PODCAST TRANSCRIPT | Episode 122: REVERSAL STORY, WEDDINGS, AND PREPARING OUR CHILDREN FOR THEIR FUTURE SPOUSES

FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell

Podcast 122: REVERSAL STORY, WEDDINGS, AND PREPARING OUR CHILDREN FOR THEIR FUTURE SPOUSES

Rocky Barrett: Welcome to the podcast, From our Home to Yours, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies. 

Nancy Campbell: It’s such a privilege to come and be with you again today in your home. Today I have someone new to introduce to you, my friend Sherri Leiter. I met Sherri about 24 years ago. We have been very special friends all that time.

Sherri has been such a blessing to Above Rubies. She and her husband have supported Above Rubies and Sherri has put on a number of our Above Rubies retreats, two ladies’ retreats, and three family retreats. It’s all been such a blessing.

So Sherri, I want you to introduce yourself to the ladies and just tell us about how many children you have. They want to get to know you!

Sherri Leiter: Okay, well thank you for having me, Nancy. As she said, I’m Sherri Leiter. I have been married to David for almost 39 years. In December it will be thirty-nine years. We have eight living children; one little guy is with the Lord.

Actually, part of what we’re going to talk about today is we actually have two families. We have two children that are older, grown and married and have blessed us with eleven grandchildren. After that we waited quite a while, and we will get to that part of the story in a minute, but then we had six more blessings.

NC: Yes, that is so amazing. It was perhaps about that time that you were getting a change of heart about your family size. You just started off with the two children and then that’s when we met you. You just had these two little children, and you were quite happy with them for a while, and then tell me what happened.

SL: Well, we decided that David would go back to college and I would go college, I had never been to college. We were done with our family and so my husband had a vasectomy because we just decided well, we have our two perfect children, a boy and a girl, and we just needed to get on with life so I could have a career.

NC: Yes, so wow, what happened?

SL: Just shortly after David had his vasectomy, for lack of a better term, God got a hold of us. I was a one-day college drop out. I went to college and I was sitting there trying to take a test to get out of the Algebra one because I had not passed the entrance test because I had been out of school for eleven years.

I was trying to test out of that. It’s one of the few times I feel I’ve heard the audible voice of God say, “What are you doing here? You never even asked Me.”

So I went home and was kind of scared to tell David that I wanted to drop out of college. He actually received it very well because he had also gone back to college and realized it was not what he was supposed to do.

Through that whole thing, over the next several months, we started praying and God convicted us to start homeschooling our children. Then also, at that point He basically said to us the same thing about the vasectomy. He said, “You know, you had that done but you never even asked Me about what My thoughts were on that.”

We were immediately convicted that we had taken something that should have been God’s out of His hands and taken it into our own hands and so we got convicted.

 NC: I thought that David was not so sure at the beginning, was he?

SL: He was convicted that we shouldn’t have had the vasectomy but when it came to having the reversal, that’s where we differed. It became a four-year tug-of-war between the two of us.

MC: Wow, four years?

SL: Four years and what I learned from that is that you can’t be the Holy Spirit for your husband, which is what I tried to do for four years. I tried to tell him every reason why he needed to have the reversal.

Praise God for a very godly woman that came into my life. It wasn’t Nancy; I hadn’t really met her quite at this point. But this lady came into my life and just basically said, “You know, this isn’t anything about the reversal. This is about headship and you are not submitting to your husband. You need to let this go.”

I went home broken because I thought, “Oh my goodness, if I tell him, ‘Fine, no problem,’ he’s just going to say, ‘Okay great, we’re good, if God wants to override my vasectomy, He will.’”

So I went home, and he got home from work. I repented to him; told him I was sorry that I had not been submissive.

It was totally God. I had been praying a lot but his words to me were, “I’m glad you realized that because I was getting ready to tell you that.” He rolled over and went to sleep and I was a broken woman. I cried myself to sleep that night.

But miraculously, the next day while he was back at work, I was outside mowing the lawn. I was getting ready to put my two children to bed and I came in the house because God said, “You need to repent to your children because they have not seen you be the godly wife that you should be by submitting to your husband.”

