Praise the LORD!!
One of my young mothers here at NPBC just gave birth yesterday to a beautiful baby girl. While the miracle of life is reason enough to praise God, this baby is a baby that our whole church family is jumping for joy to have added to our family! This young mother had FIVE miscarriages over the past few years. She portrays Mary, the mother of Jesus in our annual Christmas Pagaent and every year, while loving the part she was able to play, she would ache to have a baby of her own.

She and her husband had trouble getting pregnant in the first place, and they went through several very costly procedures to get pregnant, only to lose each baby only a few weeks into the pregnancy. Finally, after a lot of tears and a lot of prayer and a lot of "whys" to God, they felt led to stop trying the procedure and see what else God might have in store for them. They surrendered their desires over to God and chose to trust Him. They were just beginning to look into adoption, when to their surprise, this young mother discovered she was pregnant!!! Not only that, but everything has gone very smoothly for this pregnancy!!

I just spoke with our Minister of Music who was there yesterday in the waiting room. He said that he had never seen so many people from our church in a waiting room before! :-) She had brought every verse that God had given her during this pregnancy and during their struggle (She had them written on index cards). The whole time during her labor (she couldn't have an epidural b/c of some medication she was on), she had someone with her reading those scriptures and praying with her. What an awesome testimony for this baby girl to have...she was literally brought into this world bathed in the Word of God!

And this young mother would be the first one to say that it was not her ability to believe that got her through...because there were times througout this struggle that she just didn't understand...but it was her God giving her the strength that she needed.

*Update on Canthen: Thanks for your prayers! Canthen went home on Friday and is doing much better!