LIFE TO THE FULL w/ Nancy Campbell

EPISODE 334: Should Christians Attend a Taylor Swift Concert?

Allison Hartman from Pensacola joins me today, and we talk about the thousands of people attending the Taylor Swift concerts, including loads of Christian mother and daughters. But should Christians attend or not? What do you think?

Announcer: Welcome to the podcast, Life to The Full, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.

Nancy Campbell: Hello, ladies! Here we are, and if you are listening to this podcast on the day it comes out, which is the 5^th  of November, election day, well, actually I am recording this session on Friday, but it’s coming to you on Tuesday morning. So, if you are listening now, it’s right on election day. I hope you voted! If you haven’t, can an I encourage you to do everything in your power to vote today?

And, I have no compunction in saying, “Please vote for Trump.” I say that because I am desperate for this nation, for the saving of this nation. We know that Kamela and Waltz are on a whole different wavelength. They’re taking this country down a road of extreme socialism and communism. There will be, if they get in, there will begin to be a much greater persecution of Christians in this county, which is already beginning.

I have with me today, Allison Hartman. Now Allison and Daniel are the ones who do all the Above Rubies family retreats down in Panama, Florida. Every time Allison turns up, we do a podcast together. I didn’t even know she was turning up! In fact, it’s the ladies’ retreat for Tennessee this weekend, so of course, all the Hartman ladies have come up.

Last night, it was Halloween, and we were going to go to a nearby town and sing hymns in the square in the town. But it started to pour with rain, plus suddenly, Allison and her girls turned up! That was so exciting. So, instead we had dinner together.

Now Allison is here, and we thought, “Wow! Let’s do a podcast today,” because as soon as the retreat is finished, they’ll be heading back to Florida, to make sure they can vote on Tuesday, which will be today, if you're listening as this podcast comes out. Say “Hi,” Allison!

Allison: So happy to be here! One of my favorite things to do. We get to talking, and we come up with all kinds of topics.

Nancy: Yes! Yes! As I said, ladies, if you haven’t voted, a no-vote is a vote for Kamela, and for her vice-president. They are on a whole different level. It is not a godly way at all. We know that maybe Trump is not the godliest man, but we are not voting for a pastor.

We are voting for a man who has the anointing and ability to lead this country and to lead it aways from communism, and to lead it back to our roots, and back to the Constitution. For he loves this country and loves the Constitution. He has, as he proved in the four years he was in when there were no wars, he has the power to work with international countries. He has that power.

In fact, I often think of that Scripture in Psalm 89 where God was talking about David. It says: “I have laid My hand upon a warrior.” Then it goes on to say: “This is My David, who I am raising up to be king of Israel.” When God was looking for a king for His people, and a man who would be able to fight the wars and fight the enemies all around . . . God gave him that power to fight their enemies and bring peace to Israel so when his son Solomon came in, it would be a peaceful reign where they could build the temple. David was the one who wanted to build the temple He had such a heart and passion after God. But God said, “No, David. You’ve shed too much blood. You have been in too many wars. I am going to choose your son to build the temple, and it will be in a reign of peace.” But when God was looking for that man, He didn’t choose just a man who looked so good and right. No, He chose a warrior! He needed a warrior, and we need a warrior in this hour.

Talking about persecution, even now there are people in jail, in prison right now, who have been standing up against abortion. When Biden came in, he put in this FACE Act, which stands for, in case you don’t know, it stands for “Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances.” They call it the FACE Act. They brought this in so that anyone standing up at an abortion clinic could be arrested.

I’ve already done a number of podcasts with Bethany Vaughn. You’ll know how her husband was arrested by the FBI early in the morning. Then eventually it came to his time in court. Praise the Lord, because there was so much intervention (thousands of people wrote and stood up for him), he only got house arrest which was amazing. He was looking at ten-and-a-half years in prison.

But we have others who are in prison right at this moment. About two or three weeks ago, Cal Zastrow, who was at the same time as Paul Vaughn, went to prison. He’s in prison now for six months.

But then, a couple of weeks ago, this black lady (even a black lady, they’re not even stopping at the blacks),  Beverly Williams, a beautiful black mother, was protesting in 2020. Now recently she had her court date. She is in prison for three-and-a-half years just for standing up for life.

Imagine, imagine, if we had Kamela and Tim Waltz coming in who believe, and their paradigm is that you can abort right up to the last moment. If the baby was set for abortion, well, you just leave that baby to die. How much more persecution will there be?

In fact, I’d love to read you a poem that Cal Zastrow, who is an older man. (Hold is he, Chloe? Chloe is my Above Rubies helper. It’s so wonderful to see this beautiful young girl who has such a heart for life, and who has been praying and standing up with these people being arrested. How old is he? [response in background] He’s 70. Wow! And he is there, in prison!

But before he went to prison, he wrote these words. I’d love to share them with you. Actually, Chloe brought this poem from him and gave it to me. He took it from those famous words of Hiram Mann, who wrote back in the 1800’s. He wrote:

No man survives when freedom fails,

The best of men rot in filthy jails;

And those who cry ‘Appease, Appease!’

Are hanged by men they tried to please.

Very powerful words, because there are so many who, through the fear of man, are too scared to say a word. They will just give in to what is happening. But they don’t realize that it will all come back upon them because these people who want to come into power don’t care. They’re going to make happen what they want to happen which is no longer our USA but a whole new world order. Anyway, here are these words Cal Zastrow wrote:

 

No one’s safe when Christians are lukewarm,

When we look away from the coming storm.

Instead of being courage-filled,

We won’t rescue the babies getting killed.

 

No one’s safe when Christians won’t pray,

While we play and stray, refusing to obey.

Instead of volunteering for God’s will,

Our sweat and blood we won’t risk to spill.

 

No one’s safe while Christians hide,

Not standing in the gap against evil’s tide.

Short-sighted, we’re at ease in Zion,

Compromise has left America dying.

 

No one’s safe when Christians are slow starters,

Not prepared for persecution, forgetting faithful martyrs.

But suffering and sacrifice are part of the way

To be prepared for Judgement Day.

 

No one’s safe when Christians shun the cross,

Committed to things, afraid for their loss.

While we love our face, and our place,

We’ve been living under false grace.

 

No one’s safe when Christians hide His Light,

While we refuse to care, ignoring the spiritual flight.

Our own comfort is our goal.

Seeking pleasure, not a pure soul.

 

No one’s safe when Christians won’t be His salt,

For we pretend that we’re not at fault.

Accepting, instead of crucifying sin,

We’re kind of conflicted, so we won’t win.

 

No one’s safe when Christians live in fear,

Making safety an idol, our lives too dear.

Stop listening to the world a-callin’,

Jesus is Lord, Babylon is fallen!

 

No one’s safe while Christians live for survival.

Come on, get up! Let’s trust God for revival!

Repent! Throw off this lethargic spell!

Let’s go storm the gates of hell!

 

We’ll all be blessed when Christians arise,

Living by faith and not by lies.

Our salvation is not from Uncle Sam.

Join me now in shouting, “Worthy is the Lamb!”

 

The solution to our problems now?

Eyes on Jesus, hands on the plow.

No compromises, just press the attack.

Eyes on Jesus, no looking back!

That’s what Cal Zastrow wrote as he was on the eve of going to prison where he is now, a 70-year-old man. But he went there saying, “Well, this is where God has me now. This is His mission for me now.” Those are the same words as this woman, this black woman named Beverly Williams. Let’s pray for her. She had to leave her little toddler at home. Her husband is a single father while she is in prison. But she’s now looking at it as a mission.

But these are just, oh, just the surface of how they are trying to eradicate those who are standing for truth. So, folks, please vote! If you haven’t, you’ve just got to! What do you say, Allison?

Allison: Oh, absolutely! It’s the talk of our family, the talk of our home right now. It’s all we talk about. We stayed up and watched Trump’s rally at MSU the other night for six hours. From our four-year-old all the way up, we’ve got to have them, this has to be such a topic of the family. This can’t be just you and your husband talking about this.

All of your children need to be excited about the day they get to vote. It’s such a privilege. It’s such a responsibility. It amazes me to see the number of believers who are in the no-voting department. “We’re just not going to vote. It’s too bad. There’s nothing that’s going to be solved. We’ve just got to pray!” Absolutely we have to pray! But pray while you're voting.

Nancy: Yes, we have to pray and vote. The statistics are, they said, 40 million Christians are non-voting. Some say 33 million. Well, either statistic is bad enough, because those Christians could save the nation!

Allison: Absolutely!

Nancy: Oh yes! I don’t know what will happen, ladies. I know many of you are living in other countries. I know many in other countries are crying out to God like we are here, because what happens here will affect the whole world. We’ve all got to be praying. Pray today, and vote today. But yes, I’m a great believer in prayer. We have two prayer meetings a week for the nation, plus we’re praying morning and evening at our family devotions.

But I wonder, my greatest longing and prayer is that God will have mercy upon us, and that Trump will be voted in. I believe if there’s no cheating he will be. But I know that they’re trying to cheat again. They have many plans up their sleeve, trying to get this election, even if it’s fraudulent. That’s why we keep praying. Many people are saying, “Just make it TOO BIG TO RIG!” If enough people vote, their cheating won’t work.

But then, on the other hand, I look at what is happening in this country. The evil, the abortions, the millions of murders, because every abortion is a murder. This transgenderism, absolutely mocking God in His face at the way He created us, the worldliness of even the so-called Christians. You were telling me last night about what happened down there where you live. Tell us about it.

THE TAYLOR SWIFT CONCERT!

Allison: Yeah, it was hard not to see the irony of the fact that, in our family right now, that’s all we’re talking about and all we’re praying about is the election. But yet, when I look on my Facebook feed (and just to give some background), I would say most of my Facebook friends, if you will, are fellow believers, professing Christian families, some homeschooling, some not.

But in my world of circle of friends, it’s mainly Christians. I tend to shy away from those who are obviously against what I believe. And yet, my feed, my Facebook feed, was completely full of posts about this Taylor Swift concert they were all going to. I couldn’t believe it!

Almost every other post was of fellow Christian mothers going to New Orleans, because we live in Pensacola, so that was three hours, spending between $400-$600 all the way up to a couple of thousand dollars for tickets, spending probably hundreds of dollars on their outfits, booking hotel rooms. I read today that some people were spending up to the $10,000 range on this weekend with their girls at a Taylor Swift concert.

Not only is their attention diverted from what’s really going on in our country, for which we should be on our faces constantly in prayer, but not only is their attention diverted, but their money is being spent. You can say what you want about, “Well, I’m just going for the beat.” Or, “I’m just going for the experience.” But if you're putting money into this concert, then you're invested. You’ve got a dog in the fight. You’re involved. You’re not just watching it from the sidelines.

Nancy: Wow! That makes me think! Help! I could be putting out Above Rubies so much more if these same Christians really wanted to bless the families of this nation instead of wasting their money on a very worldly concert.

By the way, ladies, the new issue is out. Praise the Lord! Last Tuesday we sent out all the singles across America. Now the company is packaging for the people who get two, or three, or five, or eight, or sixteen. Then, when they have finished, they all come to our place where we send out all the big orders, from 20 upwards. Many, many people get 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 and more magazines because they have a vision to share the message, and get out this magazine that will bring truth and encouragement and inspiration to families, to marriages, to mothers, which really is the foundation of the nation!

And here I’ve been languishing, and praying, and waiting to get out a magazine. It is a whole year since I got out a magazine, waiting for the finances to come in. Now I have paid for the initial ones to go out, but I’ve still got to believe God for all these bulk ones to send out, and then to pay for the printing, because I have the money for the printing, but then I’ve spent it all on the postage! Now I’ve got to believe God for that and get it somehow to pay the printers. When I hear from you that a mother and a daughter will spend up to that much, wow, the money is there!

Allison: Sure.

Nancy: I’m thinking, oh, is everybody out of money? Help! Oh, Lord God! Let’s get our priorities straight!

Allison: Until I started digging in, because I really am not aware, I’m not familiar with Taylor Swift, but I’m thinking that if someone, if a young singer has 80 million followers, 80 million followers on Facebook, she’s probably a big deal. That’s a big deal.

Nancy: How many followers does Trump have?

Allison: Trump has 10 million.

Nancy: How many does Kamela have?

Allison: Five million.

Nancy: Wow! So, she’s more popular than they are, and they’re going to be leading the nation.

Allison: The weekend of the Trump rally at MSU, which was a substantial showing, I think they had 25,000 present for the Trump rally, and about 75,000 just outside. But the same weekend, Taylor Swift brought in 65,000 to her concert. One article I read said she brought in $200 million to New Orleans in a three-day period of time. Another article said $500 million. So, between $200 and $500 million brought into a city for moms and daughters to come and have an experience.

Here’s the thing. None of her music is of Christ! None! You’re either for Him, or you're against Him. There is no in-between. You can’t serve two masters. We know that. It’s what Scripture teaches. You cannot serve two masters. If you're a fellow Christian mother and you're arguing in your head right now, or out loud, saying, “I can go to a Taylor Swift concert and I can praise Jesus on Sunday,” you can’t. It’s impossible. YOU CANNOT SERVE MASTERS!