I repented to my two children who at that time were about eleven and eight.

I was just done. I was done. I didn’t know what God was going to do now. There are no more children for me. I don’t know what I am going to do. I went to bed and my husband came in later because he was working a night shift and literally jumped on the bed and woke me up at four in the morning.

He said, “Do you still have the name of that doctor that does reversals?”

I’m like, “Yes, why?”

He said, “It was the weirdest thing. You’ve thrown every single thing at me that you could for why I should have a reversal but one thing.”

He said, “I was standing tonight at work just working and all of the sudden God just said, ‘You’re being selfish. The only reason you don’t want more children is because you’re thinking you want to retire, and you want to get a boat, and you want to do this, and you want to do that. I have so much more for you when I bless you with children.’”

The interesting thing is when I asked him what time did it happen, it happened at almost the exact moment that I repented to our children. Needless to say that within a month we had the reversal. We had the reversal, and our faith was really shaken though.

I conceived six months later but I lost that baby at eleven weeks. Then I conceived four months later and lost that baby at ten weeks.

Then came where it really got hard. I conceived again and carried that baby till thirty-four weeks, and he lived five hours and died in my arms, and our faith was shaken to the core.

NC: I remember, oh my, yes. I feel like crying even now.

SL: I know.

NC: I remember David coming to Colin and saying, “You know, we believe this is truth. We believe we should be open to God and have the womb open.” But he said, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this to Sherri. I mean, we’ve opened our lives and our womb to God and every baby that’s conceived is dying and now this baby was born and still died.”

SL: He was broken, and we were broken.

NC: I remember Colin encouraging him and just encouraging him even in the midst of such hardship and sorrow to keep trusting God because you don’t do things because it all works good. We do it because it’s obedience. I think that was the hardest counsel Colin had to give but he knew that was the right thing.

But the amazing thing was that David and Sherri, even in their sorrow and brokenness knew that yes, God can be trusted.

And so you kept trusting God, didn’t you?

SL: Yes, yes, we did.

NC: So then what happened?

SL: Well I conceived three months later and quite honestly was terrified. I didn’t even tell David that I thought I was pregnant. I just kind of ignored it because I guess I thought if I ignored it, I wasn’t pregnant, I guess. That was kind of my logic.

Anyway, finally my husband realized I was probably pregnant. Of course we did a pregnancy test, and I was pregnant. Immediately, I burst into tears. I will admit, I was a basket case because I was so fearful.

But praise God for Colin and Nancy. David called Colin and he said, “We are not going to do this. We are not going to live in fear. This is not what God would have us do.”

So he called Colin and Colin just spoke life and encouragement into him. Then he put Nancy on the phone and Nancy spoke encouragement and life into me.

I put Bible verses all over the house about not fearing and literally lived the rest of that pregnancy without a fear and was blessed with a beautiful baby girl, Sarah Colene, who was actually named after Nancy Colene.

She just got married, just a couple of weeks ago. She’s 22 years.

NC: Yes, yes, you’ve had two marriages (weddings) in how many weeks?

SL: No, just six days!

NC: Oh goodness me! Tell about that a bit later. Finish this story.

SL: We had Sarah and then we had Mary Beth just 13 months later. I will admit at that point that I was like, “Oh my goodness, God, I don’t know how much I can do!” I had three full-term pregnancies in two years, and I was really tired.

Literally, as soon as everyone left me after Mary Beth was born, I breathed this little, “Oh Lord, please, could You just close my womb, just for a little bit?”

As soon as I breathed that prayer, I was immediately repentant. I said, “God, I’m sorry. You are the great Physician. You know what my body can handle.”

After about year I was not pregnant and I was like, “Okay, what’s going on?”

I hosted one of the ladies retreats and had you pray over me for God to open my womb. Year two rolls around and I’m still not pregnant. I cried out, “God, I said I was sorry! I want another baby!”

That was when He finally just said, “Do you believe now that I open and close the womb?”

I was like, “I got it, God. I got it.”

So I let it go and then we were blessed with Anna. There’s almost exactly three years between Mary Beth and Anna. Then I conceived Kristen and I was 41 and that was a funny one because my oldest daughter, Amy, at this point was a midwife. She had delivered the one that’s now 18.

