Back in early October, the women’s ministry at my church hosted their annual Cherished Conference in Ruidoso, New Mexico. On Friday morning each year, different women are asked to teach breakout sessions about various topics. This year I was asked to teach one of the breakout sessions and the topic I was given was about God’s promises. This is a topic I’m very familiar with as it is something that I walked through for many years while I waited on God’s promise to me to be fulfilled.

I’d like to share my breakout session with you as a two-part blog. Part 1 will be my personal journey and testimony of waiting on the fulfillment of God’s promise to me. And Part 2 will be some encouragement for those that are still waiting on your promise from God to be fulfilled.

Here is “Waiting on the Promise” Part 1…

God’s promises to us are different in so many ways yet are the same. There’s not a set time frame for one promise over another. Maybe you’re single and you’re waiting on God to bring you a husband; maybe you’re married and you’re waiting on God to bring you a baby. Maybe you’ve been saving awhile for God to bring you a new car or a new home. Maybe you’ve been working for a horrible boss or with co-workers you don’t like and you’re waiting on God to bring you a new job. Maybe you’re waiting on your treatment to finish for the “all clear” or waiting on a cure for something. Or maybe, you prayed Proverbs 22:6 over your children as they were growing up and now, you’re waiting for the promise of the prodigal child to turn to God and return home.

Whatever your promise is, God knows it. He hears you. He sees you. And as Romans 8:28 says it, “He’s working all things together for your good.”

I’d like you to find a piece of paper and at the top write this statement:

I am waiting on God’s promise of _____________ to be fulfilled.

Fill in the blank with the promise that you’re waiting on God to fulfill for you. As you read through my testimony and hopefully Part 2 of the blog, I hope you allow God to speak to you through this message and find comfort in knowing God has not forgotten about you or the promise you’re waiting on.

I want to start out by telling you a little bit about me and my story. This is something that I have walked through and have seen the fulfilment of God’s promise to me.

My promise was about having a baby and being a Mom.

Like many women, there’s always been a dream of growing up, getting married & having kids. My plan was to get married & have all my kids (3) by the time I turned 30. That way, I could live the rest of my days raising kids with my husband…the American Dream, right!?!

Well, as I’ve learned and I’m sure you have learned too, our plans are not always God’s plans. Those plans, or parts of them, may turn in to reality at some point, but not always the way we think or dream it to be.

My husband and I were in our late 20’s when we got married in 2003. We had dated for quite a while, so I was more than ready to get going on the family part. But my husband said we should own a dog for at least a year before having kids so we could learn to be responsible for something other than ourselves. So, in December 2004, we got Daisy.

Well, the year of owning a dog first came and went, as did life and everything else. So let’s fast forward to 2013.

We had finally decided to start trying to make a baby. I bought an ovulation kit to help make things easier and after only one month, we were pregnant! We were so excited!!  It’d been almost 10 years since we got married and it was time to move forward.

I did a couple of home pregnancy tests and then went to the doctor for the actual confirmation. They said I was about 5 weeks, so they set an appointment for me to go back in a few weeks to hear the heartbeat. We called our families and told our friends. Everyone was so excited for us!

We went in at week 7 for the first ultrasound to see the baby and hear the heartbeat. We were disappointed that we didn’t hear the heartbeat. But friends told us not to worry as most people don’t hear the heartbeat until weeks 8-10. The doctor wanted us to come back the following week and try again so we did and had the same results. The doctor seemed more concerned this time and sent me to have some blood work done to check my HCG level. In her opinion, the pregnancy was likely a miscarriage because the baby hadn’t grown any since the previous week, but the blood test would tell us for sure.

The gravity of the whole experience hit us like a ton of bricks. To go from ecstatic to devastated in a matter of weeks was something we hadn’t experienced before.

The pregnancy ultimately ended in a miscarriage as the baby never grew past 7 weeks and 1 day. To say miscarriage is a hard thing to walk through would be putting it mildly. You can work through your pain and move forward, but it’s something that stays with you. I could be walking in a store and all of a sudden break down in tears. I would get embarrassed because I would just randomly start crying. But a dear friend told me that when I needed to cry, just cry.

About a month later, once everything was finished, I went back in for a checkup. My doctor wanted to send me to a fertility doctor, but we weren’t interested. According to my husband, we were still young enough to try again and didn’t need the expensive measures. We just needed time to grieve.

But by the end of 2013, we still weren’t pregnant again, so I decided to check with a fertility doctor. Although we had been praying and fasting for me to get pregnant again, I just wanted to make sure that everything was okay with me, and nothing was preventing the process. I went through a series of tests and appointments and then decided to have a procedure done just to make sure all was well. A few days before I was to have the procedure, I developed a blood clot in my right leg, which turned out to be a side effect of some of the medicine my doctor had prescribed. I was in the hospital for a few days to clear the blood clot. While I was there, my fertility doctor visited with me and told me we now had to refrain from trying to get pregnant for 6 months! I was really disappointed. It had already been more than a year since we had the miscarriage, and I still wasn’t pregnant. And now we would have to wait for SIX MONTHS before we could try again!?!