So, you're going to this Taylor Swift concert, having this great, wonderful girl-time with your daughter. You are not serving Christ in that concert, because Taylor Swift doesn’t stand for Christ. None of her lyrics stand for Christ. I won’t even go far as to say what people are saying about her being a part of the occult or her music being completely devil-worship. It probably is. I don’t know enough about it to say that, but if you just want to base your opinion on what she wears during her concert, let’s start there.

Nancy: Yes, after you talked about her (I’d never bothered to look her up in my life) but  I thought, “Help! I’d better look at this.” So, last night I checked her out on Instagram and every outfit she wore, they’re actually sort of a two-piece. There’s the pants and a bra. And the pants come just barely . . .  in fact you can see her bottom in most of the photos.

Are so-called Christian mothers taking their daughters to this? I was talking to someone, and they said, “Well, she’s not dressed as badly as many female entertainers.” That would be true, because some are showing just about everything. You think of Madonna. But it’s still not godly! It’s nothing to do with godliness! It’s the opposite. It is the world.

Why are Christian mothers taking their daughters to be influenced by the world? I was reading, let’s see, where did I read this little quote? It talks about her latest album. It says, “Eleven of the 31 songs contain an “E” under the album’s description which stands for ‘Explicit.’” Several songs have the . . . I don’t even like saying it. I don’t even like saying the letter! That word . . . included within the lyrics.

Another statement says that “The album is full of minor quips that elevate Swift above God, while also featuring two songs devoted to tearing down the Christian sexual ethic.” So, where are we? I think, “Oh God, we’re crying out to have mercy upon our nation,” but it’s different if the ungodly and the secular are living like this, and this is what they want.

But what of the godly? Where are we? It says Jesus is coming for a bride that is without any spot or blemish or any such thing. We are not there if these are so-called Christian mothers. What does it say? 1 Timothy 2:19: “Nevertheless, the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal.” The seal, the seal is our proof of our citizenship in heaven. We have a seal. The Word of God gives many Scriptures about the seal. When we have the seal, we know that we have eternal life.

But what is this seal? It says: “The Lord knoweth them that are His. Let everyone that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.” If we name the name of Christ, we will depart from iniquity. So how is it that people who do, they say . . . help, I don’t know how they say it . . .  they say they name the name of Christ and yet they go to, and even take their daughters too.

What is in their critique? It’s not holiness. It doesn’t line up with the Bible. It is all the flesh. It is all the spirit of the world. Oh, since you said this, I haven’t stopped being so grieved. I wouldn’t be grieved if it was all against the world. But those 80 million followers are not all the world. Half of them are Christians!

Allison: I think the dangerous part of this Swiftie generation . . .  this is what she’s called. They’re called “Swifties.” I think the dangerous part is that it’s such a slippery slope. It’s such a situation of boiling the frog. You don’t see it because she covers it with a message of love.

Even her symbol, you put your fingers together and make the sign of a heart. She’s delivering a message of love which is what this generation wants. Everybody’s looking for love! Which is so ironic because that is Jesus’s message. But it’s hard to put your finger on if you're a mother, and you're just not sure you understand why this is so bad.

I read this Scripture today when I was thinking about why this is so bad. It’s in Luke 17. It’s when Jesus says to His disciples: “Temptations are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come.” I read that, and I thought, “That’s talking about Taylor Swift, but it’s not, necessarily.

I want to say this. “It’s better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he was cast into the sea, than cause one of these to stumble” (Luke 17:2). I found you mothers, that’s you, if you're taking your daughter to these concerts, you're also causing these little ones to stumble, because when these young girls, I don’t care who you are, but if you're looking at this amazing 80-million-followers, gorgeous woman up there in these outfits, you're going to want to dress like that. If you're the mother taking them, you're causing your little ones to stumble because they’re going to want to dress like her. They’re going to want to follow her.

I challenge you to rethink your thinking. This is a slippery slope to destruction. We have to have a clear line in the sand, a clear line in the sand where we’re not having one foot in the world and one foot in the church. There are no feet that need to be at a Taylor Swift concert because there is nothing of God at that concert. Therefore, we don’t need to be there at all. You can’t justify it by saying she has a great beat and she dances well. She probably does, but it’s not for Christ.

Nancy: That’s so true. I was just reading this morning in Leviticus, and this was when they were going into the promised land. God said to His people in Leviticus 20:24: “But I have said unto you, you shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it. A land that floweth with milk and honey. I am the Lord Your God, which have separated you from other people.”

The people of Israel were a type of who we are today, His people. He set them apart from every other nation. He separated them. We go to verse 26: “And ye shall be holy unto Me, for I, the Lord, am holy and have severed you.”

The King James uses the word “severed” this time. I think it’s a more powerful word than “separated.” But actually, in the Hebrew, it is the same word both times. But whether you say “separated,” or “severed,” it does mean “severed from the spirit of this world.” “For I have severed you from other people that ye should be Mine.” God is a jealous God. We either belong to Him or we belong to the devil.

Allison: That’s right!

Nancy: OK, we can say we name the name of Christ but going along with that is that we “depart from iniquity.” What does Jesus say in the Sermon on the Mount? “There will be many who come to Him saying, ‘Lord, Lord, I’ve done many wonderful things in Your Name!’ He says, ‘But I never knew you. Depart from Me.’” Oh my.

What does it say over in 1 John 2:15-17: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world, for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life are not of the world.” I’ve just got to go there and I must finish it. “And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof. But he that doeth the will of God, abideth forever.”

If we are truly following Jesus, following His way, we will not love the world. We will hate the things of this world. What else does it say in Hebrews 12:14? “Follow peace with all men, for without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.” I think we just can’t go on with this kind of so-called Christian life. We can’t go to every worldly concert and go to all these worldly movies and say that we belong to Christ. It doesn’t add up!

Allison: I was just thinking, when I was growing up, like a lot of young girls, we desired love above everything. All I wanted was the love of my father. I got into a trap where I was so attracted to any influence that would make me feel a part of them, loved, or whatever.

In my day, in my era, it was Madonna. Madonna was so the thing. But yet, Madonna made the mistake of being so disgusting and raunchy that even the Christian moms were like, “Stay away from her!” But I remember wanting to be like her, in a weird way, even though I was raised in a Christian home.

But anyway, what I was thinking with this whole thing, if you're a mom sitting here listening, going, “How do I shift my daughter’s desire for that?” You and I were talking downstairs. Where do we go from this? What’s the positive side of this?

I think the positive is, we’re living in a majorly social-media-influencing world. Our children are . . . We all can agree that at a certain age, our children’s peers are even more powerful than us as parents. But social media influencers, oh! I don’t even know what their influencers are. I’m not going to pretend to know.

But I do know that if you're a parent of a child, and you've allowed them to have a smart phone, then you're allowing them all the influences in the world. We have to ask ourselves, “What influences to we want our children to be influenced by?”

If you're not asking that question, you're foolish, because they’re going to choose influences, and they’re not going to be good. These influencers are way smarter than your children. They know exactly what to say. I was thinking, our family, we’re very tight on tablets and phones.

Nancy: Your 18-year-old son doesn’t own a smart phone!

Allison: Right. We have flip phones for the 18-year-old and the 16-year-old, but even we made the mistake of getting an Amazon Kindle so that we could do homeschool. Sadly, our boys were prey to YouTube, by just watching a few YouTube videos.

They were completely obsessed with fishing. They were watching fishing videos and within a few videos, it went from fishing to pornography. Why? It’s because YouTube, the influence of YouTube is so smart. It’s so destructive and it wants my children’s hearts. It knew exactly how old they were, what they were into. It led them down that path of destruction.

Nancy: They didn’t get into it, did they?

Allison: Well, no! Because we’re so aware of what’s going on. We snatched it as quickly as we could. But I’m telling you, what do parents do who aren’t paying attention to their children, who are sitting in their bedrooms at night on their phones for hours? I can assure you that your children are looking at pornography.

I can assure you that they’re being influenced by the influencers. We have got to recognize it, but then we have to essentially choose our children’s peers and their influences. You might say, “Well, that sounds awfully controlling.” Absolutely! I am all about intentionally choosing my children’s influences.

Nancy: Exactly.

Allison: And I’m not apologetic about it. You have to be! You’ve got to fight for your children’s hearts.

Nancy: Amen! What does Proverbs 13:20 say? I raised my children on this Scripture. “He that walks with wise men will be wise. But a companion of fools will be destroyed.” Of course, social media is going to take them down a foolish path. As you have said, Allison, we’ve got to watch their peers, who our children are with. And, of course, harking back to this concert, if you're taking them to that, you're just saying, “Oh, my lovely, beautiful daughters, this is the way I want you to live! I want you to be in the world, to dress like that!” What are we even thinking?

Allison: Go to the homeschool prom, because that sounds really good and sweet and fun, and you're going to make memories if you go to homeschool prom! But then you look around, and every girl there is exposing all their parts and causing boys to lust after them. You fathers, you mothers who are buying these dresses, shame on you! You’re literally causing boys to lust after your daughter!

Nancy: Now, of course, Allison is speaking from experience.

Allison: Absolutely!

Nancy: They are perhaps the main photographers back in Pensacola where they live. They do all the worldly stuff. And you do the homeschooling stuff. What I can’t believe is you tell me you go to these homeschooling proms, and you can’t believe that the dresses are the same as the public school!

Allison: There’s no difference.

Nancy: Showing all their cleavage and everything! I beg your pardon! How can a godly mother let her daughter out of the house looking like that? It’s unbelievable. And then you show me, oh no! It was Michelle, showing me some pictures of a homeschooling celebration, and she knew all these people.

I can’t believe this! You know what? They were all looking just about (not quite as bad) as Taylor Swift. They all had these . . . These were supposed to be their beautiful, what do you call it? The celebration, whatever it is (graduation drwess). I would have thought they’d want to come in beautiful, long flowing gowns.

Allison: No, no.

Nancy: No, they wore little tight, tight dresses that just barely covered their bottoms! But you know what? They all looked so ugly. They looked so ugly, but they were exposing themselves.

I can’t believe it! Where is the standard in our homeschooling and in the church today? But you know what? We’re going well over time, aren’t we? We’ve kind of got stirred up! [laughter] We can’t even believe what’s happening in the so-called Christian church! Oh, goodness me! Woo!

Allison: Yes. If you're thinking you’re your daughter’s friend by allowing them to wear what’s popular, you're not befriending them, because no friend would do that. No friend would allow them to wear something that is going to cause someone else to lust after them.

I know it sounds so, especially people who don’t know me. “Oh, you probably let your daughters go around wearing blankets!” No! My girls dress so cute and modest and trendy! We love dressing cool. But you don’t have to expose your daughter’s body.

Nancy: No! Absolutely not! That spoils the whole dress. Oh, wow! But you know, it’s not even beautiful! Anyway, dear precious ladies, we’ve just been pouring forth our passion here against the spirit of the world! But let’s leave you on a positive note.

Oh, may we all just choose holiness. Go after holiness, “after which no man will see the Lord.” Let’s raise our children, our sons and daughters, to be holy sons and daughters. Do you know, it’s not a, what would be the word? A boring thing to be holy. No, holiness is beautiful.

BEAUTY AND HOLINESS ARE TWINS

In fact, the Word of God says: “Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” Beauty and holiness are twins. Holiness is beautiful. God loves beauty! So, we are not in any way saying, “Oh, we have to become these drab, boring people.” No! But we have to be holy people, and raise holy sons and daughters, and establish holy homes in this world. Amen? Let’s pray.

“Oh, dear Father, You tell us in Your Word to love righteousness and hate evil. Lord, actually it says, ‘Abhor evil.’ That word means ‘to shudder at it.’ Lord, we pray that You’ll save us from getting used to evil, getting used to even looking at women dressing with cleavage’, and all their short dresses that show off the flesh.

“Lord God, it’s not holy. Maybe trendy, but it’s not holy. Help us not to get used to what is the spirit and fashion of the world, but, oh God, to seek after holiness, to raise our children in holiness.

“Oh Father, we cry out, Lord. We cry out for this nation, for the people of God in this nation. We know there are so many godly people, but there are so many Christians who are on the fence. They name the name of Christ, but are living ungodly lives, fleshly lives.

“Lord God, You said in Your Word that the seal is, ‘He that names the Name of Christ will depart from iniquity.’ Oh Father, we pray that You will come by the power of Your Spirit, and, Lord God, that You will, oh Father, bring a great repentance to the church in this hour. We pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.”

Allison: Amen.

Blessings from Nancy Campbell

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www.aboverubies.org

Transcribed by Darlene Norris

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“LIFE TO THE FULL w/ Nancy Campbell, Above Rubies”

DON’T KEEP THE BLESSINGS TO YOURSELF.

 

LIFE TO THE FULL w/ Nancy Campbell

EPISODE 333: Help! I’m Terrified of Needles and Childbirth! Part 3

The final episode of the birthing of Genevieve’s 11 children. Hear how God showed her how to birth her 12lbs. 6 oz. baby, who came forth with his little hand up by his face. Hear how she learned to overcome fear which continually tried to succumb her.