When I found out I was pregnant I told her and then when my husband came home, I told him. He’s like, “You can’t be, you’re forty-one.”

I said, “But I am!” and it took me about a half hour to convince him I was pregnant. He thought when I turned forty I guess I couldn’t get pregnant!

Anyway, I had Kristen and she’s such a joy. She’s 16 now. Then Josiah followed her, and I was just a month shy of 45 when I had him. I was blessed to have two children in my forties.

It’s wonderful, too, because we just had the two daughters get married and another one’s probably getting married Saturday and so we’re down to just two children in the home.

I don’t know how that happened so quickly, but it did.

NC: Oh Sherri, thank you for sharing that most beautiful story. I think reversal stories are just so wonderful. I did write a book many, many years ago and printed all these amazing stories of couples that had reversals from tubal ligations and vasectomies. You wrote your story in that book.

SL: Yes.

NC: But the years went by and I needed new stories. I haven’t reprinted and I am waiting to do a new book and I haven’t done it, though I must.

So actually, if you have a story of a reversal, well please, type it out and send it in to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. because it’s time that I printed a whole fresh book of stories because they are all so wonderful!

Can you even contemplate what your life would be like without these extra children the Lord gave you?

SL: I cannot because apparently my children think they need to get married in groups because when Amy and Brad got married, they got married four months apart.

Josiah was one year when Brad got married and sixteen months when Amy got married.

My husband and I were coming home from the wedding. Josiah was still nursing. When we were coming home, I looked at him and I said, “Do you realize that if we had not had these other children we would be going home to an empty home right now?”

I can’t even comprehend that right now. I went right from having a nursing baby to having grandbabies.

Our house is always full. It’s the fun house because they’ve got aunts and uncles to come and play with. It’s just always fun at our house.

NC: Yes! You mentioned something there, the blessing of having aunts and uncles. That’s what family life is all about.

The sad part of that in these two child families is that they grow up and then they begin their families and who have they got to help and be part of their children growing up? But when there are all these younger sisters and brothers, it’s just so amazing!

I see that in our family now. The grandchildren are getting married but because they have big families there are all these younger sisters and brothers and they are the best babysitters in the whole world. They just adore their nieces and nephews. It just gives reprieve for the mothers, too, because they have all their family.

Then they do not have to pay babysitters and they’re not sure if they can trust them. No, they have family all around them. It’s just so wonderful and how God intends it to be.

But you were telling me earlier, Sherri. I was saying how I have printed all these amazing testimonies and I’ve often printed them in Above Rubies about reversals. Maybe I should say, I actually printed an article on Facebook awhile back and there were some women who wrote in and said, “Well, what is a reversal?” They actually hadn’t heard about a reversal.

So, what is a reversal? It’s when a doctor will seek to undo what was done through a vasectomy or a tubal ligation. It is such a blessing when it works. Sometimes it doesn’t, which is very sad.

But you were telling me earlier today how these days doctors are seeking to make sterilization so much more full proof that people can’t get reversals.

SL: Yes, I was reading an article on it. It’s been within the last year or so, that especially with the vasectomies, because it’s actually already hard to do tubal ligations because of the amount of the tube that they cut out.

That’s always been more difficult if a woman had a ligation to do a reversal because there’s just a certain amount of tube that the egg needs to go down for the proper amount of time before it’s ready to implant.

But with the vasectomy, it’s usually not that difficult. They are actually doing a new procedure where they are actually making a vasectomy almost impossible to be reversed. It’s just really important to know everything before you have this done.

We were amazed. After my husband had his vasectomy, he started having terrible testicular pain. When he went to the doctor, the doctor said, “Yeah, this is one of the common side effects.” He was never told that before he had the vasectomy.

Praise God after he had the reversal it went away.

But they don’t tell you your increased risk of prostate cancer with a vasectomy. They don’t tell you your increased risk of a hysterectomy with a tubal. Almost every woman I know that’s had a tubal ligation has ended up having to have a hysterectomy.

It’s just really important to do your homework because they don’t always tell you the full story of the complications.

