Pastor Jeremy Stephens

Sometimes my orthodoxy (what I believe and what is theologically acceptable) and my orthopraxy (how I live out my orthodoxy) collide in obvious ways.  Lately, I notice the conflict most in my prayer life.

About two weeks ago, this challenge occurred again.  My wife Kim is now almost 13 weeks pregnant.  When we visited the doctor for our first ultrasound at 11 weeks, we had that terrifying moment where the tech pauses and says, “I’ll need to go talk to the doctor for a moment, can you wait here?”  I feel like that question is never followed by good news, and I was certainly right this time.  The doctor came in, muttered to himself as he looked at our baby on the monitor, then turned and told us what he thought he saw.

Normally a baby’s organs develop faster than their the body has room for, so God made it so the organs develop outside the body at first, then go through the umbilical cord into the belly at about week 10.  By the time 11 weeks roll around, they should already be through, and the hernia they pass through should already have healed.  When the doctor looked at our baby, he saw what looked like organs still developing on the outside of its belly (see the arrow in the picture, it’s the cloudy part next to the tube-y looking thing).  The term for this issue is Gastroschisis.  It’s a birth defect in which an infant’s intestines stick out of the body through a defect on one side of the umbilical chord.  It’s not a life-threatening defect.  It is usually taken care of by giving birth through C-section and immediate surgery.  We would have to wait a few months to take our baby home.

In order to confirm their suspicions, we needed to schedule an appointment with a perinatologist (specialized doctor who takes care of problems that arise before birth).  Between the two appointments we prayed constantly and we enlisted the help of several family members and friends and asked them to pray too.  This was the moment when I was challenged.

How do I pray for our baby?

My theology says that God can heal.  It says He’s actually an expert at it, and does it all the time.  My practice says that God doesn’t heal very often these days, and its better to pray that He bring good doctors, that we can accept the difficulty of disease and defect, and learn to care for it.

I decided to let my orthodoxy win out over my orthopraxy this time.  I prayed that God would heal our baby.  I prayed, knowing that He can easily heal and fighting the creeping doubt that He wouldn’t do it this time.

Yesterday morning we met with the specialist.  We got to see our baby again on the ultrasound.  You’ll notice the distinct lack of organs sticking out of its belly at the arrow.  The doctor did too.  His comment was, “I don’t know what they saw on the first ultrasound, but your baby looks perfectly fine to me.  When people don’t look at these ultrasounds all day, every day like we do, they tend to misread them I guess.”

Problem was, Kim’s OB does look at ultrasounds all day, every day.  They have all of the equipment, and they have a dedicated tech that does this for their living.

Whether our baby healed with time, or the OB misread the ultrasound, or God truly and miraculously healed him/her, I learned a valuable lesson this week.  Its not easy to trust that God truly will answer prayer in the same way we hope He will, and we often set up escape clauses so that our faith in Him isn’t shaken.  My caution for myself, and for you if this is a place where you struggle, is this: trust means placing ourselves in situations where the result can be embarrassing, soul-crushing, and painful if the one we’re placing our trust in fails.  However, if we always create escape routes in an effort to limit damage, we may never experience the overwhelming moment where God does exactly what we hoped at exactly the right time.