I asked God for free parking. Here’s what happened.

 

There I was in about July of this year, sitting in my car and talking to God about an old subject that tends to crop up (more and more often, it seems).

“God,” I said, “I  need money. A million dollars would be nice. Or maybe you could help me get a literary agent and sell a book. Or maybe a raise–a raise would also be nice.” (I like to give God plenty of ideas for his plans, in case he’s running short)

“See, in case you forgot,” I told God, “this is our first year as a single-income family. I’m the breadwinner, which by the way appears to have been your idea and not mine, and it’s been 6 years since my last raise. During that time, taxes in Chicago have gone up, so my paycheck has actually gone DOWN. What’s up with that, God? Also, my family size has increased from no kids to three kids, and all those diapers . . . Oh, plus a mortgage. Oh, and property taxes saw the largest hike in history right after we bought our house (side note, God, maybe you could do something about the corruption in Chicago?). Oh, and plus life insurance, which we didn’t need before kids. Oh, and plus a bigger car to accommodate said kids and all of a sudden expenses associated with school. Anyway God, have you forgotten about us?”

So, as I was saying, I was in the car, praying out loud like I like to do. I think I was heading to the hospital for a pregnancy check-up since I was close to having this little bean.

Suddenly I realized that parking in the hospital garage was going to cost $4.

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

NOT $4!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I circled around the neighborhood trying to find free parking, but it’s all permit-only in the surrounding streets (makes sense). So I went into the garage.

Seriously, that $4 was suddenly bringing me to tears. I was like, “God, this is ridiculous. I don’t want to be worrying about $4 for parking! Maybe you could work it out so that parking is free.”

When I came out from my appointment, I tried to pre-pay for parking on the machine in the lobby. It wasn’t working. Then I remembered they had machines at the exit that you can use from your car. “I’ll just use that,” I decided.

Those machines didn’t work either. I called “Help” with the little green button. The gate went up and I went through–FOR FREE!

Oh my word.

I’d been going to that hospital for give-or-take 6 years–for yearly female check-ups, pregnancy stuff, having surgery, being pregnant, having babies–and I had NEVER gotten out of there with free parking.

Never.

Until the day I prayed.

Of course, I cried.

Then I told my husband the story. And all my friends.

The next time I went, I prayed again. And guess what. IT WAS FREE AGAIN.

After Isaac was born, I went in with him. IT WAS FREE AGAIN.

Babies have a lot of appointments when they’re fresh out of the cooker, so next time I went back I was like, “Well God, you’ve certainly given me a lot of free parking. Thank you so much. Um, I know this little parking situation we’ve worked out may not go on for the rest of my life or anything. But could you do it one more time?”

I eyed the machines as I drove into the garage. The machines appeared to be fully functional. Okay, fine, I can totally do $4, no big deal, it’s really fine. An hour or so later, I left. I pulled up to the gate to pay. And guess what. There, sitting in the little slot where you insert the ticket to get out, was an already-paid-for ticket. Just waiting for me. I pushed it in, the gate went up, and I drove away.

“Aaaaah!” I said. “Ohmygosh, God, what did you just do!?!?!” Then I told the story fifty million times to all the same people that had heard it before.

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Fast forward to today. It was Isaac’s 4 month appointment. I arranged to go into work late so I could take him. Right before leaving, I wrote down the $4 in the budget so that when I got home I could head right back out to work without wasting any time.

“Oh,” said my husband with a grin. “Not putting God to the test, huh?”

“God,” I said, immediately turning my face upwards-ish like I do sometimes, “I’m not putting you to the test. But if you did give me free parking again, that would be so great.”

When I arrived in the garage, all gates again appeared functional. But when I left an hour later, the gates were all up. The two cars in front were not able to pay. I could tell based on the fact that a lady got out of her car and tried jamming her credit card in, like four times before driving away.

I drove up next. I did the responsible thing and tried my own credit card. But clearly the system was down. The gate was up; I drove through.

“Okay God,” I said, “Thank you thank you thank you. Well, now I have to tell this story again. My friends are probably tired about hearing about my free parking over and over again. Huh. I think I’ll put it on my blog and tell a fresh batch of people about it.”