Hear how she learned to PRACTICALLY EXPERIENCE the Scripture that “Perfect love casts out fear.” She faced her greatest fear in her last birth, and yet ended in victory. You will be strengthened and encouraged as you hear her amazing story.

Announcer: Welcome to the podcast, Life to The Full, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.

Nancy Campbell: Hello, ladies. Here we are again today, again with Genevieve, because we haven’t finished her story yet. She’s just about to tell you how she got victory in the last birth that we were talking about. She’s also going to share the rest of her births with us today. I don’t even know yet what’s going to happen until Genevieve shares with us! OK, over to you, Genevieve!

Genevieve: Well, thank you again for having me, Nancy. Just to recap, when I was a child, I was frightened of childbirth. I used to say, “I’m not going to have any children if I get married! I’ll just adopt them all.”

Nancy: And you had this fear of needles!

Genevieve: Yes, I did. The whole works! The Lord just worked in me. I was a Christian, and as I grew and matured, I really began to think that, no if God is a good God and His creation is good, then His plans are good. And so this plan also for childbirth and womanhood is also a good plan. I had some ups and downs at first, just getting onboard with His plan, and how it was all supposed to go and all supposed to run. But the Lord kept leading me back to peace and freedom from fear.

I’ve had 11 pregnancies. With my first, I had a post-partum hemorrhage and nearly died, and with my fifth, another very big post-partum hemorrhage and I nearly died. With my sixth, I also had a post-partum hemorrhage, but it was managed beautifully and was not so dangerous.

But the trauma from the fifth really created a new fear in me as I would get closer and closer and closer to my delivery date that I was really struggling to overcome. I would go into my room, and I would meditate on Scripture and be at peace. Then I’d stand up, and the fear would just wash back over me again.

So, this next part of my story, this is my seventh pregnancy. It’s here that, just through a very simple biblical concept, the Lord finally helped me to gain complete victory over the fear. I’m really excited to share this part of the story with you.

Twenty months later, after I’d had Sophie, I’m now in labor with Adele. Distressing to me was that this fear that I’d experienced, the heavy weight that I’d experienced during Sophie’s pregnancy came back again. Again, I’d meditate on Scripture. I’d gird myself with truth. I’d guard against the lies of the devil, and I’d remind myself of the promises of God. Peace would come and the fear would disappear, but as soon as I’d stand up, the fear would just come right back down and wash over me.

I want to say that doing all those things is still a good strategy. God’s Word is powerful, like a two-edged sword that never returns to Him void. This is something I do to deal with fear most of the time during my life.

But for some reason, for whatever reason, the Lord wanted me to keep digging deeper for a solution to the fear in this instance. Even though I wasn’t able, through that, at that point, to gain lasting freedom from the fear, something needed to be done. Something was done. The Lord was so gracious. I bought a little booklet called Fear by Lou Priolo. I’d never heard of Lou Priolo, but he’s a biblical counselor.

Nancy: How do you spell the last name?

Genevieve: His first name is L-O-U, Lou, and his last name, Priolo, is P-R-I-O-L-O. He’s a biblical counselor, a Nouthetic counselor. He’s written so many wonderful books on people-pleasing, on manipulation, on discontentment, selfishness, and laziness, and all sorts of wonderful things. I love everything I’ve read by him. I’ve absolutely loved it because it’s so practical! He just gets right into the Scripture and pulls out these gems for you.

But in this book on fear, the verse he focused on was: “Perfect love casts out fear.” This is that simple, biblical concept. In his little book, which is probably about 50 pages long, he talked about how he had a fear of the dentist. When he had to go to the dentist, he would break out in a cold sweat. He was so terrified of going to the dentist.

There was this one time where he couldn’t avoid it. He had to go. He thought, “How am I going to deal with this fear?” And he thought, “‘Perfect love casts out fear.’ OK, I’m going to show love.” And he began to think in his mind, “OK, when I get there and I meet with the dentist, and there’s his assistant, and the dental hygienist, OK, how can I show love to these people? Smiling, maybe opening my mouth as wide as it can go.” Whatever the things he thought of.

He found that as he was thinking loving thoughts, the fear just disappeared. I thought, “Oh, yes! I have got to do this too! I’ve got to implement this strategy.” So, I did. As the time for delivering Adele drew nearer and nearer and the fear was descending, I began to think about how specifically to show love to the children and how to show love to Pete.

Pete’s mum was always our support person. She has been our support person at all the births. She’s been there at all of the births, so how to show love to her? I began planning and strategizing how to show love to the doctors and the midwives at the hospital. I tell you what, when love was switched on, fear was just switched off and it stayed off! I was now free! You know, the strategy worked when it came to needles?

Nancy: Whoa!

Genevieve: If I ever had to have my blood drawn, or an IV put in, I would just think about how to show love to that person. The fear would switch off and I wouldn’t be afraid anymore. It worked with regard to the delivery.

So, I went to the hospital in labor with Adele, free of fear. When I got to the hospital, my labor stopped. The anesthetist really struggled to put in the two IV lines that I needed. She couldn’t get them into my hands, so I actually ended up with two IV lines in my elbows. I don’t know if you've ever had IV lines in your elbows, but now I had to hold my arms straight. I couldn’t bend my arms because of the IV lines.

Nancy: How do you hold on to anything?

Genevieve:[laughter] This was really going to hamper my labor and delivery, because I can’t bend my arms. I could have felt really sorry for myself at that point, but I had this new strategy, and I was determined to implement it. I was determined to focus on the staff, to remember that my history (by this stage, I’d had three significant hemorrhages. Out of the six births, four times I’ve hemorrhaged, half the time I’ve ended up in the operating room).

Just to remember that my history can be really intimidating, and to think and plan about how I could make this delivery as pleasant an experience for the doctors and nurses as I could. That was just a great thing. As I thought about that, my labor picked up again. I kept active on a gym ball and made regular trips to the restroom.

Six hours after I arrived at the hospital, my water broke. Same situation as with Sophie. They asked me to hop up on the bed so I could be examined, and she just shot right out! She was 10 lbs. 7 oz., so she was basically the same size as Sophie. I’m just laying there flat on my back, and she just comes right out, born within minutes. Well, the placenta came out quickly and I did not bleed.

Nancy: Praise the Lord!

Genevieve: Yes, I’ve got seven children, eight years and under and this time I can go home and just rest. And then jump right back into the saddle and not have this huge rest time that you need after a hemorrhage. After a couple of weeks rest, I could jump right back into the saddle and be Mom again. It was wonderful.

Nancy: What a wonderful birth!

Genevieve: So, this concept that perfect love casts out fear, I walked that verse then through all the rest of my labors and deliveries. It did the trick. That debilitating fear never came back again.

Nancy: Praise the Lord! That is a wonderful, wonderful . . . What would you call it? Thing for victory! Principle for victory!

Genevieve: Isn’t God a God of victory? I love that. It took persevering. It took being determined to keep trusting Him. He brought that about, and I just love it. My next four labors and deliveries, if you want a theme for the next four, it would be tests to that victory over rebellion and fear, because the next four were not perfect. They had their own challenges, but the Lord was faithful.

Nancy: How wonderful! That is so great.

Genevieve: Fifteen months after I had Adele, I’m now in labor with Katrina. It was very strange. My contractions were completely painless. After hours and hours and hours, being in the hospital, the doctor realized that Katrina was transverse. You can’t give birth to a transverse baby.

Earlier that morning, I’d been lying in bed and my water had broken. This is a little side note. It was the 11^th of September 9-11. As my water is breaking and I had suspected that Katrina was not engaged, I’m thinking, “Oh, dear.” I’m worried, concerned about the umbilical cord coming out with the water. That’s a disaster if that happens. I’m thinking about how it’s 9-11, and an emergency. And I’m thinking, “No! I’m not going to think those thoughts. I’m going to take captive every thought here. This is not going to be an emergency.”

So, I wasn’t in labor, but we decided I needed to be at the hospital anyway, because of the concern of the umbilical cord coming through and my previous history. We got there and they put me on a continual monitoring device. That showed that I was having contractions, but they were completely painless. I didn’t feel any pain with them.

After hours and hours, the doctor came in and realized Katrina was transverse. She immediately went out and organized a team for an emergency C-section. Before she went, I asked her permission to hop up, go to the bathroom, and try different maneuvers to see if we could encourage Katrina into a head-down position. Because my water had broken, they couldn’t do anything manually on my tummy to move her around.

My sister, through the prayer team, texted and said, “Try ‘spinning babies’! Here’s the link!” So, while we’re waiting for the doctor to come back, I’m on the bed, throwing one leg over the other, trying the “spinning babies” techniques. When the doctor came back, she felt for Katrina again, and said, “Hey, this baby’s moved! It’s in an oblique position!” That’s halfway between transverse and head-down.

The doctor began to get really excited. What I heard later, which I didn’t know at this point, was that when she was out in the hallway, she was talking to her back-up doctor and saying, “This lady’s had seven babies naturally. I can’t imagine doing a C-section on this lady!” The other doctor was like, “Yeah, her body knows how to do this! Like they can’t do a C-section on this lady.” I just love that story, because that’s not how you typically think of medical staff.

Nancy: I know! That’s wonderful!

Genevieve: The outcome we got here is one that the midwife later told me, that I wouldn’t have gotten this outcome with any other doctor. But that was so encouraging afterwards, to hear that, that they were gunning for me.

So, she felt Katrina and realized, “Oh, she’s in an oblique position!” She said to me, “You know what I’ll do. I’ll do an internal, and if I can feel her head, then I’ll put you on syntocin, which I think is called pitocin here, and hopefully that would firm up your tummy enough, because after eight babies, everything’s a little floppy.”

Like I’m not really keeping them in a firm head-down position anymore with my tummy. She said, “We’ll see if that works. We’ll see if that can happen.” She did the internal, and felt the baby’s head, put me on the pitocin, and it worked. Katrina swung the rest of the way down into a head-down position.

Nancy: How amazing! Whoo!

Genevieve: What a miracle! The only thing was, Katrina stayed high. We had another situation like we did with Joshua. She would come down, pop back up, come down, pop back up. This was taking a long time. It was a long period of contractions and then pushing. The doctor actually left for a second time to organize the operating room, this time for an instrumental delivery. Her comment when she left was that this was still probably going to end in a C-section.

I negotiated with her for another 35 minutes. I thought in my mind, “How long did this take with Joshua?” I asked her, “Can I have another 35 minutes?” She said, “Yes, as it’s going to take me 15 minutes to organize the operating room so go right ahead.” But I didn’t need the 35 minutes. Katrina was born eight minutes later. It was just such a miracle. From a transverse lie to a natural delivery.

With Katrina’s birth, I had a lot of firsts. I had continuous monitoring, which I’d never had before. I’d always asked for that intermittent monitoring. Katrina ended up with a scalp probe on her head while she was still inside me. They attached a little scalp probe so they could monitor her vitals. I ended up with the induction drug which I’d never been induced before. I’d never had any pain-relieving drugs or induction drugs before.

But it all went well. Technically, I did have a post-partum hemorrhage. I bled about 580 mils, but again it just seemed like absolutely nothing in light of what had happened. We were just over the moon.

Nancy: Another miracle, really. When you think of all the things, you're safe, and all the miracles you had! God was there, doing miracles!

Genevieve: Yes. So, you remember her birthday was 9-11? It was an emergency, but you know, God is bigger than emergencies. It’s so wonderful. Just as a side note, Katrina’s first word was “Oh-oh!” [laughter] We thought it was so funny! “Oh-oh!”

Rather than being resentful for how childbirth had to be this way, after Katrina’s birth, I really found myself very grateful to the Lord for this experience. It was really hard work. It was a lot of hard work. But the doctor coached me through it. She got more energy out of me, more effort than I had ever thought that I’d have to give. I’m just really grateful for those experiences; how they open your eyes, how you gain new understanding about the world, and how things operate. It's really great.

So, sixteen months after Katrina was born, I was in labor with Nadine. Hers was a pretty straightforward birth. She was 11 lbs. She was number nine. At this point, she is my second biggest. She was born, the whole of her, in just one push! The whole thing. It’s pretty amazing.

But after she was born, I began bleeding and bleeding. The doctor was a very young woman, but she stayed calm. She was terrific. She followed the plan that had been drawn up. We’d made a plan for if I ever hemorrhaged again, this is how it’s all going to go. She began following the plan.

I think most women when they are in labour, for the third stage, they get syntocin, which is like pitocin. Well, she skipped that. She went straight to the syntometrine, which is like the next step up. She also gave me ergometrine, which I think here is called methergine. She gave me tranexamic acid, and misoprostal, which I think they call here cytotec. Then she gave me carboprost, which here is called hemabate.

When she went to give me the carboprost, she actually stopped and came and asked my permission. She almost seemed to be very apologetic about even suggesting giving me the carboprost. It was described to me as “the big guns” and having some unpleasant side effects. The side effects were described as diarrhea, but they would give me something to deal with the diarrhea. So I never had diarrhea because of the two drugs meeting in the middle. We gave her permission to give me the carboprost.

After she gave it to me, I experienced what I understand to be a rare reaction. I began burning up. If you felt my skin on the outside, I was cold to the touch. But on the inside, I felt hot. The thermal effect was just hellish. I felt like I was overheating. I couldn’t have any blankets on me. I couldn’t have any sheets on me.