Well, that brings us to 2015. I was so excited and ready to go back to see the fertility doctor so we could start everything again. But, by the next appointment everything had changed. I was told I only had a 1% chance of conceiving a child naturally. What!?! The news completely devastated me! The one dream I had always wanted and pursued for so long was now shattered into a million pieces!

I’m not going to lie to you…this news was hard to hear and come to grips with. On top of all of that, our dog Daisy passed away. So now within a two-year time frame, we’d miscarried a baby, had a blood clot, lost our beloved dog, and told our chances of conceiving a baby were slim to none. This was too much! I felt like God had actually given me more than I could handle!

After this, I went into a dark period for a while. I was mad! I was angry! I was frustrated! I stopped praying. The time in my life when I needed God the most, I just stopped talking to Him altogether. I told myself there was no use in fasting or praying because it didn’t work. I had been praying and believing for a baby for so long and it didn’t get me anywhere but heartbroken!

With my frustration, I started withdrawing from a lot of things. I still went to church and put on my happy face, but I stood in the back with my arms crossed and refused to sing and worship. I truly didn’t see the point.

Then one day, a friend of mine asked me to lunch. I had thought about pouring out my heart to her, but I still wasn’t sure I was ready to be so vulnerable or even just to not be so mad. Do you know that God still loves us in our darkest places? And that even if we think we’re done with Him (even temporarily), He’s not done with us? Lunch with my friend that day turned my world around!

I had put myself on an island thinking I was the only person going through this. My husband knew how I was feeling; he was even experiencing some of the same feelings himself. But my friend was a blessing in disguise! We met for lunch and talked until dinner…literally!! =) I felt so much better after talking to her. I just needed to share my feelings and let go of the negative so that God could refresh me and move me forward.

Later that year we decided to get a second opinion from a different fertility doctor. We were given the same answer, but this time, we decided to talk about our options. We took some time discussing our options and figuring out where the money would come from. Once we got everything worked out, we set the plan in motion for early 2017.

But our plans were halted again when we realized the fertility office misquoted the amount of money that was due. Being that fertility treatments are horribly expensive, we only had half of what we needed to pay for everything.  So, as we worked to figure out the rest of the money issue, I had another medical setback.

There’s a song that Lauren Daigle sings called “Trust in You”. The very first line of the song is:

Letting go of every single dream, I lay each one down at your feet…

This is what I had to do. I had to lay down my dream of having a baby at God’s feet. I finally realized that I was holding on so tight to my dream, that I wasn’t allowing God to freely move in my life and do what He needed to do. The chorus of the song says:

When you don’t move the mountains, I’m needing you to move

When you don’t part the waters, I wish I could walk through

When you don’t give the answers, as I cry out to you

I will trust, I will trust, I will trust in you.

And that’s exactly what I had to do! I had to put aside the money issues, the medical issues, the “Kara-get-out-of-the-way-and-let-God-move” issues and I had to TRUST HIM.

It’s amazing what can happen when we move out of the way and let God do what God does best…the impossible…the miracle work.

Now we’re in late 2019 and we’re ready to go. We’ve visited with the fertility office; we have the correct amount of funds, and everything is put into place to begin late February 2020. I was very excited, but also very nervous. There was still a quiet voice in the back of my mind saying, “What if…” But I was also too excited about the possibility of what was coming to give it a second thought!

I had a positive pregnancy test on March 19, 2020. We went to have the first check-up at 7 weeks. We were both nervous due to our last experience with a 7-week pregnancy, but God is so GOOD!! We heard the baby’s heartbeat, and it was good and strong!

And we heard his strong little heartbeat at every appointment up until the day he was born. We welcomed our baby, James Hyden, Jr to our family on November 24, 2020.  He was born at 4:01am and was 8lbs, 8oz and 22” long. He was born the day before his due date! Ironically, the first time in my household that a Hyden man has actually been early for anything!! Lol!

Our long-awaited promise was fulfilled! If you count the time from when we first got married, we waited 17 years for Baby James. I look in his precious face every single day and just feel God’s blessings pouring over me. He is my rainbow after the storm.

But the fulfillment of promises doesn’t always take 17 years. Maybe it takes more; maybe it takes less. But when God gives you a promise, He will deliver it when He says it’s time. God’s timing is different from ours, but the promise will not expire, and it will not return void! God keeps His word to us…every time!

Thank you for reading my testimony! I hope it brings you encouragement to know that no matter how long you’ve been waiting, God’s miracles still happen every single day. Please come back next week for Part 2 as I share the second half of my breakout session for ways to keep your faith strong during the waiting process.