The goodness of God

I've been meaning to post about some of the ways God helped us through the whole Toby-being-born thing and how He reminded us that He was looking after us...

During the day on Tuesday, Deborah was feeling a few twinges and my mum called to ask how she was because she had a sense something may be starting to happen. After homegroup prayed for us that evening, Deborah went in to labour at around 11pm.

We were all packed ready to go to the hospital but nothing was progressing very quickly and, at around 3am on Wednesday, the contractions started to get further apart rather than closer. Deb was feeling pretty miserable about this and a bit fed up. At this point, an email from Dave Mitchell at church came through to say he was praying for us and awaiting any news. Not sure whether he actually sent it at that time of night (update: apparently he did!), but it certainly arrived in our inbox at the right time and was a reminder to us that God was with us.

The next evening, after around 22 hours of labour, we had a call from our friends in Canada called Tom and Liz who we hadn't managed to speak to for ages. I guess they knew it was around Deborah's due date and were calling to see how we were getting on. When Tom heard Deborah was in labour, he prayed for us over the phone. Just before he finished, Deborah's waters broke.

As we made our way into hospital, I had just rung the buzzer on the maternity ward and was just about to turn my phone off when it rang. It was our church leader, Pam, who had just got in from a day out and gave us a ring to say she was praying for us. Had she phoned 30 seconds later, she wouldn't have got through.

Through all this, we really felt that God was demonstrating that he was in control and He cared enough to prompt other people to call at just the right times!