Nancy: That was the effect of this drug?

Genevieve: Yes. I couldn’t have Nadine anywhere near me. The heat from her skin was too overwhelming. I couldn’t have anybody touching me. All of this just exacerbated the distress of the overheating. I couldn’t move. I became desperate to know how long this was going to be in my system.

The only relief I got was being stroked by a wet cloth. Pete and his mom would wet cloths. If they put them on me, I’d begin saying, “Get it off! Get it off!” Like I just couldn’t handle it. They had to actually stroke me, because that would create a cool breeze across my skin. It was the only thing that provided any relief.

This reaction subsided after three hours. Three hours, but my bleeding stopped. It stopped just below 900 mils. I never had to go to the operating room. I didn’t have to have a D&C. It was hellish, but it was worth it, to be healthy, to be strong, to have the bleeding stop before you get so weak.

I actually learned later that carboprost is given to women to induce second-trimester abortions. Every now and then I think about women in that situation. I think about, imagine going in to have your own baby killed, and you end up with a reaction like that where you feel almost like you're in hell. Imagine.

That causes me, every time I think about it, to just pray for women. I just say, “Lord, if there’s anyone going through that right now, turn them to You. Use that experience to pull them to You.” That also makes me glad that I’ve had that experience, because through all these experiences, God has grown me. He’s opening my eyes to things. He’s giving me understanding. He’s increasing my understanding. He is good. All His ways are good.

So, after Nadine’s birth, I was a little bit discouraged and down. I was still in the hospital. That’s three days of being in the hospital. It was all still too new and raw to be feeling like, what if I have to go through that again? Who should walk in, who should walk in, but Annie Barnes? Annie Barnes was assigned to be my midwife. She ran Above Rubies in Australia for a few years. I didn’t know that.

Nancy: Yes!

Genevieve: I didn’t know that. I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t know who she was when she walked in.

Nancy: She was up in Queensland when I knew her. Now she’s down in Victoria with you.

Genevieve: Yes! Yes! So, there I am, and she walks in. She didn’t know who I was at this stage, but she had read my file, saw that this was my ninth child, saw that we had declined vaccines.

Nancy: That’s right! I remember when they left Queensland and went down to Victoria. Actually, they were trying to get out of Australia too. Anyway, carry on!

Genevieve: Yes! So, she starts a conversation with me. I think one of the questions she asked was, “Did we homeschool?” And, of course, we did homeschool. For some reason, I don’t know why I did this, but I mentioned my parents, Craig and Barbara Smith, who ran the Home Education Foundation in New Zealand.

She just starts laughing! She says, “I visited them! I’ve visited them in their home in New Zealand!” I’m thinking, “My home? My childhood home? This stranger to me has been in my home, like she knows me then?” It was so wild. I don’t usually consider hospitals to be places to meet like-minded people.

But Annie’s conversations over the next two days, as she was caring for me, and caring for Nadine, were just like a hug from the Lord. They pulled me up from being discouraged and feeling down. Only God could have organized that. Praise God again for how He does things. He’s always so interesting in how He does things.

Nineteen months later, I was in labor with Laney. She’s number ten. This is July 2021. The covid vaccine and all that had started in March 2021 in Australia. We began thinking, “Oh boy!” With my hemorrhage history, if I had another post-partum hemorrhage and had to have a transfusion, any blood I got would very likely be from a covid-vaxed donor.

We began thinking about this. We did a lot of research. We did a LOT of research, and we found that Pfizer had done this study in which they found that in the covid vaccine, at least the Pfizer and the Moderna ones, you've got the RNA. It’s encapsulated with the fat (lipids). That’s in the vaccine, and when that goes in, the Pfizer study showed that that goes into all different organs in your body, especially in a short period after you've been vaccinated. And it’s found in your blood in quite high quantities.

We thought, “Hm, if it’s like that, and somebody who’s just had a vaccine donates blood, then if I was given that blood, then that RNA in me could teach my body to produce the spike protein. Proteins accumulate in breast milk. On the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, I was reading a lot of reports from women who’d been vaccinated, that their breastfeeding babies were having intestinal bleeding, which putting two and two together, was from the vaccine.

We saw that there were risks, both to me and to Laney, if I was to receive blood from someone who had been vaccinated. We didn’t know how to quantify the risk. It was sort of an unknown risk. We were really desirous to mitigate it if we possibly could.

I talked to the Australian Red Cross, who are the people who draw blood in Australia. I talked to the local hospital. When I talked to the hospital, I talked to the blood bank, I talked to the hematologist. I talked to a lot of the obstetricians and the head obstetrician. They were all fascinated to hear that research that I just described to you.

The hospital, at least, was very apologetic, but they couldn’t facilitate direct donations of blood from unvaccinated family and friends. The Australian Red Cross put their foot down, “No, no way. We cannot facilitate that.” It felt like we’d done everything we could. We had tried to mitigate this risk. We tried to do everything we could. Now all we could do was leave it in the Lord’s hands. Do you know that it is such a great place to be!

Nancy: Yes.

Genevieve: I’ve been in that place now so many times in my life, where you just get to a point where, “OK, Lord, I’ve done everything I can. Now it’s up to You, and I’m just going to leave it there. We’re going to trust You and see how this goes.” 

What He did was pretty amazing. He gave me an amazingly straight forward birth, with absolutely minimal bleeding. Probably 300 mils, maybe less. It was so minimal. I left the hospital the next day. I’d never spent such a short period of time in a hospital before. It was a huge answer to prayer.

Nancy: God was protecting you.

Genevieve: And you know what? Once again, I had this prayer team. They were praying, praying, praying, during that whole birth. They understood. They were all people who hadn’t taken the vaccine themselves, as well. They were very interested, very desirous to pray when I was in labor. They were so kind.

Nancy: Oh, God is so good. That was your last birth in Australia.

Genevieve: My last birth in Australia, because 22 months later, Prentiss was delivered in May 2023. It was December 2021, that we moved over here. Now in May 2023, Prentiss was delivered. We moved to Tennessee, just down the road and around the corner from you! [laughter]

This time, in Tennessee, Blood Assurance here, and the local hospital were all willing to facilitate direct donations of blood from unvaccinated family and friends.

Nancy: Oh, praise the Lord!

Genevieve: It was amazing. It’s a really weird thing to be in this situation, contemplating asking people if they would give you some of their blood. I was so embarrassed. I did not want to have to ask anybody. But people ask you how you’re doing and what are you dealing with in life. We would describe the research we were doing and things. Enough people said, “Well, if you need blood, I’ll donate to you!”

Nancy: How wonderful!

Genevieve: I never had to ask anybody. The Lord cares about things, even those funny little things on your heart.

Nancy: How did that work? They would go to the hospital, and they would keep it especially for you, if you needed it?

Genevieve: Yes. Blood Assurance has a direct donation coordinator. They actually have someone who coordinates this. I opened up a file with her. She gave me a number. I gave that number to all the people. We weren’t collecting platelets. We were collecting plasma, and we were collecting red blood cells. Those will last 42 days. I wanted to cover the two weeks before and after my due date. We figured out a time to ask everybody to donate their blood. Then it takes three days to be tested.

I had arranged to labor in a little county hospital just outside of Nashville. I was over 39 weeks. I was getting really close to my due date when the head anesthetist at the hospital learned about me and my history. He said, “She cannot come over here. There is no way she can deliver here.”

This was, as you can imagine, very, very distressing. You’re emotional enough at 39 weeks, so that was not a fun phone call. I was over 40 weeks when I met the head obstetrician at the bigger Nashville hospital. An ultrasound was done, and when this head obstetrician walked into the room, he just looked at me. He was a big man, a tall man.

He said, “You’re not going to like what I have to say, but you can only deliver at this hospital if you agree to a C-section in the morning.” The Lord was now bringing me face to face with one of my biggest birthing fears, which was a C-section. But He’d been working in my heart, leading up to this.

Nancy: So, it didn’t matter what happened. He just wouldn’t do anything unless it was a C-section.

Genevieve: No. It was because the ultrasound showed that Prentiss was over 13 pounds.

Nancy: What??

Genevieve: And the ultrasound showed that I had a heap of fluid. I guess a lot of times this stuff can come about because of diabetes. I’ve never had gestational diabetes, and I didn’t this time either. She was just a big baby. But the Lord had really been working in my heart. So, my prayer team, I have a list of prayers that I have them all pray—that I won’t hemorrhage and that I won’t have to have a C-section, and I won’t tear.

But as the weeks got closer and closer to my delivery date, I reached out to one friend, and I said, “Would you forget all of that, and just pray that I would be submitted to whatever God has planned here?” I think the Lord already had put it in my heart. He was preparing me that this may be necessary.

The C-section doctor was also kind enough to inform me that no other doctor in Nashville would take me either, under any other circumstances, unless I agreed to an immediate C-section. There we were. We had no other choice.

Again, same situation as with Laney. I’ve done all I can. It’s now in the Lord’s hands, and this is what He’s doing. My only choice is to believe that this is His plan for good, for Prentiss and me. You know, it was. I really just needed to trust God. I had no other options.

Well, as I was wheeled into the operating room, that cooler of the unvaccinated blood was wheeled into the operating room with me. It was quite a procession! All of us! And you know what, I wasn’t terrified, thanks to the prayers of the prayer team, I was able to be at complete peace. I always thought I’d be terrified about having to have a C-section. I’d had on my birth plan all these years, if I have to have a C-section, just give me a general. I don’t want to be awake.

But the anesthetist had explained about how it would really be so much better if I’d agree to a spinal or an epidural. So, I agreed. It was just a couple of hours before I was wheeled in, where I was remembering a difficult time in my life before, which was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, this escaping Australia as you mentioned.

I’d decided, “It would be too bad to travel all around the world in a state of fear. Let’s enjoy this! Let’s have a sense of adventure here.” The Lord helped me remember that. Right before I was wheeled in, I thought, “Hey, hopefully this is just going to be a once-in-a-lifetime thing, the C-section. Let’s have fun! Let’s enjoy it.” And it was. It was an absolute blast.

Nancy: Wow! [laughter]

Genevieve: You wouldn’t think it. All the things I’d been afraid about were all OK. I was told later by some midwives; they said that the group of anesthetists and doctors and technicians that I had in that group were the absolute A-team. They really were wonderful. I wasn’t terrified. I was able to go in with a sense of adventure. I wanted to be able to enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime experience. And I did. It was wonderful.

I was way more mobile after that C-section than I’d been after a lot of my births. I was much stronger afterwards than most of my other births. Which is not to say, I don’t want to advocate for C-sections, but I just want to say, if you're in that situation where you have to have one, God can work good through that. I healed really well.

Prentiss was not 13 lbs. She was 12 lbs. 12 oz. She was pretty big. And very healthy. I have to say that looking at her after she was born, I did think, how could I have ever birthed her? There was no way. And I didn’t hemorrhage.

Nancy: Oh, you didn’t hemorrhage! Praise the Lord.

Genevieve: All that donated blood was given to other people, which was fantastic.

Nancy: You’ve shared with us all these births, and you faced scary situations, but God has come miraculously through every time! But in the midst of all this, you haven’t actually shared, what about motherhood itself? Wow! Tell me how you feel about motherhood. You could have stopped with one. Many women would have stopped at one, but you kept going!

Genevieve: Apart from wifehood, motherhood has been the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done, without a doubt. I want to tell you, Nancy, God has shown Himself trustworthy over and over and over again. The message of my story really is this—put your trust in God. He will prove Himself trustworthy to you too.

I want to speak to your listeners that it may not always look like what you expect, or what you hoped for. My birthing history is not one that most women dream about. My experiences have caused me to trust in God and to draw near to Him. Consequently, He has drawn near to me.

If I could choose to go back and not have those experiences, I wouldn’t do it, because I wouldn’t want to miss out on the joy and the love and the closeness to the Lord I’ve developed through these difficult experiences. He is so good. He is so faithful. He is so trustworthy. If you are weighed down with debilitating fear and scared like I was at many points during my journey, remember this: “True love casts out fear.”

From being a twelve-year-old who was so scared of childbirth that I said I’d never have any children, to drawing near to the end of my childbearing years, as I assume I am, and having delivered 11 children, from Natalie, my eldest (15 years old), to my youngest at 16 months, the children are an absolute delight. It really has been the most fulfilling thing that I’ve ever done.

I’m so glad that I’ve been able to put my trust in Him, that His plan is the best, and that He’s carried me through and shown me that this is absolutely the case. It hasn’t been easy. It’s been inconvenient and messy and painful at times.

But what’s the end result? Eleven souls to raise for the kingdom of God. By God’s grace, in one hundred years, those eleven children might be a thousand descendants, who by God’s grace will be faithfully building God’s kingdom. All because the Lord was powerful to work with a scared woman and take that fear and turn it to trust and love. Thank you for letting me share this story of the Lord’s faithfulness with you and your listeners.

Nancy: Oh wow, that makes me want to cry! So amazing! Thank you. Thank you, Genevieve, for sharing that. We look at your beautiful family and it’s only the beginning of what God is going to do.

Genevieve: Praise God.

