“Wasn’t your youngest child born on Easter Sunday?”  I was asked the other day.  “Yes”, I replied, surprised she had remembered.  “Wow… that’s spooky!” was her response. 

I know what she means.  It was two years ago our little (and I mean little!!) baby girl was born ten weeks early weighing in at 1460 gms.  New life in our family.  And what’s “spooky”, is that that’s what Easter Sunday is all about.  (For those of you who don’t know the meaning behind Easter Sunday, that’s the day when Jesus rose again from death – and as Christians we celebrate this as being a day of new life.)

She could have been born on any day really, but I think that it is amazing that God chose Easter Sunday for her to come into this world.

Our little girl is a miracle in many ways.  I had come to the point of accepting that we would never have any “normal” children, when God threw me a “curve ball” in the form of what I can only describe as being a very definite “spiritual encounter”, telling us to go ahead and have another baby.  It would be almost another year before we had enough guts to follow through on this – after all, we had two severely disabled children to look after already, we didn’t have the energy for a third child (normal or otherwise).

The verse God gave me on the night of that spiritual encounter (which I admit to taking ages to find in the Bible at the time!) talked of the plans God had for us, plans to give us hope. 

It’s funny, when we named our daughter, coming up with the first name was easy.  But the middle name was mulled over for days after her birth.  Finally we decided on the name “Hope”.  You may well think I’m stupid, but it wasn’t until months after we had named her that I realised how “spooky” it was that we had decided on the middle name of Hope … (I’m afraid that the verse had sort of gone on the back burner with all that happened from my waters breaking at 26 weeks to her birth at 30 weeks).  Hope was exactly what God had promised to give us!!!  And there she was – tiny, but healthy, lying in an incubator.

The other thing that was a miracle about our daughter was the fact that if she had been born when she was meant to, at the end of June, her Grandad (who died in May) wouldn’t have had the chance to see her.  It is very special to our family that we will be able to say to our daughter when she gets older, that her Grandad came and visited her twice when she was a tiny baby in an incubator.  She will always have that special connection with her Grandad.

Our little girl has given the extended family so much hope and joy in the last two years.

Thank you God!!!