We’ve been grateful for God’s gentle way of dealing with us over the past 22 months. We have needed time and space to digest and to heal and ultimately to embrace Cam’s situation. It’s been relatively easy for me to share our story in the cathartic realm of cyber space, where vulnerability is not so tangible. But if we’d been asked, say, a year ago to share our story in public, with a real audience of real people who may not ‘tread softly on [our] dreams’ as Yeats suggests, we may not have been ready. This month, we were asked to speak at a conference which is taking place in May in Pietermaritzburg, and our ready acceptance struck me as powerful evidence of God’s healing in our lives, and of His enabling, equipping faithfulness, and of His not testing us beyond what we are able to endure. This month, too, we’ve made contact with a family in Cape Town whose baby boy has congenital cataracts and microphthalmia and it’s been awesome to share with them – now that we are able.
Our cell group saw photos this week of congenital cataract patients in Benin, served by Mercy Ships. It’s always hard for me to see things like that, and to make sense of all the unfairness on the planet. But it reminded me to be grateful for the incredible visual care that Cam gets, literally on a daily basis, and for how much hope God has poured into our lives.
Something we wrestled with in the ‘early days’ was the decision of whether or not to have another baby. There’s no family evidence that Cameron’s condition is genetic, but there is a possibility that it is genetic, and if so, there is a chance that our next baby will have the same thing. If recessive genes were not the cause, then it means that something went wrong on a particular day at a particular time in my particularly normal and uneventful pregnancy. We will never know what it was, and we will never know how to avoid it again.
But, because he is just unthinkably awesome, we would have ten of Cameron if we could.
And God has blessed us: there is another little Reyburn on the way, due to arrive in September, DV :) According to the all-knowing internet, he/she is already 1.6 cm long and has taste buds. We are excited, and a bit terrified.
As for Cam, he will tell you that there is a ‘tiny baby in Mommy’s tummy.’ He has a broadening repertoire of songs, colours and numbers, and is saying whole sentences, using auxiliary verbs and everything :) (He still struggles with stairs and push bikes. He also has a snotty nose, but we soldier on!)
‘But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.’ – C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 1962
‘Much-Afraid told herself that never before had she realised what the awakening from the death of winter was like. Perhaps it had needed the desert wastes to open her eyes to all this beauty, but she walked through the wood, almost forgetting for a little that Sorrow and her sister [Suffering] also walked with her.... “You see, the winter has gone at last. The delay was not unto death but for the glory of God. Never was there a fairer spring than this.”’ – Hannah Hurnard, Hinds’ Feet on High Places, 1975
Our cell group saw photos this week of congenital cataract patients in Benin, served by Mercy Ships. It’s always hard for me to see things like that, and to make sense of all the unfairness on the planet. But it reminded me to be grateful for the incredible visual care that Cam gets, literally on a daily basis, and for how much hope God has poured into our lives.
Something we wrestled with in the ‘early days’ was the decision of whether or not to have another baby. There’s no family evidence that Cameron’s condition is genetic, but there is a possibility that it is genetic, and if so, there is a chance that our next baby will have the same thing. If recessive genes were not the cause, then it means that something went wrong on a particular day at a particular time in my particularly normal and uneventful pregnancy. We will never know what it was, and we will never know how to avoid it again.
But, because he is just unthinkably awesome, we would have ten of Cameron if we could.
And God has blessed us: there is another little Reyburn on the way, due to arrive in September, DV :) According to the all-knowing internet, he/she is already 1.6 cm long and has taste buds. We are excited, and a bit terrified.
As for Cam, he will tell you that there is a ‘tiny baby in Mommy’s tummy.’ He has a broadening repertoire of songs, colours and numbers, and is saying whole sentences, using auxiliary verbs and everything :) (He still struggles with stairs and push bikes. He also has a snotty nose, but we soldier on!)
‘But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.’ – C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 1962
‘Much-Afraid told herself that never before had she realised what the awakening from the death of winter was like. Perhaps it had needed the desert wastes to open her eyes to all this beauty, but she walked through the wood, almost forgetting for a little that Sorrow and her sister [Suffering] also walked with her.... “You see, the winter has gone at last. The delay was not unto death but for the glory of God. Never was there a fairer spring than this.”’ – Hannah Hurnard, Hinds’ Feet on High Places, 1975
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