Nancy: The greatest privilege, actually, in the earth is to be with God in bringing forth eternal souls. There’s nothing more powerful.

“Oh, Lord, we thank You. Thank You for Your wonderful faithfulness to Genevieve. Thank You that You brought her through every birth with Your miracle-working power. Thank You for the beautiful children You’ve given to her and Pete.

“Lord, we thank You for the destiny that You have for them, and all the future, Lord God, an eternity. Oh, Lord God, we praise You and give You thanks that You truly are, as Genevieve has testified, You are a faithful, good God. We praise You. Amen.”

Genevieve: Amen.

Nancy: Amen.

Blessings from Nancy Campbell

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Transcribed by Darlene Norris

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“LIFE TO THE FULL w/ Nancy Campbell, Above Rubies”

DON’T KEEP THE BLESSINGS TO YOURSELF.

 

LIFE TO THE FULL w/ Nancy Campbell

EPISODE 332: Help! I’m Terrified of Needles and Childbirth! Part 2

Genevieve continues the stories of her births, each so different, many of them traumatic, and yet God showed His faithfulness to her and brought her through in victory. You will be amazed and yet so encouraged.

Announcer: Welcome to the podcast, Life to The Full, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.

Nancy Campbell: Hello, ladies! Here we are again, and Genevieve is with me again today. She is going to continue sharing the story of her births. Well, we’re up to number two, Genevieve! What happened this time?

Genevieve: Thank you for having me on again. When we were talking last week, we were discussing how, as a child I was so scared of needles and childbirth. But the Lord worked through that to help me trust Him, and to acknowledge that God is God, and He is good, and His plan is good.

But I still had in me a little bit of a complaining spirit about why we had to be made like this as women and why we had to go through this messy, inconvenient, painful thing called “childbirth.” But nevertheless, I submitted to God in this area, and decided to trust Him.

Well, with my first, with Natalie, I had a post-partum hemorrhage. I bled nearly three liters and ended up in the operating room with a D&C and large transfusions. After her birth, I really had to trust the Lord again and submit all this area to Him, which I did.

Four months later, I found myself pregnant with Caleb. The fear resurfaced again. But you know what, I thought to myself, “This is really a blessing that I can even be pregnant again after what happened to me with Natalie.” So, I really chose to be thankful and grateful to the Lord. I put all that out of my mind and kept moving ahead.

One of the things I did during Caleb’s birth was that I researched post-partum hemorrhage. Just like you were saying last week, just because you hemorrhaged once doesn’t mean you need to hemorrhage a second time. I did some research into what my risk factors were, why I’d hemorrhaged that time, what things I could do to mitigate a hemorrhage in the future.

All that also helped me to have increased confidence. One of the things that happened during Caleb’s pregnancy was . . . I’d had Natalie at a big teaching hospital in Victoria, Australia. After I hemorrhaged, when I was pregnant with Caleb, they really wanted to control his birth. They wanted to have active management of the whole third stage which included immediate clamping of the umbilical cord.

We were really not comfortable with that because we thought by doing that . . . We understood that they were trying to prevent a potential hemorrhage in me, or possibly an ongoing or active hemorrhage in me. But by doing that, they could also potentially cause a hemorrhage in Caleb. This hospital that we’d been at with Natalie was 25 minutes away. Thirty-five minutes away was another little country hospital. We went there and talked to them, and they said, “Oh, yeah, you’ve hemorrhaged once, but it doesn’t mean you're going to hemorrhage again. Of course, you can come here.”

Nancy: Oh, that was good!

Genevieve: “And we don’t need to actively manage the third stage. We’ll just watch and wait. If something needs to happen, we will, but we’re not going to plan on jumping in if it doesn’t need to happen.”

Nancy: You have to search for hospitals and find the right place, don’t you?

Genevieve: I really learned through all my deliveries that you do have to take personal responsibility for your own health and the health of your children, and really advocate for yourself, although there’s also a balance between the help and the wisdom that they have. You need to cry out to the Lord for wisdom, to navigate all those little details of your own unique birth.

Natalie’s delivery, because I’d hemorrhaged with her, this now was complicating Caleb’s pregnancy, because in the lead-up to my birth with Caleb, they now wanted me to go in twice a week and have blood drawn. More needles, so I could have my blood cross-matched so that they could make sure they had enough blood on hand for if I did hemorrhage again. Then, when I went into labor, I had to have two IV lines put, just in case I hemorrhaged, because once you're hemorrhaging, it’s much harder to get a line in afterwards. Oh, boy.

Nancy: You need needles! You never wanted . . .

Genevieve: Needles and childbirth, yes, were very much synonymous for me from this point on. So, during his labor, sadly, those complaining thoughts came back. I remember actually being in labor and thinking, “Oh, again, why does it have to be this way? Couldn’t God have organized it differently?” And particularly evil at this point was the thought, “What is God going to put me through this time?” I knew it was rebellion to complain against God this way, but I just couldn’t get victory. I fought, but it just kept coming back.

Well, Caleb’s birth went very well. I didn’t bleed, and it turned out that having two babies so close together was actually a huge blessing from the Lord. Because I’d hemorrhaged with Natalie, I’d never properly healed after her birth. Because I didn’t hemorrhage with Caleb, I healed wonderfully after his birth, so a lot of things that had been left unresolved, were resolved and healed by Caleb’s birth. It was a real blessing. You just think, “Why was it this way?” But you realize, no, the Lord had a perfect plan, and it was a good plan.

Nancy: Yes!

Genevieve: I was also ashamed of my complaining. I really said in my mind, “I don’t want to do that again.” My vision for childbirth was walking really closely with the Lord through this. This complaining was getting in the way. [laughter] Although I said I don’t want to do it again, actually I did. The next part of my story is about how God’s loving kindness broke me, and I gained victory over my fear-driven rebellious complaining.

My next labor, 16 months after Caleb, I was in labor with Evangeline. Sadly, that rebellious complaining was coming up again during her labor. This whole “Why did God have to make women this way?”

Well, in the lead-up to Evangeline’s birth, I piled on the expectations. Things had gone so well with Caleb’s birth that I . . . the expectations just piled on. I said to myself, “I want to breathe her out. There wasn’t going to be any pushing. I’m just going to breathe her out.” I wanted to have a completely natural childbirth, including the third stage. With all of them, I never had any pain-killing drugs, never had any interference until that third stage where I had third-stage drugs to clamp down your uterus and things.

But this time, I didn’t want to have those either. It was going to be in the hospital, it had to be in the hospital, but I wanted to have a natural, completely natural birth. Despite all my grumblings and my complaining, God gave me the desires of my heart.

Nancy: So wonderful!

Genevieve: When I was in the first stage with Eva, I was getting tired, and I prayed out to God. I said, “Lord, I’m getting tired. Can we go through transition now?” And with the next contraction, I was in transition!

Nancy: Wow!

Genevieve: When I was pushing, I called out to God again and said, “Lord, I’m getting tired. With the next contraction, can she be born?” And bang! With the next contraction, she was born!

Nancy: So wonderful!

Genevieve: It was so amazing. She was 9 lbs. 9 oz. I didn’t tear. I didn’t bleed. God granted me every single desire of my heart. I breathed her out. I hadn’t had any medication for that third stage. You know what, even when I was rebellious, He was faithful. His goodness and kindness just humbled me.

His love broke me. I was finally able to repent of all that rebellious complaining and be free. God was good. His plan for childbirth was good. It was under the curse of sin, you know, but God was able to work it out for good. I was really able to just grab hold of that.

Nancy: I must say something here. Again, as I mentioned in the last podcast, it is true. Because there are many precious mothers, who after a traumatic birth, even as you went through with Natalie, your first, who will say, “I can just never do this again!” But look how God blessed you! No birth is the same! Not one birth is ever the same. Here you had this glorious, natural birth, even after a traumatic birth.

So, dear precious ladies, maybe those of you who had a traumatic birth, know that that’s not the end. God does wondrous things, and God heals our bodies, doesn’t He? Sometimes we get a cut, and it can be pretty bad. But it always heals. When we have things happen on the inside, they heal too.

Genevieve: So, being humbled and broken enabled me to be free. My repentance and freedom from resisting God’s plan came just in time, because my fourth delivery really required me to submit to God’s plan. When I did, He did marvelous things.

Seventeen months after Eva was born, actually I’m having an ultrasound on my due date. The man doing the ultrasound began saying things I think no woman wants to hear right as she’s about to give birth. He’s saying, “Wow, this baby’s got a big head! Oh, my goodness, he’s weighing in at over five kilograms!” This is about 11 lbs. I remember thinking, “Oh, I know that these things are not accurate. This one must be really out!” And “Why would he tell me this at this point?” Anyway, he was a wonderful technician, and I actually really enjoyed going to him.

So then, about six days after that, I was in labor with Joshua. I had the same plan with Joshua. I wanted to breathe him out, but I quickly realized there wasn’t going to be any breathing him out. On that realization, I did the whole pendulum swing. I went from breathing him out to really pushing, like over-pushing, like pushing way too much. He would descend, and then he would pop back up again. He would descend and pop back up again! The contractions sometimes would be strong, and sometimes they would be weak.

Nancy: Talk about every birth being different!

Genevieve: Oh, yes! And this was so discouraging to me, because of not feeling like I was making any progress. I was getting tired. I would look at the clock in the delivery room and say, “OK, Lord, could he please be born withing the next 15 minutes?” And then that 15 minutes would pass, and I’d look at the clock, and I’d say, “Well, how about the next 15 minutes, Lord? Can he be born in the next 15 minutes?” And he wasn’t born in the next 15 minutes.

You know what, God wasn’t giving me exactly what I wanted, when I wanted it, this time. This was a different situation. I realized I did not know how to push this baby out. So I just said, “Lord, please help me. I don’t know what to do.”

And immediately He brought to mind two verses. This was so wonderful. The first verse was: “Be still and know that I am God,” from Psalm 46. It struck me then that it was so odd that I was being told to be still! But you know, I did! I needed to be still a moment.

The next verse was the one from Isaiah 66, which says: “Shall I bring to the time of birth and not cause delivery?” Straightaway I realized, “Oh, yes, every contraction is from God! Those weak ones that I’ve been frustrated by, they’re from God. The strong ones are from God!”

I realized, “Oh, when He sends the strong contraction, I should push in line with that contraction. Give it all I’ve got. Give as much energy as He’s also sending. With those weak contractions, I should rest in them, and not over-push them, and just be guided by Him.” Now we had a plan. It took another one-and-a-half hours but that’s how we did it.

Nancy: Oooh! That’s amazing!

Genevieve: Joshua wasn’t 11 lbs. He 12 lbs. 6 oz.

Nancy: Isn’t that amazing? And you didn’t know you had that big a baby, did you?

Genevieve: No, I did not! He did have a big head. When it came out, it was huge, and it was completely unmolded. All the rest of my babies have had molded heads, you know, the little cone-shape. But not his. It was completely unmolded. And he had one hand up by his face!

Nancy: Really? As well? And you gave birth like that! Isn’t that incredible?

Genevieve: It was incredible. I’ll tell you what, pushing him out quickly, as I had been trying to do, that would have been a disaster.

Nancy: So, listening to God. You know, I have just read a little book about this missionary in India who went out there with great visions to lead so many people to the Lord. Nothing really happened at all. But another missionary came, and he wasn’t going out like she was. He just listened to the Lord; what God wanted him to do in every situation.

She learned, and she began to live that way. Every story in the book is the story of miracles of how, even in impossible situations, she just listened to God. Then He’d tell her. She had to be still, like the first verse was “Be still and listen.” She had to wait and listen. But then God would show her. I thought, “Wow! What a great way to live!” As you did that in childbirth, God showed you. That was wonderful.

Genevieve: His plan worked so beautifully. God really did have a better plan. That was to stretch things slowly. We had picked Joshua’s name already. After his birth, I went back to remind myself about the meaning. You know what it means? “Jehovah delivers.” I was just floored, because, of course, God had literally delivered Joshua.

Nancy: And naturally! Amazing!

Genevieve: Yes! I had the third stage drugs. I did hemorrhage with Joshua, but it was a little over 600 milliliters. We felt like it was a non-event. Considering his size, things had been terrific. Just praise the Lord. It seemed like such a victory to naturally birth such a big boy.

But you know the real victory was in my heart, that I had submitted to God, and to His plan, that I hadn’t been grumbling, I hadn’t been complaining. I hadn’t had any more thoughts of why this had to be this way. You know, when we do submit to God’s plans, He does marvelous things. This was really marvelous.

At this point, I was now really, genuinely grateful for the experiences that God was giving me. Not complaining anymore, but just feeling like . . . I think the reason was, I was drawing near to him through these trials and the difficulties, and He was drawing near to me. The result was just utter joy.

Nancy: So wonderful!

Genevieve: The next birth was another traumatic one. The next part of my story is about how this next traumatic birth brought back that fear again. It became a really debilitating fear. Sixteen months after I delivered Joshua, I’m now delivering our fifth, Josiah.

