God Told Me I’m Going to Have Twins

I feel stuck.

I’ve been feeling this way for a while, but I couldn’t explain why. I wasn’t sure what I felt stuck in. Just overall stuck.

Now I realize why I’ve been feeling stuck. I feel stuck between the life I’ve created for myself, which I thought was everything I wanted, and the life God is telling me to live.

I so desperately wanted to create my own life and my own version of success without the help of God. Now that I’ve accomplished the career goal I set for myself, I find myself feeling more unhappy and empty than ever before. I actually feel miserable going to work most days, and I have recently developed new health issues.

The opposite of sadness is not happiness.

I know this because I’ve spent the last 10 years doing essentially nothing except searching for happiness, and I have yet to be satisfied.

I tried to find happiness in relationships, my career, and alcohol.

Like sadness, happiness is always temporary. This world is full of troubles, and whatever happiness we find will always be fleeting. While we may try our hardest to search for happiness, it cannot always be found.

The opposite of sadness is contentment, or peace.

Peace can always be found. In difficult moments, we may not be able to find a single reason to be happy. It may feel like our world is completely meaningless. In those times, I believe God is our only hope. God is the only way we can feel peace beyond worldly understanding.

I am a counselor by profession. Within the past few months, my view of counseling and the world has changed. I still believe in counseling, but I have recently come to believe that people can only experience true and complete healing if they find peace with God. This promotes existential healing.

I believe in the power of change through counseling. However, counselors are not miracle workers or even advice-givers. A counselor’s job is not to give advice but to help individuals come to their own acceptance of life’s struggles.

Counseling only works if people are ready to change. Similarly, Christianity only works if people are ready to fully accept God.

Obviously, Christianity does not seem like the answer if you refuse to believe in God. If you cannot accept the existence of God, then you will have to find meaning for your existence somewhere else.

Sometimes you are only ready to accept God if you have exhausted all of your other efforts.

For years I was ashamed of God.

I was raised in a Christian home. When I turned 18 and went to college, I turned away from God.

Not consciously. I didn’t wake up one day and suddenly decide I was turning away from God. But it happened so easily because I was distracted with everything else in the world and trying to find myself, which is so easy to do in a society that tries to sell you every version of happiness except for God.

I didn’t want to associate myself with God anymore. I was ashamed because I didn’t want people to associate me with any of the stereotypes of Christianity. That those who believe in God are stupid, judgmental, hypocrites…

Maybe we are stupid and judgmental and hypocrites at times. Because those who believe in God are humans. I myself felt hurt so many times by Christians as I was growing up in church. Churches are composed solely of humans.

As I grew up, others in the church disappointed me, and if these were the people to look up to, I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore.

So no wonder I chose to turn away from God when I was finally old enough to choose. After all, as a child growing up in a Southern Baptist church, it was terrifying at times. Tall white men with white hair wearing suits seemed to be always yelling about the possibility of going to Hell. At five years old, I knew I didn’t want to spend eternity burning in flames and endless doom. So I did what any scared five-year-old would do in response to an old man jumping up and down and yelling that if you don’t get saved now, it may be too late, and you’ll spend eternity in Hell.

I walked up to the altar in tears, silently begging God not to send me to Hell. I remember a preacher coming down from the pulpit to the altar to talk to me. I don’t recall exactly what he said, but it was something to the effect of John 3:16. If you believe in God and accept Him, then you are saved from eternal damnation.

I don’t remember much more about that moment. Perhaps I only barely remember that fuzzy blip of time because the preacher had told me what a good, big decision I had made, and all the other adults in the room clapped and cheered.

But as I grew up, it never made sense to me. How could it be that simple? I walked up to an altar one time at five years old out of fear and asked God to save me, and that was it?

A few months ago, I saged my home with the intention of clearing negative energies and making room for positive change. That evening, I felt God say, “you have been saved, but I knew you wouldn’t feel fully saved until now.”

I collapsed on the floor in tears, yet I felt such a calm wash over me. I finally understood this so-called peace beyond wordly understanding.

God had begun speaking to me more clearly than ever in my life thus far.

A bit prior to that, He told me something else that deeply excited yet terrified me.

I was at work preparing for my second year as a high school counselor. I felt led to print and read Jeremiah chapter 29. I sat at my desk, debating the ethics of using the public school printer to print a Bible chapter using paper and ink paid for by taxpayers.

Further, I considered the ethics of using the time allotted for pre-planning to do a personal Bible devotion while I was technically supposed to be working on things to promote student wellbeing. Then I remembered what demographic area I served, and I figured hopefully no one would be upset about the misuse of educational resources in order to print a Bible chapter. I clicked print. I stapled the pages together, and began highlighting key phrases that stood out to me.

When I reached Jeremiah 29:6, I heard God’s voice suddenly with clarity.

“Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished.”

God told me I would have twins, and He told me their names.

I felt crazy. Could that really be God’s voice I was hearing? Or was my own brain playing tricks on me? I was a mental health professional, after all. I held deep pride in my knowledge of the human brain and behavior, although there is much left unknown.

With shaky hands, I used my phone to search for the meanings of the names lingering in my head. The meaning of the first name was “God’s oath,” or promise. The meaning of the second name was “God’s gift.”

I felt God saying, “I promise you will be a mom; that is my oath. The second child is my gift.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes. These names had suddenly just popped into my head, and those were their meanings? What kind of coincidence could that possibly be?

I wanted to leap for joy, yet simultaneously hide.

No one would believe me. I didn’t even fully believe it.

I had spent the last decade of my life trying to ignore God and spirituality altogether. I couldn’t run away or hide anymore. God was beginning to make His presence clearly known in my life.

There is a difference between hidden and private relationships.

I feel like I have to hide my relationship with God in public education to best serve the kids. As a school counselor in public education, I must remain professional and as unbiased as possible.

But I am done hiding. This is who I am, take it or leave it. If you think I am crazy for admitting on the internet for the world to see what God has spoken to me, then so be it. I feel crazy too. But I am tired of running away from God and trying to hide my relationship with Him.

Running is exhausting, and the thing about hidden relationships is that they don’t really work. You can keep details of a relationship private, but you cannot keep a relationship hidden.

The basis of hidden relationships is shame. If you are ashamed to admit to the outside world that you have a relationship with someone, then what kind of relationship really exists?

I am no longer ashamed of God. As I reflect, it is not really God that I was ever ashamed to admit I knew: it was Christianity. It was the stigma associated with being a Christian.

I was afraid that by labeling myself as a Christian that I was taking on all of the negative stereotypes and stigmas associated with that label.

But the thing is, if you want someone in your life, you have to accept the bad with the good. We don’t get to pick and choose which aspects we like about someone. We have to accept them as they are.

We also have to nourish relationships.

We spend so much time worrying about the wrong people and what they will think of us that we neglect people who truly matter to us. We must make time for these relationships.

So I’m here to tell you it’s not your fault if you’ve turned away from God. Sometimes it happens without us realizing it. Sometimes we do choose purposefully to turn away from God. That’s okay too. What matters is if we choose to return to God. If we do, God will always accept us because He loves us.

The irony of running away from God out of shame and fear of stigma and stereotypes is that the basis of God and all Bible teachings is simply love.

“And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

I Corinthians 13:13