Unplanned Love

Isn’t it interesting how we try so hard to impress everyone around us in an attempt to feel better about ourselves? I think that I am certainly not an exception to this, as I am constantly looking for acceptance from family and those around me. I have always fought with self assurance and the idea that I just wasn’t up to par in pretty much everything that I have ever been involved in. When I was younger it was due to the fact that I was so very shy and was not confrontational at all. I was a doormat and people walked all over me, and I let them. And then I grew up.

When I graduated high school and went into the the U.S. Navy I was forced to come out of my shell and I flourished. In all aspects of living I was a brand new person. I entered Boot Camp weighing in at 125 pounds and 10 weeks later I graduated 2nd in a graduating class of 600 recruits, weighing 180 pounds. I was confident, proud, sincerely happy in who I was. I looked like a brand new person, and I liked it. I wasn’t the scrawny little kid anymore, I was a young man in the U.S. Military. 

After a couple years after graduating from A School, I was awarded a full scholarship to John Hopkins University. I was so excited to share this with my family, yet apprehensive at the same time, as this would be the largest undertaking that I would ever take, short of getting married and having children. It was at this point in my life when I was thinking seriously about marriage and finally being with the girl of my dreams, since I was 16 years old. I was at this point almost 20 years old and more in love than any man had ever loved a woman. I know that sounds corny and perhaps way over used, but I knew it to be the truth, and I still love her just as much today. Both of us had always said that we wanted to wait for marriage before sex, and we did extremely well at that endeavor for nearly five years before we succumbed to the temptations that only God could make so good. My wife visited me in Philadelphia and when she left that weekend I told her that she was pregnant, and she assured me that she wasn’t. She told me that she would get a pregnancy test when she got home and call me when she got home. That pacified me for the time being.

The next day she did call and had a very relieved sound to her voice when she exclaimed  that, “we are not pregnant”. I was not so sure and told her that I had a strong feeling that I couldn’t explain that said different. After two more pregnancy tests came back negative I was still convinced that she was in fact pregnant. She agreed to go to the OBGYN off the school campus and get a pregnancy test done and I agreed that if that one came back negative I would let it go. Later that afternoon she called me and was very quiet and I knew before she told me. Something inside me knew that she was pregnant and I sincerely believe that it was God who kept me convinced of that fact. Had we taken any kind of action at all I would not be blessed with my son Matthew, his wife Tabitha, and the two most special grandchildren in the world, Christopher and Alexis. None of them may not have been in our original plan, but I know for certain they were all in God’s.  I didn’t go to medical school, instead I came home from the Navy to prepare for my future family.

My life has taken an unplanned turn over the past two years and I am being forced to plan for things that I would have preferred doing later in life. It saddens me to think about my wife being alone in the coming years, but it makes me think about her impromptu trip to Philadelphia, our unplanned and misguided lack of good judgement that led to  being pregnant after the first time. Our unplanned son led to his wife, two children, and his two sisters who would all not be here if we hadn’t interrupted “our” plan and let God have it His way in our circumstance.