When my husband Terry and I got married, May 10, 1969, we had so many things that looked like they were working against us. The doctor had told me for years that I’d never be able to have a baby at all — that I couldn’t carry one. He said, “If by some slim chance you were ever to get pregnant, you’d have to spend the whole nine months in bed. But, even at that, I doubt that you could carry it.” Well-meaning friends of the family and family members all said to Terry, “You know, Jackie can’t have children. It’s really a shame too, the way she loves babies and has always wanted to have a house full.”

We didn’t know the Word then like we do now, but Terry did know that God healed and he knew some basics of the Bible from growing up in church. He knew we could pray and change things. Most of all, he knew God and knew that God’s Word was always — in every area — accurate. For all the years I’ve known him, his standard comment on any subject is “Who said?” It makes big difference who said it. “What does God say? What does the Bible say?” So he told me, “I appreciate medical doctors and medical science. They’ve come a long way, and I hope they go farther. But they are not our source, our answer, our final authority.”

God says we can have children. And we will have all the children we want,” Terry said.

We didn’t know the details or the methods or exactly how to make it work in those early days, but we knew the will of God was to have children. It was His idea; He thought children up. He ordered them in the Garden of Eden. We knew that we could, that we would, have babies.

We prayed and we were so excited to find out, after we were married only a few months, that I was expecting our first baby. Even though all the things I had been told about not being able to have babies were all so real in my mind, and of course, had produced so many fears, I did have hope because we had prayed and asked God for children. Terry had just about convinced me it was possible, and I began to have faith in his faith that God would answer our prayer.

When I was about eight weeks along, I started bleeding, and all the fears and doubts I had came back. Within a few hours, I lost the baby.

Even though I was only a few weeks pregnant, that baby was as real to me as any baby I had ever seen. Any woman who has been pregnant knows what I’m talking about too. Many times men don’t understand the trauma of a miscarriage because to them the baby is not a reality yet. They often try to comfort their wife with, “It’s okay — we will try again.” And that doesn’t comfort us, because to a woman that baby is a reality from conception. It affects mothers because it is not just a “miscarriage”; it is the loss of a child. And it takes a period of time to recover emotionally, just as it does with the loss of any loved one.

Of course, the fears, anxieties and everything terrible that everyone had told me still bombarded my mind. It looked like it was just impossible for us to ever have children, and to have children was the desire of my heart. I had no greater ambition (and still don’t) than to be a wife and mother. I was convinced that was the very best job I could ever have in the whole world — and you know what? It is. I’ve made the statement for years that to be Terry’s wife and our four children’s mother is the highest calling I could ever achieve.

For a whole year, I cried each month when my period came because I wanted to be pregnant and wasn’t.

Then Terry got drafted into the army, and we moved three hundred miles away from everyone we knew and everyone who knew us. That was very good for us. We were on our own. We spent serious time getting into the Word of God and building our faith.

We decided to pray and ask God for a baby. We prayed and believed God that we would have a baby, and I got pregnant again. This time we knew, that we knew, that we knew, that we would have a baby. We did everything that we wanted to do. Terry was stationed at Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Texas, and we didn’t have a car, so we rode a borrowed motorcycle until I was so big with the baby that I was embarrassed to ride it anymore. We did everything. We even went mountain climbing outside of El Paso. And not one time did I even start to miscarry. You see, once we made up our minds and determined in our hearts that we were going to have a baby, that we could pray, that God would hear and answer that prayer because it was His will, that’s what God did. God will meet you at your level of faith — whatever that level is — and that’s where our faith was.

Terry was in the army, and they do things a little differently in the army. They put me in the hospital a few days before the baby was even due because they thought he was going to be a large baby and they wanted to watch me. The doctors said because of possible complications, they were going to induce labor Wednesday morning, August 11, 1971.

Well, we knew that we could pray and God would hear our prayer. It was no big faith feat — we didn’t know anything about faith — we just knew the simple truth that God would hear our prayers. We have always believed that prayer changes things. We prayed that I’d go into labor by myself — that labor would not be induced — that the baby would be born before noon, and that the labor would be short. (We didn’t know at that time we could pray for a painless delivery.) It was stretching our faith to believe to deliver the baby safe and whole, in a short time.

The hospital staff got real busy and didn’t have time to induce me into labor. I went into labor by myself, and after three hours and fifteen minutes, our little miracle, that the doctors said would never happen, arrived.

Lynn Noel, not a large baby — only seven pounds, five ounces — was born at 11:45 a.m. on the very day he was due, just as we prayed. We got everything we prayed for.

Because I was a gestation diabetic (diabetes showing only during pregnancy), we were depending on God to balance Lynn’s blood sugar. Being in an army hospital, procedures were done routinely. They immediately began an intravenous solution of sugar water in the veins of my baby’s tiny little head so the insulin would not cause him to convulse. It was awful the first time Terry and I saw Lynn with needles taped to the sides of his shaved little head. But in only a few hours, his blood sugar level had come into balance, and we never had another problem with it.

Before I got pregnant again, we applied our faith against diabetes and declared, “I’m healed by the stripes of Jesus.” In the next three pregnancies, I always made it a point to tell the doctors that I had been a gestation diabetic and should be checked. The tests always came back negative. Diabetes was never a factor again.

The world has programmed women to expect a long, torturous delivery with their first baby, but it doesn’t have to be that way for those who have a covenant with God. We have to totally change our thinking by renewing our mind with the Word of God on the subject of having babies, the same way we renew our mind concerning finances,  health, and everything else. We can no longer think the way the world thinks if we want to have the results, the promises and provisions that have been given to us as born-again believers.