I was at peace. I was not fearful, not rebellious. Josiah’s birth was very straightforward. He was 8 lbs. 15 oz. He was my smallest. But after he was born, my placenta would not come out, and I was bleeding and bleeding. The doctor in the delivery room tried two manual attempts to remove my placenta. Because I hadn’t had any pain-killing drugs for birth, he did it without any anesthesia. The doctor was able to retrieve most but not all of my placenta. I was still bleeding.

By this stage, they had already begun transfusing me with the blood that they had on hand. They were running out. They only had one unit left and they were faced with this decision: “Do we take you to the operating room with only one unit left, and try to do a D&C, or do we send you back to that big teaching hospital where you had Natalie?”

They decided to send me back to the big teaching hospital. An ambulance arrived, and normally it would take over an hour to get from the little hospital to the big hospital, but it took us less than 30 minutes. Pete and Josiah drove behind us and we left them in the dust.

Nancy: Whoa! They had the siren going for that one then!

Genevieve: Oh, yes! While I’m lying there in the ambulance, I can feel that I’m still bleeding, and that it’s too much. It became sort of a visual thing where I was lying there, and I could see all my emotions, all my mind, just fracture into all these little pieces. I could tell that they’re about to break apart and fly into a million pieces. I was desperate to keep them together, but I didn’t know how to do that.

While I was lying there, I began to think about the hospital I was going to, and how a lot of people at my church worked in the medical field, and how some of them worked at this hospital. I began to wonder whether I’d see them at the hospital. I began to think about how they loved me and how I loved them.

With all that thought of the love of Christ and the love of His people for one another, like all those millions of little parts of my emotions and mind came right back together again and gave me the wherewithal to actually look at this poor nurse who accompanying me to the big hospital. All the staff had actually, literally drawn straws to decide who was going to come with me, because nobody wanted to.

She was scared. She’d drawn the short straw, and she was scared. I was able to turn to her and smile and say, “You know, it’s going to be OK.” But that was the Lord. That was in the midst of that assurance of His love.

When I got to the hospital, the head obstetrician met me in the ambulance bay. He was my favorite doctor at the hospital. He was such a nice man, and this was such a comfort from the Lord, that straightaway I’d been met by someone I know, I’m familiar with.

They took me up to the delivery ward, and I’m surrounded by all these people looking down at me. Who should come into my vision but the midwife who had delivered Natalie! She had heard over the hospital announcement the code blue announcement that I had arrived. She came to see me.

You know, when you've given birth, and that oxytocin is flowing, people call it the “hormone of love,” you fall in love with everybody in the room! You’ve had the baby. Well, I’d fallen in love with her. She was a wonderful woman. She had saved my life with Natalie, and there she was. I was lying there, and my head sort of drifted over to the right. I began drifting away. She called me back, and twice my head just fell to the right. I began drifting away. I was called back twice.

Nancy: She called out loud to you.

Genevieve: Yes, “Genevieve, Genevieve! Come back!” That sort of thing. I was taken to the operating room where they did a D&C. A large piece of my placenta was removed. I lost nearly three-and-a-half liters of blood, which is getting close to a gallon. I got what the hospital records called “massive transfusions.”

Then I was taken into the ICU. That midwife was there again in the ICU. This had taken hours, but she had waited. Her shift had finished a long time ago but there she was again. That felt like a hug from the Lord, familiar faces in the midst of a terrible trial. There she was, just smiling and comforting. It was a really wonderful thing.

Well, after I had Josiah, I was able to debrief both with the doctors at the big hospital, and the doctor at the small hospital. This was a really comforting thing, because they were again able to say, “Hey, this doesn’t mean that you're going to hemorrhage again.”

Nancy: That’s so great. The thing it seems to me, you had wonderful births. It was always the after that was the problem.

Genevieve: Yes. Third stage is my little hill. But they were so good. They all said, “Look, we’ll be happy to have you come back. You’re going to go on to have lots more children.” The doctor, my favorite doctor at the big hospital, he said, “You know, you have beautiful platelets!” You know, the little part of your blood that clots. In other words, he was saying, “You don’t have a bleeding disorder. There are no issues.” Which was just so kind of him to say that.

Nancy: You wouldn’t get that from a lot of hospitals. That was amazing.

Genevieve: They did say, at the little hospital, that they don’t have women after they’ve had their fifth child because they’re not equipped to deal with it. I guess they say it’s more dangerous after your fifth, so I knew I couldn’t go back there. I was always going to be at the big teaching hospital now. That was something I had to reconcile myself to.

But another little tidbit of information I thought may be interesting is that the little hospital also didn’t offer epidurals. That’s because they can’t deal with the c-section full out from an epidural. It was an interesting dynamic there between the two hospitals.

After nearly dying with Natalie, I experienced a lot of sympathy, but after nearly dying with my fifth, I actually felt a lot of antagonism and ill-will. The implied, or the spoken accusation, was how could I nearly die and leave my husband, Pete, with five young children?

This really didn’t make any sense. There hadn’t been any signs of anything amiss before I went into labor. It was as though they didn’t believe that God was sovereign over life or death, or sovereign over opening or closing the womb. Or it was like they would only accept good from Him, and not bad.

At any rate, God used that antagonism for good, actually. In a lot of ways, He used it for good. But one of the ways that He used it for good was to make me begin to consider the perspective of the hospital staff in a new light. I actually began to realize that my hemorrhage history could be intimidating to some hospital staff. This was just a little baby thought at this stage. The Lord was going to grow this thought later. But it was a really good thing, like a good path to be set down.

Well, 19 months later, after delivering Josiah, I was in labor with my sixth. It was September 2015. I’m in labor with Sophie. I again gave my fear to God. I kept seeking to obey Him and trust Him. He had been faithful, and I believed that He would continue to be faithful. As I got closer and closer to her delivery, however, as this reality got closer and closer that childhood fear, exacerbated by the trauma of Josiah’s birth, just came back again. The fear was a real weight, like it was a real physical weight bearing down. I remember saying to Pete at one stage, “I’m just so scared, and I can’t shake it.” It didn’t feel usual for me. I tend to be a fairly . . . I’m not an up-and-a-down kind of a person. I’m fairly stable or whatever the word would be.

But anyway, to deal with the fear, I would go into my room, and I’d read the Scriptures. Some of the Scriptures that were very helpful, there’s that one in Philippians 4:8-9: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. Whatever you’ve learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me, put into practice, and the God of peace will be with you.”

Then there’s Psalm 15. I love that whole Psalm, but just to truncate it down, it says: “He who speaks the truth in his heart shall never be moved.” I thought about that as being not fearful but being confident. Then there’s Ephesians 6, of course, which says: “Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth.”

I really spent time. When the fear became too big, I’d go into my room, and I would gird myself with truth. I’d written down all these things that were true. I would meditate on God’s Word, and on His promises. Pease would fill my heart and the fear would go.

But as soon as I stood up to go back into the rest of the house, get back on what I needed to do for the day, the fear would just descend again, and the weight of it. I wasn’t able to gain lasting peace. I couldn’t shake that fear. I was having flashbacks too, at this stage, of being in hospital again, of drifting off again. It was Pete, not the midwife this time, calling me back, but this time I couldn’t come back.

Those were just awful flashbacks. I had to push them out of my mind. But God was good, and He’s able to organize everything for good. I wasn’t afraid to die for myself, but there was that thought, an awful thought, that if I died, people might not support Pete because of that antagonism we’d felt. Pete might be left to fend for himself with six children six and under.

That was an awful thought. But we knew God was good. We grabbed hold of that. I wasn’t afraid to die for myself. I just didn’t want to cause that antagonism for Pete by dying. I didn’t ever fully overcome that fear during Sophie’s pregnancy, but I did persevere in deciding to trust God.

Sophie was ten pounds, eight ounces. Her birth is such a story of God’s kindness to a struggling, fearful woman. It happened like this. At 2 AM one morning, I’m asleep in bed, and I have this enormous contraction. It’s like one of these ones that lasts over a minute, and it’s so painful. It’s so all-consuming. All you can think about is just getting through this thing.

I jumped up after that, jumped through the shower while Pete got the car ready to go to the hospital. In the car, I had two more contractions like that. Those were all the contractions I had. Three contractions for the whole labor.

Nancy: Wow!

Genevieve: When I got to the hospital, I was wheeled up to the labor and delivery ward in a wheelchair. I stood up from the wheelchair and my water broke. They said, “Please lie down on the bed so that we can examine you.” I was feeling tired and very grateful to just be able to lie down on the bed for a minute. And whoosh! She just came right out!

Nancy: Whoa! That was it! How wonderful! You hardly knew you were in labor!

Genevieve: Yes, exactly right. It was so amazing. And you know what was so amazing? The part that felt really amazing to me was that she . . . I have big babies. I had gone to a chiropractor who had “mapped” my pelvis, which is term from The Pink Kit which is a New Zealand birthing material. The Pink Kit, great material.

She had mapped my pelvis, which is to say, she had told me what shape my pelvis was, and what the best position would be for opening it up the widest. Every time I labored, I always labored in an all-fours, upright, asymmetrical position to open my birth canal. I knew that lying flat on your back is not optimal for opening your birth canal. I’d heard you can close it by up to thirty percent. So, the fact that this 10 lbs. 8 oz. baby would just shoot right out while I was lying flat on my back was just amazing!

Nancy: How incredible!

Genevieve: I still am amazed by that.

Nancy: And no problems afterwards?

Genevieve: Well, here was me, poor, fearful, traumatized me and God would give me this amazing gift. Well, my placenta was delivered quickly. It was deemed to be complete. I was transferred to the maternity ward, but six hours later, my bleeding picked up. I could feel it.

I asked someone to come and check. I was immediately taken to the operating room where they did a D&C and removed one-quarter of my placenta that was still there. I bled one-and-a-half liters, which is borderline for a transfusion, but I was stable enough where they decided not to transfuse me.

Nancy: Praise the Lord!

Genevieve: Yes. Well, the next part of my story is about how, through a very simple biblical concept, through my next pregnancy I was able to gain complete victory over that fear. So, I’m very excited to share that with you.

Nancy: I think we’ll have to have another podcast! OK?

Genevieve: OK!

Nancy: You’ve got to come back for this, because you've got to hear how to get victory, ladies! Would you like to pray for the ladies this time?

Genevieve: Thank you very much.

“Dear Lord and Heavenly Father, You are such a good God. You are our King and our Lord, and sovereign over everything. You open the womb, and You close the womb. Lord, Your Word is so perfect and complete to help us though all things. The next part of my story really shows that, that in Your Word, You have the answers to all the dilemmas that we have in this life.

“Lord, I would pray for all the ladies pregnant right now, that You would work in them, and help them to be free of their fear, if they have any, just the same as You helped me to be free from mine. I pray all these things in the name of Your precious Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.”

Nancy: Amen.

Blessings from Nancy Campbell

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www.aboverubies.org

Transcribed by Darlene Norris

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

DON’T FORGET TO TELL OTHERS ABOUT THESE PODCASTS AND TRANSCRIPTS.

“LIFE TO THE FULL w/ Nancy Campbell, Above Rubies”

DON’T KEEP THE BLESSINGS TO YOURSELF.

 

LIFE TO THE FULL w/ Nancy Campbell

EPISODE 331: Help! I’m Terrified of Needles and Childbirth! Part 1

Today we are blessed to have Genevieve de Deugd with us. Genevieve was born in New Zealand, then married and moved to Australia, and is now living in the USA with her husband and 11 children. Genevieve shares that as a young girl she was scared stiff of needles and terrified of one day giving birth to children. She begins her amazing story in this session.

Announcer: Welcome to the podcast, Life to The Full, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.

Nancy Campbell:Hello, ladies! Always so great to be with you! I have another visitor with me today, which is so exciting. Her name is Genevieve de Deugd, and Genevieve comes all the way from New Zealand, by Australia, to the States, exactly the same way we came. You were born in New Zealand,Genevieve?

Genevieve:Yes, I was.

Nancy:Yes, and I was born in New Zealand. Then you went to Australia when you were married?

Genevieve: Yes.

Nancy:Is that when you went?

Genevieve:Yes.

Nancy: Well, we went to Australia into our marriage, of course, and then we came here. Genevieve has the most exciting story of how they came here to the States. They actually escaped Australia during the plandemic because they were facing many, many trials there. They had a miraculous escape which is an adventure story to tell someday, but we’re going to talk about other things today.

So, Genevieve, it is so great to have you here. I’ve always known about you, and of course, know your family, your parents, because they were so well-known in New Zealand. They spearheaded the homeschooling movement in New Zealand. But we’re now up to date here. We’re in America and Genevieve is the mother of 11 amazing children.

Today she’s actually going to talk about the birthing of her children and how that’s affected her life. First of all, we’ve got to get to know you a bit better, Genevieve. Tell us the names of your wonderful children. I always love hearing the names. That’s why, in Above Rubies, I always have the names of all the children. So many love to tell me how they love looking at the names. Lots of people use names that they see there. You can tell the names of your children.

Genevieve:Thank you, Nancy. Thank you for having me on your podcast. My firstborn, Natalie Elizabeth, is 15 years old. Then I have Caleb Oliver, and he is 14. Then there’s Evangeline Luise.

Nancy:Yes, and we’ve got an Evangeline.