They’re just like, “Oh this will keep you from ever having a child again” but they don’t tell you all the ramifications that come with that.

One thing I was talking with you about earlier was that so many women say, “Oh I got fixed” or “My husband got fixed.”

I really like to look at them and say, “They weren’t broken. You were working properly the way God created you. You actually got broken when you have a vasectomy or a tubal ligation.”

NC: Yes, yes, I don’t believe, dear mothers, that we can play around with the way God created our bodies without having adverse effects upon it. You can’t get away with it. We can’t get away with trying to change how God created us.

I love that Scripture that says: “All His ways are perfect.”

God’s ways are perfect. His creation is perfect. The way He created you as a woman, the way He created your husband as a man, His creation was absolutely perfect.

When we try to stop the workings of God or when we try to just change them, we’re going to have negative problems. That’s just what happens.

As you say, no one ever tells them that. In fact, you can go on to the internet and you can just look down and you’ll find all these sights that tell you that, “Oh yes, there’s no problems. You won’t have any problems at all.”

You have got to keep digging until you find out, oh wow, yes there are lots of problems.

We have met so many men just like your husband. I remember at one Above Rubies retreat there was a gentleman there. He was in absolute pain. He even got into a wheelchair after he got his vasectomy.

Colin said to him, “You can have it reversed.” He went and had a reversal, and he was just completely healed. He was t back to normal.

You know, just be careful. Now some people think, “Oh if we want to maybe have another child, we can have a reversal.” No, these days there is such antagonism against life that they are making it more and more difficult.

If we belong to God, we’re going to be open to life, aren’t’ we, because God is the Life Giver. He’s the One Who creates life. He loves life.

Satan is the life hater. He hates life and he does not have the power to give life. Oh yes, he comes against God and he tries to eliminate life because he hasn’t got that power. He can’t give life. He can only take it away and that’s what he specializes in doing.

So let’s be on the right side! Amen?

SL: Amen.

NC: So all these years you’ve enjoyed raising all these beautiful reversal children and now they’re getting married and of course, eventually, more grandchildren are going to come along.

Isn’t it just so exciting? God is so good. Do you want to say anything about the weddings?

SL: Well, they were a lot of fun. It was a whirlwind, though, because like I said there were two of them in six days.

The way that happened is our one daughter that’s twenty-two, her young man is in the military and we had to just kind of wait and see when he could get time off. They were able to get married over Labor Day weekend and our other daughter already had her wedding planned for September 11th.

It was a little crazy there, but it was wonderful. They were two beautiful weddings, two beautiful couples that love the Lord and are starting godly homes. So it was fun to see, hard to let our girls go, especially for Daddy, but it was still wonderful.

NC: It always is. There is never ever, I don’t think, a man that’s good enough for your daughter. I think that’s how every man feels.

I was talking with a couple just recently and they were telling me about a young man who was interested in one of their daughters. Yes, he had all these good points, yes, he was open to having children, yes, he even wanted to home school them.

But there were one or two other things, and he was in debt because he has college debt and so her husband wasn’t very happy about him marrying their daughter with debt.

I said to her, “Look— it’s rare that you’re going to get ten out of ten. Where can we get ten out of ten? We’re not perfect! None of us are perfect.”

Were we perfect when we got married? Help, no, but look at what God has done. I just believe we have to know and recognize when God brings a couple together.

We may not be able to tick off every thing for every ten points or a hundred points or however many you have but if the foundational things are there we need to just realize God created our young people to marry.

I do believe that we save them from so much heartache when they get married young, if God brings that one to them when they are young. It saves them from those rounds of girlfriends and boyfriends. It saves them from many heartaches, and it brings them into a beautiful safety.

They have one another and they grow together. It’s God and it’s beautiful and it’s how He designed it. I’m a great believer in it even if you don’t get ten out of ten!

It’s sad that there are also some families who, because they have been so grieved even at the dating scene in the church, which is so not right, but they’ve taken it to the other extreme that there is such perfection for the man that comes along that they have daughters in their late twenties and thirties and they’re not married!

Those precious daughters, all they’ve wanted to do, all those years, all of those beautiful, wonderful years of your twenties, your best years to embrace children, they’ve just been single.

