Child of Promise
by Melanie Hemry
Hannah Minor stared out the window on her flight to Florida. She didn’t notice the clouds, the brilliant blue sky or the hint of ocean gleaming in the distance. Instead, she pictured images of the child in her womb.
She was sure it had her husband Terry’s smile, and his chocolate brown eyes. Who knew, maybe this little one would grow up to be a Christian rapper, just like his father.
She sighed, leaning back in her seat.
Maybe she was getting a little ahead of herself. After all, she had just found out she was pregnant that morning before catching the flight to Florida for business. Her thoughts drifted back to the first time she’d been pregnant two years earlier, in 2013. Early in the pregnancy, she’d started having symptoms of a miscarriage. Her doctor told her to go home and put her feet up. She’d done just that, but a week later, she lost the baby.
The following year, in 2014, she had become pregnant again. This time, the doctor put her on folic acid supplements and one baby aspirin a day. They seemed to help, and things went well at first. Then, at eight weeks, she miscarried again.
The loss had left her bereft.
This morning, as soon as Hannah realized she was pregnant, she had taken the folic acid and baby aspirin. As the plane landed, she felt triumphant, sure that this time she would hold their baby in her arms.
The next day, during a training meeting, Hannah felt the familiar symptoms of miscarriage. Slipping out of the room, she called her husband, who prayed for her and their child. Her next call was to her doctor.
“Fly home,” he said. “You need to be off your feet.”
Hannah flew home and, as the doctor had instructed, put her feet up. A week later, she miscarried.
Dark Days
“That was one of the darkest times of my life,” Hannah explains. “Losing one baby had been hard. Losing a second had been devastating. Losing our third child threatened to overwhelm me. The miscarriages were bad enough, but it seemed like we were taking hits from every direction. Terry was working hard to get his music ministry off the ground and we were living in a poverty situation.
“We’d lived with Terry’s parents since we married. We loved being with them, but we both slept on a broken futon in a room the size of a closet. When Terry’s dad saw how we were sleeping, he wept.
BVOV : 11
