The Day Mary Inspired Me with the Perfect Prayer

How’s your May going?  Ours has been full of birthdays and family visits and lovely weather and it’s been quite enjoyable.

Sometimes I find myself just surviving May — like I almost die in the middle of it — but this May has been a little less hectic. I think it has something to do with having another driver in the home.  So yay for teen drivers!

This post is scheduled to publish on my oldest son’s birthday. I have to say, he is turning out to be a wonderful young man, and I can’t help but think that it has something to do with the way he entered into this world.

Bear with me, those of you who don’t like birth stories, this one has an important lesson in the end.

It began on a beautiful day in May.  We had just come back from a reception for my sister-in-law and I was pretty sure I was in labor.  I had such an awful experience in the hospital that we decided to have a home birth this time.

The challenge was that both of my midwives had been at parties for the Memorial Day weekend, and they were both pretty exhausted when they showed up at midnight.

At one point, John and the midwives had all fallen asleep and I was there in the dark of my room — in a birthing tub — feeling completely alone.

In those dark moments, my only consolation was the thought of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemene.  Keeping Jesus company was about the only thing that kept the darkness from overcoming me.

What I didn’t know was that my 9 plus pound baby was posterior and those incredibly intense back pain and contractions weren’t going to go away for the next 12 hours.

Finally, it was time to push.  Anybody who has had a posterior baby knows it’s 10 times harder to give birth to a posterior baby, especially when they have big noggins like our kids.

I pushed for hours — that’s right, hours!

By some miracle of God, this beautiful baby with a shock of black hair was finally born.  He was rosy and healthy looking.  They lifted him up onto my stomach and we all laughed and cried with joy — but quickly, I noticed he wasn’t crying.

All of a sudden, this joyful moment turned to panic as this rosy cheeked boy started to turn blue.  The midwives did absolutely everything they could to get him to take that first breath, when suddenly, the one in charge yelled, “call 911”.

So John called 911 as they continued to try to revive him.

I sat there in total shock — like this wasn’t really happening.  This baby I had worked so hard to get here, was slowly fading away in my arms.  It was the worst feeling of my life.

After a minute or so of giving 911 instructions, John hung up and started joining me in trying to coax this baby to breathe.

The phone rang, and John picked it up, thinking it was 911 calling back.

It was my father.  John, let my father know the baby wasn’t breathing and told him to pray and then he hung up.

My dad hung up and immediately grabbed my brothers and prayed on his front lawn before going off to church.  He called my sister, who was walking into church, and she began to pray, too.

Perhaps simultaneously, somewhere across the Great Lake Michigan, I began to pray, as well.  I looked at this blue lifeless boy and I prayed the only prayer that came to mind.  It was the Memorare — a desperate prayer said in the moment of my greatest need.

One of the midwives told me to stop praying, and to call to my baby, instead.  I know she meant well, but I also knew that this baby’s life was out of their hands.

I felt him slipping away, I knew that with each minute that passed, there was less of a chance that he was going to make it through.

I was desperate, and the question I have for you, is what do you do in your most desperate times?  Who do you look to for help?  For me, I knew there was really only once chance for this baby, and it lied in the hands of our Mother and the God that she serves.

At this point, minutes had passed, and I began to try to prepare myself for the inevitable:  this beautiful boy was going to die in my arms.  I was going to lose one of the greatest gifts in my life, and there was nothing I could do about it.

And then, I believe Mary inspired me with a prayer that only she could have helped me to say, it was a prayer of complete surrender of this child that I so desperately wanted to live.

It was only seven words, the seven hardest, but most grace-filled words I ever prayed.  I slowly let go of clinging to this baby, and I slowly raised him up towards Heaven.  I looked to the Father in Heaven, and I said out loud, “Lord, this is your baby.  Your baby.”

To let go of something you love so desperately, to offer it to God — it wasn’t easy, but it was the prayer that I needed to pray.

In that moment, I offered God my baby — blue and lifeless — and I believe He accepted that offering, but then He did something very unexpected.

He gave that beautiful boy back to me — only He gave him back to me, full of life.  It was at that moment, that my little boy finally began to breathe.

God gave him back to us, and amazingly, there was no harm done.

It was a miracle in my eyes, but I know that not every traumatic birth experience ends that way.  I mourn for any of you who have had to say goodbye to your babies in that moment.  I am so sorry!

I don’t know why God decided to breathe life into my baby on that day, but what I do know is that every tear will be wiped away from every mother and father who has ever lost a child.

I do know that the reunion with those babies will be amazing, and they will add immensely to the joy of Heaven.

I also know that, for me, this moment was the moment that Mary became my “Wing-Woman” — you know, a woman who has your back, a friend that you can rely on no matter what?  That’s what she became for me.

Make no mistake.  Mary is not God, but I promise you, she will lead you closer to Him.

Without Mary’s intercession, in that moment, I would not have been able to let go of my son.  I wouldn’t have been able to say that prayer to God and mean it.

And without that prayer, maybe I wouldn’t be privileged to have one of the greatest young men I know living in my own house, setting the example for his siblings, as he so beautifully does.

I used to be afraid that loving Mary could take away from my love of God — but now I realize that love does not come in limited quantities.  By it’s very nature, love multiplies with each loving act.

The more love we give to one person, the more we have for everybody else.  We shouldn’t be afraid to love Mary or the people around us — for it is in loving them that we are more capable of loving God.

That day taught me that I need to be willing to surrender everything back to God, otherwise those things just might become our god and take the place of the one, true God.

We need to make a gift of everything we possess and everything we are — a gift to be shared with others, and a gift that ultimately we are willing to turn over completely to God.

Most every year, I remind my son of his birth story.  I tell him how much he would be missed if he wasn’t in our daily lives.  I remind him that God breathed life into him that day and that God still has work for him to do on this earth.

The same is true for all of us who still have breath in our lungs.  God has important work for all of us to do.

So let’s get out there and do the work that He has for us to do.

Let’s not forget that even if the world doesn’t recognize our work as important, that God notices and He cares, and your contributions really do matter to Him.  Take heart in that.