How terrible. How boring. How unbiblical.

We’ve just got to see God more in getting married, I think, because I think marriage is so wonderful. I feel sorry for everybody who’s not married.

SL: I would have to say, too, that when I look back at David and myself when we were married, we were young. I was eighteen and he was twenty.

Basically what we had going for us, probably what my Dad liked, was that we both loved the Lord—and look where the Lord has brought us. That ultimately making sure both the young man and the young woman love the Lord with all of their hearts.

One thing I had to look at with my daughters is that I’m not going to be married to their spouses like they are. And so me trying to pick them out for them, yeah, I definitely believe parents need to have input if they’re seeing some major problems. But for the most part, if they love the Lord and they’re compatible with one another with the things that are there, they’re adults and we’ve got to let them make these decisions.

NC: Yes and this also brings me to something we thought we may talk about because you’ve always had a real concern about preparing your sons, and of course your daughters.

But your sons, even to prepare them for their wives to be good husbands, so I think we’ll chat about this today because I think that is very important.

I always believe when we are raising children, we’re not just looking after them from day to day and yes, we’re training them, no— we are ultimately training them to be a husband or a wife.

SL: Yes.

NC: Truly, when you are thinking about character training of your children, keep that in mind. You are preparing your daughters to one day be wives. You are preparing your sons to one day be husbands. This is powerful because how you prepare them can determine how their marriage will work and if they will establish a godly, loving marriage and then a godly home.

You know, it’s so determined on the way we raise them and the kind of attitudes that we raise them with because attitudes, our attitudes, affect our marriages so much.

What do you say, Sherri?

SL: Oh I couldn’t agree more. Little girls with their relationships with their daddy, young men need to be looking when they’re out in a group, they need to be looking how young women respond to their dads. They need to look at how they’re responding to their brothers because that’s ultimately probably about how they’re going to respond to their husband.

It’s the same in reverse, too.

I have more girls than boys and I’ve told my girls when we’re in a setting and you see a young man who you are kind of like, “Oh I kind of like this young man,” you start watching how he treats his mother and his sisters and how he treats the little children around him because that is going to tell just incredibly a lot how he is going to treat you.

We’ve been very blessed with our son-in-laws that they’ve respected their moms. Our one son-in-law doesn’t have any sisters and we were able to watch him in a church setting with the little girls that he would take out and swing on the swing.

It was so sweet, and he’s just been a wonderful father to the five daughters that God has blessed him with and his one son.

Those are important things to be looking at, is how they treat and respect their parents and their siblings.

NC: Of course that is another blessing when we allow the Lord to add to our family because the older children learn to be fathers and mothers through just loving on their younger siblings. It brings out that nurturing instinct in them and that fatherliness and that motherliness.

It’s just so sad to see so many young people today that have come from smaller families of one, two, or maybe three children. As they’ve grown up there are no younger siblings.

They’ve never been around younger children or little babies and they really feel clueless because they’ve never been opened up to that.

It’s not even natural. It’s not natural because that is how God intended, that they would grow up with younger siblings and babies coming along and so they are prepared for marriage.

I noticed, and I guess you noticed too (Sherri was also with us at our recent Above Rubies family camp down in Panama—with all the children and young people we had about 600 there, there were more young people I think than adults).

But wasn’t it glorious? I think my favorite part of the retreat was to look out and see young guys, you know, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen or twenty . . . often when you see young guys, and these guys are all beautiful, handsome young men, and you know, out in the world, how do you see young guys? You never see them hanging around babies. But you see these young guys holding onto little babies. Not even their own brothers and sisters, but any baby they see!

They’re taking that baby and they’re holding that baby for the mother. They love that baby. I mean, that’s God like. That is beautiful.

I tell you, I think that’s why I think Above Rubies family retreats are a great place for people to come because there you’re going to find young people with similar beliefs and understanding. A young girl can find a man who, yes, he loves babies! He’s open to children. He’s ready for family. Oh it’s so beautiful!

I just love it.