So here I am, to say this:

God has not given me a million dollars, though I have asked him more than a few times. But by giving me free parking, he has said to me so clearly: “I hear your prayers. I care for your needs. And I will provide.”

It’s one of those times where I can just hear God saying, I AM HERE! I AM LISTENING!

And can I just say? This string of miracles, which has gotten to feel like an inside joke between me and my Heavenly Papa, is so much more personal-feeling than a million dollars. It’s like a wink from above. A squeeze on the arm, saying, “I got this. You don’t have to be afraid.”

I can’t tell you how much it’s meant to me, this free parking joke/blessing.

It blows me away: I am in a relationship with God (!?!?). The same God who made space-time and did funky quantum things cares enough about ME to answer a small but deeply-felt prayer for something that in the scope of the universe could seem quite insignificant.

But it’s not insignificant to Him, because it’s not insignificant to me.

Oh what a good God I have.

And how it encourages me to keep asking for whatever I need–or think I need–or even just want! A million dollars is still on that list. But more than a million dollars, I want exactly what I already have: a Father who is good, who listens, who gives abundantly when the time is right and comforts me when I cry in the car.

I love these verses from Psalm 62:5-11:

For God alone my soul waits in silence,
    for my hope is from him.
6 He alone is my rock and my salvation,
    my fortress; I shall not be shaken.
7 On God rests my deliverance and my honor;
    my mighty rock, my refuge is in God.

8 Trust in him at all times, O people;
    pour out your heart before him;
    God is a refuge for us.

9 Those of low estate are but a breath,
    those of high estate are a delusion;
in the balances they go up;
    they are together lighter than a breath.
10 Put no confidence in extortion,
    and set no vain hopes on robbery;
    if riches increase, do not set your heart on them.

11 Once God has spoken;
    twice have I heard this:
that power belongs to God,
12     and steadfast love belongs to you, O Lord.

I love prayer.

For me, prayer isn’t boring or formulaic or blah–it’s an actual conversation with a God who listens.

While I want to pray ‘well’ (whatever that means), I also don’t worry about how I ‘sound’ to God. I figure, whatever I throw at him, he can handle it. Not that I try to be rude or anything–but I do keep it real (if not, what’s the point?). And if real is me crying and shouting and saying “Why are you DOING THIS TO ME!?” as I sit alone in my parked car in the dark privacy of the garage, then that’s what prayer is at that moment.

Yes, there are times of prayer that are full of awe and reverence. Or wordless praise. But for all those times, there are other times when I’m like, “I don’t like, this, God!!! How about, if this is your plan, you change your plan? Oh, and could you remind me later that I need to put popcorn on the grocery list?”

Ultimately, I’m God’s kid. And as my good Father, I don’t have to worry about what he thinks about me. Because I know what he think about me–he loves me.

So, friends–pour out your heart to him!

And if anyone from Swedish Covenant is upset that my prayers keep breaking their credit card processing system, all I can say is, um . . . sorry?


Isaac’s Birth Story

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They said, “you’ll take a million pictures of your first baby. By number three, well, they’re lucky if they get a single dang picture.”

“Hogwash,” I said. “I will take an equal amount of pictures of each of my children. I will write an equal amount of blog posts about each of my children. They will be equally loved, equally posted about, because I am an Equal Opportunity Employer. I mean Mother.”

Ha ha ha ha.

{wipes tears of laughter out of eyes because I’m no longer under the 20-year-old’s delusion that I am different in every way from everyone else in the world} {though I’m sure some wise 20-year-olds are out there who are, like, uh, knew that}

Anyway. I blogged weekly through my pregnancy with Alice. Then, during my pregnancy with Ben I pretty much didn’t blog . . . but I managed to squeak out his birth story at least. And now, with little Isaac, well–the least I can do is blog once. That’s the least I can do.

So. It’s a tale simply told.

There I was, on Tuesday August 8th, at work. Everyone kept joking, well, today might be the last day we see you! I was always like, no way. I’ve never gone early before. I’m gonna be here until his due date. Possibly beyond. In fact, I’m pretty sure he will never be born and I will always be pregnant.

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(Side note: funny how it never seems possible that a baby will come out of your body, even after you’ve done it multiple times)

On Tuesday, as fate would have it, I finished up three major projects at work that I had to get done before I went on my 3-month maternity leave.

