With God Nothing Shall be Impossible!

   

    Little did I know when attending the 1996 General Conference that I would meet my husband to be, Fred Benkley, III. I was thirty-five, single, and involved in full-time ministry. A year later, we were married!

    We wanted to start a family, but three years passed with no children. My doctor advised me to see an infertility specialist. After one year of unsuccessful treatments, we were told that we would never be able to have children, and that we should pursue adoption. This was devastating news to a forty-one-year-old woman desperately wanting a child!

    Every day I prayed, asking God to allow me to conceive. I read the stories in the Bible of barren women who the Lord blessed with a child, hoping and praying that He would do the same for me. But after four years and no child, I submitted to the idea that it might be His will for us to adopt. Our journey of adoption began: we applied at several agencies, all of which had a lengthy wait for a newborn.

    It was the week of our anniversary and my husband was preaching a revival. Just as Isaac entreated the Lord for his wife, Rebekah, my husband did the same for me. He informed the church of my inability to conceive, and asked for women who believed that God could give me a child to come forward and pray for me. I must admit that it was very difficult to believe for a child when trying to prepare myself emotionally for adoption.

    Shortly after the revival we received a phone call from my cousin who knew of a teenager wanting to give up her baby for adoption. Since this did not happen through any of the agencies to which we had applied, we felt that God had arranged this opportunity. When notified that the birth mother had delivered a little girl, we frantically tried to get all necessary documents to her in order to complete the adoption. However, at the last minute she changed her mind and decided to keep the baby. We were puzzled as to why God would seemingly put this all together and then suddenly take it away.

    But God was in control! Someone in that revival meeting had touched God for me. Little did we know that I was expecting a baby. It took me several weeks to realize this. I then immediately called my doctor to request a pregnancy test. He quickly stated that I was probably going through early menopause—he was concerned that I had conceived in one of my fallopian tubes which was deformed. If so, I would miscarry.

    An ultrasound a month later showed the baby perfectly positioned in the uterus even though conceived in the deformed fallopian tube. It indicated that I had conceived one week after being prayed for at the revival. We heard the baby’s heartbeat and knew that God had given us this precious life!

    At the end of my first trimester, we received a call from an adoption agency informing us that we had been selected to be the adoptive parents of a newborn girl. With mixed emotions, we declined the adoption.

    In the secret recesses of my heart, I desired a little girl. When the doctor told us that we were going to have a girl, I burst into tears. God did “exceeding, abundantly above all that (we) could ask or think!” (Ephesians 3:20). I gave birth to a beautiful, healthy baby girl, Brianna Marie. Just as Elizabeth in Luke 1:37, “With God nothing shall be impossible!”

 

Written by: Heather Halpin Benkley

Pastor’s Wife

Andover, MA
 

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