Nancy on Family

               In 1976 I attended the Urbana Missions conference at the University of Illinois, spending a bitter-cold week listening to John Stott teach the Bible, Elizabeth Eliot tell the story of her husband and Nate Saint and others being killed by the Aucas, and scores of other missionaries tell their stories. I went to workshops by Wycliffe Bible Translators and many other mission agencies; and at every turn I was thrilled and saying to God, "I'd love to do that!" I had had no idea the scope and breadth and draw of missions, and I wanted to do it all! On the last night of the conference, Billy Graham spoke on Responding to the Glory of God. I knew without a doubt that God was calling me to something specific. I also knew that I needed to write down what he was saying to me before I convinced myself that he didn't really say it. I had been keeping a notebook all week and there, at the end, is an entry that says 'God wants me to give to him the area of children.' Now, I didn't have any children, and I planned on graduating from College before I had any. And this was a student mission's conference and nobody talked about children all week. But that was what God spoke to me about. And I said yes to him so far as I understood what he wanted from me.

On the way home on the bus I had a moment of panic in Iowa somewhere when it occurred to me that maybe God did not intend to give me any children, and that this was what I was supposed to sacrifice to him, an interesting misconception from this vantage point, nine children and 15 grandchildren later.

But I wanted to obey God in this very specific calling.  I began to really question the whole idea of family planning.

As a young newly married Christian, I assumed without thinking that I would use birth control until I finished college. No brainer. In 1975 my Dr. recommended The Pill, and I took it. But I didn’t like the way it made me feel physically. (Several years later when I was pregnant for the first time and had the usual morning sickness, I realized that the pill did give me morning sickness because of the high dose of hormones it contained.) We switched to other methods of birth control for a while.

Modern culture advocates that we limit the number of children we give birth to. Overpopulation scares them, and will ruin the environment, they say. Women can’t possibly compete with men in the workplace if they don’t have access to birth control and abortion., they say. The financial burden of raising many children is too great if a family has only one income, they say.

God tells us children are a blessing. The lengths our culture has gone to in making sure that pregnancy doesn’t get in the way of our plans has resulted in the abortion industry. From blessing to large scale murder. Something is terribly wrong here.

My husband Phil and I were so happy to welcome Jamie, our first child, in 1981. Two years later we had Elizabeth, and then soon began looking into adoption, another one of those callings from God, which resulted from my saying yes to Him at Urbana. As it turned out, Stephen arrived from India soon after Becky was born. I was still not really comfortable with the options on the birth control front, and was content to let things unfold, see what God would do.

The major change in our thinking at this point was that, at the very least, we needed to be prayerful about family planning, which we really were not early in our marriage. I don’t think it occurred to us that we should ask God’s opinion about when or if to have babies. But if there is anything we should be holding up to God in prayer it is LIFE.

Hannah was born in 1990, and Joshua came to us by adoption in 1991. Our love for having lots of kids around was growing as our fear of being overwhelmed was dissipating. We welcomed Philip, adopted Peter, and in 1997, at age 40 I gave birth to Joey. And we didn’t know it then, but that would be it.

The joys of raising this big family are too many to count. We feel so rich to have so many grown children and in-laws and grandchildren.