I also noticed my back pain, the cruel companion of over half my pregnancy, was mysteriously gone.

Huh.

Around 7pm, kiddos in bed, my husband and I retreated to our bedroom, the hangout place of choice due to the large amount of pillows I required to prop my aching body up and the nearness of the bathroom wherein I had to go to pee about every 2.2 minutes.

Duly reclined in the soft embrace of my pillow throne, I hopped on Facebook. Lalala, something outrageous about Trump, ooh someone got engaged, oooh someone ate some really good-looking sushi . . . WAIT, WHAT?

My pregnant friend, due right around the same time as me, had just given birth to a gorgeous, fat little baby. I showed my husband.

“Look at this. Isn’t he adorable,” I said in a despairing voice. Tears filled my eyes. “Isn’t this great? Wow. And by the way this will NEVER happen to me. I will ALWAYS be pregnant.”

The universe has a funny way about it. Because an hour later, my water broke. There I was, still in bed, and I felt a small gush. I hopped out of bed like, whoops, uh . . . surely I’m not peeing on myself . . . ohmygosh I’m peeing on myself . . . wait, no . . . could this be . . . could this possibly be my water breaking?

Then I was like, no, it can’t be. This didn’t happen with either of my other two births. With Alice and Ben, I was in active labor when my water broke.

But liquid continued to trickle out.

Is this really what I think it is?

Then again, what else could it be??

I couldn’t come up with anything else this liquid could possibly be. And yet I still couldn’t quite believe it.

Well, Google had to have the answers. I looked up: what color should it be? (clear) What should it smell like (slightly sweetish–NOT like urine). I even considered Googling what it tasted like, then I realized that might put me on some kind of Most Wanted for Creepiness alert with the government. Then I Googled it anyway. Turns out no one has tasted their amniotic fluid and I was, after all, an utterly disgusting human for being the very first person to come up with that idea.

(In my defense, I figured the baby breathes it in all day–can’t be that bad for me, eh?)

Moving on. I waited for a couple hours. When I realized I was soaking through pad after pad, I called the midwife group and told them I was pretty sure my water was breaking. We also called my mother-in-law, who drove in to spend the night. It felt funny having her come when I wasn’t in labor, but it would have been worse to wait until 3am and scare the crap out of her with a middle-of-the-night phone call.

So. We packed the hospital bag. Then we went to bed. And I waited for the contractions to start. I imagined it would be something like my birth experience with Ben–contractions that would kind of ramp up during the night, intensify in the morning, then we’d head into the hospital, get the epidural, give birth, Falalalala.*

(*The Falalala is a distinctly post-epidural thing)

Thing is, the contractions never really ramped up. They looked like they were going to for a while–the pain even got intense-ish during the first few hours of the night as I lay in bed. Every time one hit, I closed my eyes and thought, “get through two more contractions and then you can wake El Hubby-O up and we’ll go to the hospital.” (see, I wanted to let him sleep as long as possible so that he’d have energy for The Event)

In this manner, hours passed. I kept saying to myself, “Just one more contraction and then I’ll wake him up.”

Suddenly it was 7am, I was waking up, and realized I had been asleep for about four hours with no contractions.

Dang it, I thought. I knew I was on a 24-hour countdown from the time my water broke to the time the baby would have to come out, one way or another. I called the midwives. They told me to come on in, because I had to deliver a baby by 8pm that night.

We drove to the hospital some time around 10am. I had one single contraction right after leaving the garage. Since we were still in the alley, El Hubby-O stopped the car and we waited it out. Thankfully I had no more on the way. This was kind of nice because the contractions between parking lot and hospital when I gave birth to Ben were awful.

We got checked into the hospital. We did the whole hospital gown, IV in the arm routine. I got checked. They did a swab thingy to see if my water really had broken (news flash: it had). I think I was maybe 3 centimeters? 4? Something like that. Not bad, things were happening, but my contractions were still only every 20-30 minutes. They hurt like heck, but from past experience I knew they should have been much more painful and much closer together by this point.

“Pitocin,” they said, which I’d been expecting.