Genevieve:Yes, you do. And she is 13. Then there’s Joshua Craig, after my dad. He is 11. And then Josiah Trey is 10. Then there’s Sophie Dawn, and she’s nine. Adele Paige is seven, and Katrina Sue just turned six. Then there’s Nadine Vera, and she’s four. Laney Elise is three, and Prentiss Shiloh is our youngest. She’s just 16 months.

Nancy:Oh, that is so lovely.

Genevieve:Yes, and we have a Shiloh now as a great-granddaughter.

Nancy:Yes, although I do get mixed up, because after being in Israel, and actually going to the very place in Shiloh where the tabernacle became the permanent dwelling when they went into the land, of course, it is pronounced “Shee-loh” in Israel. So, I keep going to call my little great-granddaughter “Shee-low” But here they call her “Shy-low,” like you do, and like most people do.

In fact, it was interesting. Last night, we were playing a DVD on the big screen downstairs. It was about the land of Israel. It was the most powerful message. But this speaker was talking about this guy, which when I read it in the Bible, I’ve always called him “Abimelech,” but he was calling him “Abby-lemeck.” I realized, “Oh, goodness me, I’ve been saying it wrong all my life.” We pronounce so many of the Israeli words according to how we think they’re to be pronounced. But we don’t say it quite like a Hebrew, do we? But that is so wonderful.

Now, Genevieve, before we get to birthing, I think we need to find out a little bit of your story. So, why don’t you start? Let’s see, where would we start? I think we need to start even, yes, with your parents maybe. Yes, because they were an amazing couple in New Zealand who were very,very influential in the homeschooling movement in New Zealand. So, start there.

Genevieve:I would love to start there. Often, when I tell my story, or if I have a testimony to share, I love to start with my parents’ story, because it always seems to me that’s where my story starts.

Nancy:Well, of course, it does!

Genevieve:My dad grew up in California. Both of my parents were born in 1951, my dad on a ranch in California, and my mom grew up on a sheep station in the South Island of New Zealand, in the Hakataramea Valley.

They were both non-Christians growing up. They became Christians in the early ‘70’s, in their early 20’s. They met in New Zealand through the Navigators. The way my dad came to New Zealand was that his mom decided to do a trip. She wanted to do an overseas experience for her children.

Nancy: Tell me, wasn’t that after her husband died?

Genevieve: Yes.

Nancy: And she actually took them on many trips around the world, didn’t she?

Genevieve: You’re right. My dad’s dad died when my dad was about 13 years of age. He had an older brother and three little sisters. His youngest sister was only two years old. At the time that his dad died, his parents had been planning a trip to Europe for the family. My grandma, his mum, decided after her husband died, that she would still do that trip.

They rented out their ranch in California and they went to Europe, and they actually turned out that they could spend a year touring around in Europe cheaper than it was to live in California. They spent the winter skiing in the Alps. My dad learned German and little bit of French. His job was to do all the money exchanging for the family.

She ended up organizing a number ofdifferent trips for the family. It was the early ‘70’s when she was tossing up between Australia and New Zealand. She wanted to do another trip overseas. She was going to take her three youngest daughters. My dad and his brother were both at university, but my dad had no vision for university at that point: what he was really wanting to do there.

He said to his mom, “Well, I’m going to come withyou to New Zealand.”  He met her in New Zealand, but first of all, he went around to all these different consulates in the United Statesgetting visas so that he could do the London to Katmandu overland trip. Then he went down through Australia and ended up in New Zealand.

He became a Christian in New Zealand and joined the Navigators and was discipled by the Navigators. Then he learned how to read the Bible, how to study the Bible, how to meditate on Scripture, how to memorize Scripture. Somebody challenged him one time and said, “I challenge you to memorize the book of Romans in two months.”  And he did it! Two chapters a week.

Nancy: That is amazing!

Genevieve: Life-transforming thing.

Nancy: I was so blessed to be involved with Navigators when I was young too. I did their memory program. It was so wonderful. I think that was one of the greatest blessings of my life, to memorize all those Scriptures,especially when I was in my late teens which is when I was involved.

Those Scriptures are still with me today. I still seek to memorize, but somehow it doesn’t last as long. I have tokeep memorizing again. I forget it and keep memorizing again. With those Scriptures I memorized back then, they just stay with me. It’s so incredible.

Genevieve: That’s why I think my story really starts with dad’s story, because all that Scripture he put into his life, all those years he spent being discipled by the Navigators, putting aside his old non-Christian way of thinking, and taking on board a new Christian way of thinking. Some of the things he used to tell me that they used to do in the Navigators were just so exciting.

They would organize parties with the purpose of being able to share the gospel. They would go skiing and they would learn how to take any conversation and bring it to the gospel and be able to share the gospel within three minutes. Because when they’d go skiing, they’d hop on this ski lift with somebody else, a stranger, and they would get that conversation to sharing the gospel before they both hoped off the ski lift.

Nancy: That’s so, so cool.

Genevieve: I love those stories. I feel like that had such a huge impact on dad, which had such a huge impact on me. And Mum, who was in the Navigators too at this stage. She was working for them. This had a huge impact on their thought processes, and becoming Christians, and then how they raised us.

Nancy: Oh, yes, that is so wonderful. But I should start withyour parents, but I remember your telling me even about your . . . oh, no, that starts withyour parents. Because you're going to get on into your childhood, and how that even as a young girl, becauseyour father was rather political, you became quite political about things that were important. Tell us about that.

Genevieve: One of the things that my dad was going along, as a Christian, he used to love to listen to sermons. Any time that he had spare time, he would listen to a sermon. These were all on cassette tapes at the time. He used to get these catalogs from different cassette tape lending libraries.

And he noticed that all the sermons were always organized under three topics. They were personal piety, end times, and evangelism. Then one day, he came across a catalog from a cassette tape lending library, and this one had the sermons organized under topics like politics, law, economics, art, biology, history, education, family, parenting, child discipline.

It was like, it blew him away, because here were people who wereactually thinking about how Christianity applied to every area of life. That really marked him from that point on. That gradual understanding, and this looking to Scripture, to see what it has to say about this topic, or that topic.

I had the opportunity, over the course of my childhood, to see him standing for things when nobody else was standing for them, and saying, “I believe in this,” or “I think we need to go this way.” Even when no other Christians were doing it; even when some Christians or family or whoever would not stand with him, or not think that was a good way to go. But as he saw it in the Bible, as he saw that this was what God wanted, then he would do it.

An example of that, he began the Home Education Foundation. He began to homeschool us as an outworking of his understanding aboutwhat the Bible had to say about education, he began to homeschool us in the early ‘80’s. In 1987, he organized the conference for homeschoolers in New Zealand.

Nancy:Was that the first conference for homeschoolers in New Zealand? 

Genevieve:Yes, first conference. Four hundred and fifty people came from all over New Zealand, and they all came saying, “We thought we were the only ones doing this in this country.” Then they went back to their hometowns and formed little support groups from the other people that they’d met at the conference. This was the beginning of support groups in New Zealand.

Then my dad networked all those support groups and would keep an eye on what was happening politically, and then disseminate that information to the support groups. So, my dad became a political watchdog in New Zealand. His goal was to keep the climate good for homeschoolers.

As he was watching things politically, one day he came to me, and he said, “Genevieve, look, the government wants to tax the interest on children’s bank accounts. What do you think about that?” I got all up in arms, because I had a bank account, and I had savings, and there was no way, known, that I wanted the government to reach their sticky little fingers in! This was how I was thinking as a little nine-year-old.

So, he encouraged me to write a letter to the Prime Minister, or I said I wanted to, and he facilitated it. I wrote to the Prime Minister, and I wrote to the Minister of Finance, and I wrote to the Opposition Minister of Finance. As I was talking to my dad, and we were discussing the topic, he was telling me about history and things like this. One of the things I said was, “Taxation without representation is tyranny! I am a nine-year-old. No one is representing me in Parliament. I can’t vote.”

The Opposition Minister of Finance thought this was pretty good. She invited me to the Beehive, the Parliament buildings in New Zealand. I was interviewed and it went on television. I was invited to be part of the select committee meeting as they discussed the bill. Not to make any comments, but just as an observer. They passed the bill at a lower interest rate than they were considering.

Nancy: Yes. That was how, even young children. . . actually, it shows you the power of letters. The power of letters, or faxes, or emails. Now today, we can email. That’s a wonderful thing. It’s very easy. Any senator or congressman, we canjust go onto their email and say what we want. But we don’t always do it, do we? In fact, sometimes I’m desperate to do it about something and I get so busy. But we really should. It has such power and impact.

Even if we think we can’t do anything else, we can email or phone our senators and congressmen and tell them how it’s meant to be! Because here we are, in the States, we are so blessed, because our government is meant to be, well, it’s not so much at the moment, but we need to make it to be what it’s meant to be, which is WE THE PEOPLE. But here you were, even a nine-year-old, and you had such an impact. I love that.

Genevieve: Thank you. As a result of my dad’s influence, I was very interested in going into law and studying law. We had a lawyer who was attending our church. Dad said, because I was being homeschooled, he said, “Why don’t you ask him now what you should be studying in preparation for doing a law degree?”

So, I did, and this lawyer was then alerted to the fact that I was interested in law. When he went out into his own practice, he asked me to come onboard as his law clerk. Then he paid for me to do a legal executive course. I worked for him for about five and a half years.

Nancy: Yes, so great. What happened after that?

Genevieve: Well, after that, he sold his practice to go into the ministry. My brother and I did what many Kiwis do. We go overseas and we do the whole overseas experience.

Nancy: That’s a real Kiwi thing, because Kiwis know how to live on the smell of an oily rag. They will go without, and go without food, go without extras to save and travel the world. It’s different here in America. When we came to the States, and we talked to young people, “Oh, we’d love to come to New Zealand. We’d love to go to Australia.” We even started to set up some tours to take back.

But then, we found that actually, although they wanted to go, they couldn’t cough up with the money because young people in the States don’t know how to live on the smell of an oily rag. They live to the limit. They spend everything. They spend it on life instead of saving.

Those of you who don’t knowNew Zealanders, Kiwis, that’s a typical thing. Save like mad, then you travel the world. Because I think down in New Zealand too, we’re at the bottom of the world, and we always want to go and see the world. But Americans, which I am an American now, I’m an American citizen. We sort of think America is the world, so we don’t have the same thing. Anyway, carry on.

Genevieve:When I got to the States, the Lord began working. You know how sometimes He has to break you before He puts you back up. One of the first things that happened was that I began to realize that a lot of the ways that I had been interacting with my parents, the example I had been setting for my younger siblings, hadn’t really been a good example.  I’d been probably disrespectful.

That shocked me, that realization, because I thought of my parents as my best friends; my family were my best friends. But to really realize, no, I could havebeen doing so much better, and I hadn’t. The Lord really broke me through that.

After that, I began reading some material, and realizing, wow, by this definition, I’m a feminist. My dad always taught me worldviews and I had rejected feminism. I was proud of that. But by this definition, I realized, wow, I really was a feminist. Then I began hearing things about how when a family works together, it really strengthens the family.

And about preparing for marriage. Up until this point, I had actually purposely neglected to prepare for marriage. I didn’t know how to cook a thing! There were so many things I didn’t know. I was really convicted to go back home, learn to cook, prepare for marriage. What an unloving thing to do to a future husband, to actually purposely not learn to cook.

So, I did all that, and realized, hey, my dad has this ministry. It’s something I really believed in, and I should go home and help him with his ministry. His ministry was, at that point, he had the Home Education Foundation, which was helping homeschoolers. Then he had another ministry called Family Integrity, which was fighting other anti-family legislation in New Zealand. That was a blessing, a really wonderful time, the next five and a half years at home, helping my parents.

Nancy: And then you met your husband!

Genevieve: Yes! Or, as we like to say, we didn’t meet!

Nancy: Tell us your story!

Genevieve: Someone asked my brother and I one time, how did we envisage getting to know someone for the purpose of marriage? I remember saying, “I’d love it if they would approach my dad.” And my brother said, “I’d love to marry my best friend.” And that’s how God organized it for both of us. My brother married his best friend and Pete approached my dad.

The way it happened was, well, Pete had a friend, someone he used to go tramping with, which is hiking, but we call it “tramping” in New Zealand and Australia. They used to go hiking. They were talking about girls and things, and marriage. Where would there be someone like-minded?

His tramping buddy said, “Well, I know this girl in New Zealand. You need to go and get to know her.” He said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll write a letter to her dad, and I’ll introduce you, and I’ll tell him that you’re going to write a follow-up letter.” So, that’s what he did.

Nancy: Not even knowing who you were?

Genevieve: Not yet. He didn’t know our family. He didn’t know us. A work colleague met Pete when he was going to come to New Zealand and visit us. A work colleague said, “Now let me get this right. You’re going to a country you've never been to, to visit a family you've never met, about a girl you've never met?” [laughter] It was so wild. But that’s how it happened.

This friend sent a letter of introduction. He said Pete would write within the next two weeks, and he did, write at the last minute of those two weeks. He introduced himself and sent it to Dad. So, Dad wrote back, and they wrote back and forth for about seven months before Dad said, “You know what? Why don’t you come and visit the family?”