I think, too, you’re telling me about your weddings. We’ve got some weddings coming up, too. Next weekend we have one of Pearl’s sons getting married, Noble, and he’s getting married to Megan Harrison. In fact, Erin Harrison, the mother, and I were doing a talk show together. Then Erin began to foster and has adopted some very special needs children. We just got so busy we hadn’t been doing it. But this week we started again.

But any way, Erin’s daughter and Pearl’s son are going to be married. I look at them and they are a young couple. Actually they started their friendship at fifteen, but they waited until they were eighteen.

But do you know what? They are so mature! I like to call them “Ma and Pa” because they’re just so mature and beautiful in their relationship. They are just so relaxed and happy in their relationship. You just know, here’s a marriage that’s going to last forever.

Then we now have Serene’s daughter, Chalice, who suddenly, they grow up so quickly, and now she is engaged to a lovely young man, Trae Ruppel. They’re getting married the first weekend of December (now postponed because Trae’s mother is carrying a little baby in her womb that may need an operation about that time.)

I look at her young man, Trae. You were saying, “Look at a young man and see what his relationship is like with his parents.”

Well, he’s a young man who so respects his parents. He loves his mother. He loves his little siblings (because they’ve got older ones and little ones, too).

In fact, when he and Chalice started courting, this is how they courted: Trae would bring his little brother and sister over to our place and Chally would bring her little wee brother and sister. They just looked after the babies together. It was so gorgeous. They were always, and they still are, just looking after babies, their little younger siblings together.

What a beautiful way to prepare for marriage.

SL: Yes that’s beautiful.

NC: But any way, there are lots of other issues. Talk to me about one.

SL: Well I see mothers try to do everything for their children. My children have joked sometimes that they were slaves, but they weren’t.

My philosophy is: I start my children from the time they get their toys out . . . if they can get their toys out, they’re old enough to pick them up.

So we start training them to pick up their toys. And as they get a little older, they’re carrying a garbage can to dump the wastepaper basket.

My sons, I think I did this mostly because my oldest son, when he was about seven, was really talking heavily about going into the mission field.

I looked at him and said, “We don’t know if you’re going to marry or not. I hope you do, but we don’t know. God could send you out on the mission field by yourself, so you need to know some basic household things.”

I made sure he knew how to clean. I made sure he knew how to do basic cooking. I made sure he knew how to do basic mending. It has blessed his wife because there have been a few times where she’s been ill after a baby. A couple times she’s had mastitis really bad and he’s had to take care of her.

I’ve just been really adamant about that, that my boys know how to do those things. They can basically run a house. My daughter-in-law teases me that my son actually does it better than she does.

NC: You’ve trained him well, Sherri.

SL: Then my girls, kind of the same thing. My husband has taken them under his wing to make sure that they know basic things like they can check the air in their tires, they can change their oil, and they can mow the lawn. We’re just a team and we work together around household things.

My oldest daughter who’s married, she helps her husband mow the yard while he’s at work all day long. If she has time she goes out and mows the yard.

Just different things like that because it’s actually teaching them how to serve and that’s what marriage is all about. If we go into marriage going, “Ah if he does something for me, I’ll do something for him,” no— it’s what we can do for one another and just serving.

I like to teach my children to serve at home, but then of course, also serve others, and it just carries them through their life. One, it keeps you grateful and it also keeps you just serving others all the time. It’s just a really good lesson I think, especially as believers, but everybody can profit from it.

We all profit from Biblical principles whether we believe in God or not. For believers it’s how we show the love of Christ. He came to serve and so we need to be willing to serve.

NC: Amen, wow! You’ve been a great example there, Sherri.

But time is up, and I think I’m going to ask Sherri to come back next week and we’ll talk some more.

Let’s pray.

“Dear Father, We love the fact that we can come together as women and talk about the things that concern us, that are so much part of our lives. I pray for everyone listening today that You will bless them at whatever stage they are at with their little ones. Just minister to them and encourage them.

“For those who have older ones, give them great wisdom and anointing as they are finishing off their training before they leave home. Lord, these years just go so quickly. We haven’t got time to just flitter them away because it’s just one blink of our eyes and our children are leaving the home. So we pray that You would help us to put every moment into training them for You. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

 

Transcribed By Morgan Roth

 

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