God's Fingerprints
August 2017 Newsletter
Dear Friend,
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On Monday the 17th of July, I (Chrysti) was booked for induction of labour. Once admitted to the labour ward at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, the midwife looking after me introduced herself.
“Hi, my name is Tracy; I’ll be looking after you today.”
I couldn’t believe it. “I think you delivered my Titus!” I told her.
She remembered us. Long before we knew I’d deliver in Newcastle again, I prayed that we’d know the midwife who delivered our new baby. Of all the dozens of midwives in Newcastle, God answered this prayer with the only midwife I really knew on that side of the country. It gave us peace from the start to have a familiar face present.
Ellis Matthew, our “Benevolent Gift of God,” greeted us at 5:30 in the evening, just in time for us to have our dinner.
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The next day we met with Ellis’ surgeon on the Special Care Baby Unit. He explained that Ellis’ ultrasound scan indicated Ellis had a benign tumour on his coccyx (tailbone), in addition to the cyst that antenatal scans showed. The surgeon ordered an MRI scan and hopefully surgery for the following day. Amazingly, the MRI happened when the surgeon wanted.
After sending Ellis off to the operating theatre at two days old, we waited all afternoon and into the evening. Leon got a phone call from the surgeon at 9:30 pm informing us that Ellis was out of theatre and the operation was successful. We visited our recovering baby boy on PICU, in awe of the fact that surgery was complicated yet straightforward.
God’s fingerprints are all over Ellis’ life. God answered our prayers in many ways, from my midwife to the timing of surgery, to blessing our family with another little boy.
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Prior to Ellis’ birth, we asked Asher if he wanted a brother or sister. Asher said he wanted a little sister. He was convinced the baby would be a girl. A lot of time passed before we realised why. In Asher’s mind, you only bring little sisters home from hospital (Eva Joy); little brothers (Titus) never come home. We found that we subconsciously were going through that same emotion.
To be honest, we had mixed emotions with the birth of Ellis. We were excited to have another baby to love. At the same time, memories of Titus and our experiences with him cropped up everywhere we turned. We were all mixed up inside. Grief somehow allows us to feel both joy and sorrow at the same time, and that is an uncomfortable combination of emotions.
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I (Leon) feel that I am growing more competent in my role as team leader for the Carlisle OM team. I am on a leadership training program for OM until next February. I’m encouraged as I learn new things and find that often I had already been doing things well. Or I can quickly apply what I am learning as I work out my leadership role. I care for the well-being of the team very much, and I am thrilled to see measured improvements spiritually and emotionally for our team.
On the IT side of things, only authorised sources of OM email will get into inboxes. A couple weeks back we began flagging emails that come from an unknown source as spam. We do this to protect our reputation, but more importantly to protect against email fraud. OM-ers have been a victim of fraud and we want to steward our resources.
Last week I upgraded our email server from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2016.The upgrade positions us to support our Office 365 setup and adds the potential for new functionality.
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- We’re grateful for God’s hand of care for us all in Ellis’ birth, surgery and recovery.
- We had a fantastic response from our neighbours at our 4th of July party. We got to know neighbours we hadn’t previously met. Our neighbours initiated some great conversations about faith. Pray we continue to have these conversations as we grow our relationships with them.
- Leon’s mum came over to assist with the birth and afterwards. She has been a huge help and blessing these last few weeks.
- Please pray for Leon’s rotator cuff (shoulder). It is getting better but is still not entirely healed.
- Pray we have the motivation to setup meetings for our upcoming trip to the US. We also pray for God-ordained times of fellowship while in the US.
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The first week of September sees us as a family in London to register Ellis’ birth at the US Embassy, get him a US passport and renew Asher’s US passport. This is to get us ready to travel to the US in November – January. Get your calendars out and expect a call from us to meet up while there!
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God Bless,
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