I was aware of the communications between them, and I used to say, “Hey, Dad, ask this, or ask that.” I was encouraged by all this,because I really wanted Dad to vet someone. I wanted, before I entered into a courtship with someone, I really did want to know that my parents were happy, that I was given their blessing, that they knew there would be an equal yoking.

So, Pete came, and we asked lots of questions of one another. Dad had already vetted him. He secretly felt like Pete was the husband for me. All that would be needed was a little bit of chemistry, and that would be a done deal.

Nancy: When does that happen? Did it happen immediately, or not straightaway?

Genevieve: Well, when I first met Pete, when we met him at the airport and brought him home, I was struck with the thought, “Here is a man.” When I say that, I mean you could just tell that this was a man who did not avoid responsibility. He was a man who grabbed hold. You could see it in his demeanor.

Nancy: You don’t see that in a lot of men, so that would have been something cool.

Genevieve: Yes. And then a few days later, he shared his vision. I remember thinking, “Boy, I could really follow a man with a vision like that.” As we spoke together and asked another questions . . . I’d gotten from someone 40 pages of questions that courting couple might like to ask one another. They were questions like, “What do you think about debt?” And “How would you want to take care of your elderly parents? Is it a nursing home, or are you going to take care of them?” “How would you raise your children?” These sorts of questions. Not just what your favorite flavor toothpaste is like.

Nancy: Are you listening to all this, girls? I have my three lovely Above Rubies helpers recording this podcast. Are you getting all this? [laughter]

Genevieve: He was with us for ten days. By the end of those ten days, I think we both felt like, wow, we had such a unity of thought. We spoke together so easily. It was very clear that the next step would be courtship. He went home to get his parents’ blessing.

My mom and dad and I went to visit him in his natural environment, because we hadn’t really known him for very long. It was so great doing that because we went to church with him. I met some of his relatives. I met his neighbors. I met his customers.

He was born and raised in the same place, so people around him had a long history with him. Everybody came up to me and said, because here I am, a young lady, I think people could put two and two together. They said, “This fellow is gold.”

Nancy: Oh, what a wonderful story! I just love it. But when did you get the spark?

Genevieve: The spark. Well, I think chemistry was clearly not going to be a problem from the word go. But what we wanted was the Lord’s will. We wanted all the way along to be sure that this was the Lord’s will as we kept going.

Nancy: Yes. Why I said that . . . this last weekend, I was taking an Above Rubies retreat up in Idaho. At the end, I was talking withsome of the young people. They had read my 20 points about what to look for in a man, for a husband. They’re all pretty good points and it’s not always easy to find all of them.

A young lady said, “Well, even if I find all those, and the guy is interested, but I’m not really feeling . . .” I said, “Well, you do have to get the spark. A guy canhave all the good points, but there’s a littlesomething that ought to draw youtogether.” Because God is in it, isn’t He? A beautiful thing. But that’s a glorious story. I just love it.

So, we were going to start on birthing, but we started by talking aboutall of these things. I think they are soimportant. What happened then? How did you get married? Where did you live, and all that?

Genevieve: We got engaged, I think two months after we met, two months after we started courting. Then we got married five months later and moved to Australia.

Nancy: So, you moved where your husband was. I’m a great believer in that.

Genevieve: Yes. He ran a timber mill and wood processing business there. But later on, we grew, and we bought a showroom,and we developed our own line of timber furniture that we designed and sold in our showroom. I came and helped him with that. I came onboard, took over his accounting and QuickBooks, and did all the bookkeeping.

Nancy: Oh, you'rejust the one for that!

Genevieve: Then, shortly after we got married, I became pregnant with our first.

Nancy: Yes! I think that must have been quite something because right back, even when you were little,you were scared of childbirth, and scared of needles, and scared of all that stuff! How did this all work out?

Genevieve: Yes, yes. I was. I don’t know where the fear came from, but I remember at 12 years of age just saying, “The thought of childbirth, and the thought of needles . . .”

Nancy: It’s interesting that I put needles with childbirth! [laughter]

Genevieve: I don’t know why they were connected, but they certainly were in my mind! I guess I’d heard that you got stuck with all sorts of needles.

Nancy: Old wives’ stories!

Genevieve: Yes, and I used to say, there’s no way I’m ever going to have children. If I got married, I’d just adopt them all, because I wasn’t going to go through childbirth! There was no way. But at the age of 14, the Lord . . . You know, I’m glad He doesn’t leave you to certain places. At the age of 14, I’d been reading certain Scriptures and really became convinced that God does open and close the womb, like He says.

This really seemed to be His jurisdiction and something that would need to be left in His realm. But I was still really resistant to the idea of childbirth. As we went along, I remember at 16 years of age really thinking that God is good, and if I really believed He was good, and that the way He created the world was good, then this also must be good.

Nancy: The way He created you was good!

Genevieve: Yes! Womanhood and womanliness, and able to have children. I knew theoretically that I needed to accept this, and I did, but it was with this little complaint of, “Eww, but why does it have to be this way? The mess, and the inconvenience, the pain, and the needles!”

Nancy: Of course, knowing that you went into marriage, knowing that, “Yes, if I’m getting married, I’ve got to be open to childbirth.” You knew you would have to face that.

Genevieve: Yes. It’s an interesting thing to be where I am now with 11 children, because I think a lot of people looking at me now, sometimes I get the impression they think I’m here because this has all been easy for me. In fact, I have nearly lost my lost my life more than once in childbirth. I’m only here now because of what God’s done in my life and how He’s helped me overcome my fear. He’s helped me to trust Him.

Nancy: And so, you've had to overcome fears in the face of incredible things. Let’s hear your stories. Of course, we’re not going to fit them all in in this podcast. We’ll just start with one maybe, and we’ll do another podcast to hear more.

Genevieve: Okay. That sounds great! So, I was pregnant with Natalie shortly after we got married. I remember this tiny little moment where I felt a little panic. Like, “Oh no! I’m pregnant! And I’ve been afraid of childbirth! This is what I’ve been afraid of all this time!” Pregnancy is a one-way journey to childbirth.

Nancy: Yes! You don’t get out of it!

Genevieve: I remember thinking, “Well, there’s no other option but to give this fear to God.” That’s what I did. When we first got married, even on our honeymoon, Pete pulled out a verse: 2 Corinthians 10:5. He said, “Let’s start, even right now, start memorizing Scriptures together.” So, this was our first verse.

Nancy: That’s a wonderful thing to do at the beginning of your marriage!

Genevieve: Can you imagine? It was wonderful!

Nancy: I know you think, “Thank You, Lord, that I’m married to a man like this!” Amen. Yes, of course, we know God’s highest purpose is for marriage. I also think one of them is the fact that He brings two together to pray together. “If two of you on earth should agree as touching anything, it shall be done to them as My Father, which is in heaven.”

What a glorious promise for marriage! If two of you! I went into marriage claiming that promise. We have always been a praying couple. That is one of the reasons I married my husband. He was a man of prayer. I have loved that. A man of prayer and a man of the Word. You can’t beat it, can you?

Genevieve: No, that’s right.

Nancy: I love that, how you started memorizing together.

Genevieve: The verse he said we should start with was:“Casting down arguments, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.” Here I was, so early in our pregnancy, needing to put this verse into practice. I had this moment of fear. I said, “OK, I’m just not going to think about this. This is going to be in the Lord’s hands and we’re just going to trust Him.”

One of the things I did through my pregnancy was to do a lot of study into natural childbirth. I tell you what, that’s a really wonderful thing, when you are afraid, because so much of it is the fear of the unknown. When you study and you read, you don’t dispel all the unknown withyour first, but it gives you a lot of confidence. Then the confidence decreases your fear, which is a wonderful thing.

But throughout the pregnancy, at various points, I was dragged down by this internal dialog I had inside me, which was, “Why does it have to be this way with childbirth and women being made this way? God was God, and couldn’t He have organized things some other way?” Sadly, I did not succeed in taking those thoughts captive. I tried, but every now and then, they would just pop right into my mind.

Throughout my pregnancy, I was interested in home birth. But my husband, Pete said, “We live too far from the hospital. Let’s just deliver in the hospital.” We only lived 25 minutes from the hospital, but I submitted to him in that.

I do believe that when the Bible says we should submit our husbands in all things, that this certainly fit within that category of “all things.” I also believe that the Lord really protects us through the leadership of our husbands. That was a really good call that Pete made. We didn’t know it at the time, but I nearly died with Natalie. It wasa good thing that I went with his plan on this topic.

Two really significant things happened during Natalie’s pregnancy. The first was that I overheard two ladies at my church talking about a book that one or the other had read. It was a book on Christian childbirth.I think the book was abou tdifferent verses that you could read at different parts of your labor and delivery. Different prayers maybe; I’m not really sure. I haven’t read the book.

But I remember overhearing them and they were mocking about this. “Why would you do this?” I had this moment of clarity. I realized that, that was in fact exactly what I want my labors and deliveries to look like. I all of a sudden had this vision for what I wanted them to look like.

Nancy: Well, finish this story for Natalie, OK?

Genevieve:All rightie! I realized I really wanted God to be my helping guide through this pregnancy, through pregnancy and birth, particularly through the labor and delivery. I really wanted to walk closely with Him through the whole labor and delivery. So, I did. I went home after that and gathered together a lot of verses that I thought I might like to meditate on to encourage me during various parts of the labor and delivery, which have been an encouragement though all these eleven deliveries.

The second important thing that happened during Natalie’s birth was that a friend suggested that I set up a prayer team. I did. The best thing, in fact, that I did to prepare for labor and delivery was to set up a prayer team. I did it for Natalie’s delivery and I did it for all the rest. What does it look like . . . it has looked a little different through all the eleven deliveries, depending on the technology available to us.

But back then, we organized a prayer team, friends and family who were willing to pray for me while I was in labor, then we would have a coordinator. During labor and delivery, Pete would message the coordinator, and then the coordinator would send the messages out to the team so we could keep them up to date with what was happening—what point of the labor we were at, and if there were any difficulties we could alert the team to please pray for this specific thing.

In December 2008, I went into labor with Natalie. I nearly died. She was a big baby. She was 10 lbs. 1 oz. I was pushing for way too long. Her placenta was about the same size as she was, so I had an over-distended uterus. I was just enormous. I had uterine atony and retained products. All of that led to a post-partum hemorrhage.

About three hours after she was born, she was healthy and well. She was doing great. But I was bleeding, and I was taken to the operating room. We call it the “theater” in Australia and New Zealand, but here it’s the “operating room.” So, I was taken to the operating room for a D&C. I was given a very large transfusion. I’d lost nearly three liters of blood in all. The transfusion saved my life, and they stabilized me.

But when they give you a transfusion, they don’t give you enough to bring you back to fully functioning energy. They just give you enough to stabilize you, so afterwards the doctor said to me, “Please don’t even think about exercising for the next three or four months. You’re going to have to do a lot of resting and build up your energy, build up your blood.”

They really wanted me to spend a lot of time just lying flat on my back, especially the next four weeks. Just lying flat on my back to rest, which I did. There was a little bit of loneliness there, flat on my back in my room with my lovely newborn.

But during that time, I used to get these flashbacks to when the doctor had done the D&C. She came into my hospital room and sort of debriefed me and told me all that had happened to me in the operating room. She said really gruffly, almost accusationally, accusing me. She said, “It took an hour to stabilize you in there.”

And those words, and those gruff tones would flash back at me, and I would just have to take every thought captive and push that out of my mind, because it was a very unpleasant flashback to have.

Through all that, that childhood fear of childbirth came back again. But I did force myself to take every thought captive and to just trust the Lord. I remember saying, “Lord, You know I’m terrified to go through childbirth again. But I’m going to obey You by continuing to be open to future pregnancies in Your time frame. You’re going to have to deal with my fear and take it away. So, I’ll just trust You to do it.” I basically took the whole issue and passed it over to Him and didn’t think about it again.

Nancy: That wasn’t easy. You did that by faith.

Genevieve: No, not easy. Four months later, pregnant with Caleb.

Nancy: Wow! Well, I think we’re going to have to hear what happened next time! Wow. We’ve kind of left you on a pretty traumatic thing, but the amazing thing about childbirth is that a traumatic situation doesn’t have to happen the second time. Every birth is different, isn’t it?

Next week, tune in. We’re going to see what happens next time. The next podcast, Genevieve is going to share about more of her birth experiences. Thank you so much for being with us, Genevieve.

Genevieve: Thank you.

Nancy:

“Lord God, we thank You again for Your wonderful goodness to us. Thank You, Lord, that You are a faithful God. We thank You that You are faithful, even in childbirth. You are the One who brings the baby safely from the mother’s womb.

“Lord, here we are, sitting with Genevieve today, the mother of 11 children. You have been so faithful to her. We thank You, Lord. We pray that mothers now who are listening who are pregnant, that You will encourage them, that You will strengthen their faith, and that You will bless them, and You will bring, Lord, their babies forth safely into this world. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.”

Genevieve: Amen.

Nancy: Amen!

Blessings from Nancy Campbell

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www.aboverubies.org

Transcribed by Darlene Norris

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“LIFE TO THE FULL w/ Nancy Campbell, Above Rubies”

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