jumped down this rabbit hole with very expectant hearts on what God is going to do through this child, through us, and in us. We did a remodel of the basement and moved our teenagers to their new rooms. We transitioned teen rooms into a baby room and guest room. When you have not prepared, had to do a 180, and simply start over, the to do list seems endless. Three things are for certain: I hate to be bored, the next 18 years will be anything but, and God is still good.
Evan Osgood is the NextGen Pastor at Antioch Christian Church.
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