“Okay,” I said, already reconciled to whatever had to happen. “So when can I get the epidural?” I was under the impression that I had to suffer through some pitocin contractions for a while before getting permission for an epidural because the epidural risked slowing things down (which in turn would make a C-section more likely).

Turns out I was wrong. Turns out I could get the epidural BEFORE the pitocin.

“YES!” I shouted as I ran a victory lap, hugging nurses, doctors, random staff, even the inventor of epidurals.*

(*this all happened in my heart, not in physical space-time).

At this point, I’d like to note how much more relaxed I was this time around than with either of my previous experiences. Makes sense, right? I knew what was going on, I knew for the most part what to expect from my body and from the hospital staff (with some surprises). I have loved giving birth in the same hospital all three times. Funny detail–I was in the same room with the same midwife AND the same nurse for both Isaac and Ben’s births. The familiarity really helped.

Anyway. A nice woman with a nice needle came in and gave me the epidural. Gosh, it hurt. I don’t remember it hurting when I got one for Ben’s birth, but that was probably because with Ben I was in transition and the intense pain of that drowned out everything else. So know this: getting an epidural when you’re just “chilling out” is really quite painful. Let me repeat: QUITE PAINFUL. Yeeks. I shouted and growled so loudly that my husband (who, per the anesthesiologist’s request was outside the room) heard from the hall.

The drugs kicked in immediately.

I turned to the anesthesiologist. “Wow, I don’t remember it kicking in that quickly last time.”

“Oh, that’s because I always do a narcotic with it that makes it take effect right away,” she said nonchalantly.

“Huh,” I said, thinking she probably should have asked my preference and whether I was cool with narcotics or not but very quickly not caring because the narcotic was A-MAZING and made me feel like my body was afloat in an ocean of pleasure. Not exaggerating. An ocean of pleasure, people.

The only downside of the narcotic was that it made my skin itch until it wore off post-birth, but interestingly, it didn’t drive me crazy–I was mostly like, ‘whatever.’

After getting the epidural, the pitocin got started. Then I read a book and took a nap. Two hours later I realized I wanted to push.

“No,” I said to my husband. “This can’t be right. I can’t have gone from 4 to 10 centimeters in just two hours.” Then, suddenly, it was like the epidural wore off in two seconds.

“AAARCH!” I cried. “Okay, it’s not working! My drugs are broke*!”

(*I know it’s ‘broken,’ Mom. Broke just sounded more dramatic. Love you.)

What came next were about 25 minutes of intense suffering in the grips of transition.

The midwives were like, “You’re ready to push–why don’t we just do that?”

I was like, “NO!!! I NEED MY EPIDURAL BACK FIRST!”

I was (ehem) rather adamant.

They tried to tell me I’d push him out faster if I just did it without drugs–but they didn’t remember my pushing experience with Ben. The big guy flew out within two contractions, epidural and all, so I knew that it wouldn’t be a problem with Isaac.

Thankfully the anesthesiologist came back, upped my dose and the pain magically went away.

Then I was quite ready to push.

I was grateful in a weird way for the twenty-to-thirty minutes of suffering when the epidural broke. Birthing a human is such an intense experience, and for some reason having intense pain (for a short window, mind you!) helped me be more in the moment with what was happening. It’s like the largeness of the pain matched the largeness of the experience.

Of course, such philosophical thoughts (for me) only work when the pain is short-lived. Extend that pain to hours on hours and let’s just say I might not be so philosophical about it. (For proof you can read about my first experience giving birth)

Anyway, just like Ben, Isaac popped out within about two contractions.

Yippee!

Suddenly I had a wet, wriggly, purple-tinted baby on my chest.

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It was Isaac Gabriel. And he was wonderful in every way. And I was ready to fall in love again–which I promptly did as they stitched me up.

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If you’d like to read about my other two experiences giving birth, here they are:

–Alice’s birth story (full of swearing because of the zero drugs thing)

–Ben’s birth story (full of epidural-magic)

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Love you all, and thanks for listening to my story–again. If all goes according to plan, this will be the Last Birth Story I Will Ever Post on my Blog. Then again, as Alice said in the car a few months ago when I told her Isaac would be our last baby, “Well Mom, Jesus might want another baby.”

And that, for now, is the last word on the subject.