Blessed be Your Name

It struck me just now that I really should have Matt Redman's song "Blessed be your name" on my blog of meaningful songs... If you don't know the song - you are in for a treat! If you do, then you know why it is here...

Again it stems from my reflections on the suffering of Job, and his response to that suffering. I can imagine that if this song was around back then that he would be singing it at the top of his lungs! So often I find it difficult to hold back tears when singing this in Church because it's too pertinent, too close to how I feel. Now I'm the one in danger of being all soppy!

When Sarah and I were in the town of our fertility clinic 250km away from home to have our first cycle of IVF, I had plenty of time to write a wee journal of thoughts about what was going on. I was just rereading it, and decided that I would elaborate on a point I made there. I made the statement that anguish is not a measure of unfaithfulness or doubt in God. He knows that our hopes and dreams correlate to emotions. And I'm a firm believer that he has planted this particular hope and dream deep within me, so it's only natural that I would experience deep sadness over all that has happened in the last three and a half years.

I realise now that we've been trying to conceive for about half of our marriage. Boy I wish we'd started sooner. Maybe we'd be closer or even have a child by now. We could have started sooner, but I think we wanted to get ourselves into a position where we felt confident we could support ourselves, and I think we felt that we deserved to have time to ourselves, you know, to enjoy having time just to ourselves... how things have changed. What we wouldn't give. I saw this youtube video a while ago... it says it all...



Another song well worth adding to the "Songs with Meaning". There's nothing I wouldn't give...

A friend and I had a conversation over lunch last week in which we wondered out loud to each other about the possibility of putting adverts in our local paper simply promoting adoption as an option for people considering abortion. It's apparently against the law to advertise in any way to encourage women to give up their children for adoption etc. The reason it came up was because in our district in NZ, something like 3 adoptions occurred in a period of several years (I don't know the exact figures, but it's single figures anyway). Do you know how many abortions there were in NZ last year? The figure disgusts me. over 18,000. If even 1% of those pregnancies had been carried to full term, and adopted out, then not only would 180 lives have been saved, but 180 families would have been blessed with one of the greatest blessings imaginable. It breaks my heart...

Abe