The place where God finally tracked me down wasn’t a church or a school or a hospital or any place you might think.
It was a Pizza Hut.
My daughter Sabyre had earned a free small pizza for winning a reading award at school, and we drove to the Pizza Hut to pick it up. While we were waiting, I ordered a diet Coke. Our sweet, elderly waitress brought over our check, which was for $1. Not a bad deal.
But as she handed it to me, I felt the nudge.
I call it a nudge, because I don’t know what else to call it. Actually, it was more like a really insistent thought. I didn’t hear a voice in my head or anything like that; instead, this thought just popped in my brain and started flashing like a neon sign. Have you seen the movie Ghost? When Whoopi Goldberg keeps hearing Patrick Swayze tell her to do something, and she’s the only one who can hear it, and she’s annoyed because she doesn’t want to hear it? Well, that’s a bit like what this was like. I kept getting the nudge, clear and persistent.
Give the waitress a $100 tip.
I didn’t know where it came from; I just knew it wouldn’t stop. It made no sense to me, and it actually made me kind of mad. A $100 tip on a $1 bill? Huh? It’s not like Virgil and I were rolling in dough. We were pretty much going from paycheck to paycheck at that point. One hundred dollars was an absolute fortune for us. But the nudge was getting stronger, and I felt so overwhelmed I went outside and walked around the parking lot. I called Virgil at work and told him what was going on.
‘That’s God,’ he said calmly. ‘Do what He’s asking. I can’t talk now, babe, gotta go.’
But there was just no way I was going to leave a $100 tip. Then another thought asserted itself: Okay, then leave $50. My nudge, it seemed, was flexible. Honestly, I felt like I was on the fast train to Crazytown. I went back in and paid the bill and left a $10 tip – and even that struck me as too much.
But when I got in my car, the nudging only got worse. Whatever it was that was all over me wasn’t going away. I was being reminded that I hadn’t done what was asked. I called Virgil again, and he said, ‘Babe, I’m in a meeting. I really can’t talk. Go to an ATM and get the other $40 and take it to her. Bye.’ What kind of husband supports his nutty wife giving money away to strangers? I sat there thinking, Gee, Virgil, thanks for nothing. There were a million reasons why I couldn’t leave such a generous tip. The utility bill was due. We needed new curtains in the bedroom. JP and Sabyre were owed their allowance. Why would I give a stranger money I didn’t have?
And yet – the nudge. It wouldn’t go away. Believe it or not, I called Virgil again.
‘Just do what God is asking you to do,’ he said. No anger, no judgment, just calm, decisive advice.
Virgil knew we didn’t have much extra money, but he didn’t care. This was not his decision to make. This was God’s decision. Or at least that’s how he saw it. For me, it still seemed like lunacy. And yet I couldn’t get myself to turn the ignition and drive away.
Instead, I took Sabyre by the hand, marched over to an ATM and withdrew $40. I stomped back toward the Pizza Hut, angry at the whole situation. I thought, Well, at least this will make me look like a really great person. Which is when yet another thought pushed its way through my brain.
Tell her who this is from.
By that point, I not only felt like I was losing my mind, but I probably looked it, too. I was arguing with myself all the way to the Pizza Hut. Great, so not only do I have to give my money away, but you want me to walk in and say, ‘Oh, hi, this is from God’? I wanted to turn around so badly, and yet I walked back in and spotted our waitress near the cash register. I took a deep breath and said, ‘Okay, let’s get this over with.’
The waitress seemed confused to see us.
‘Hi, I gave you a tip earlier, but it wasn’t the right amount,’ I said.
The waitress dug into her apron and tried to give me the $10 bill.
‘No, no, that’s not it,’ I said. ‘I gave you too little.’ Then I handed her the $40 in cash and said, ‘God asked me to give this to you.’
She looked at me and said, ‘What?’
Naturally, she was hard of hearing.
‘God asked me to give this to you,’ I repeated, loud enough to draw stares from staffers and customers. I could feel my face flushing the color of tomato sauce.
The waitress looked at the money in her hands and seemed completely stunned. Finally, after a few moments she screamed, ‘Oh, my God!’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘exactly.’
I grabbed Sabyre and got out of there, feeling agitated and confused. I was not a cheerful giver, that’s for sure. That night and the next day, I thought a lot about what happened and tried to make sense of it, and when I couldn’t I just tried to forget it. But three days later, as I was dismissing my students for recess, I got a call from Virgil. The first thing he said was, ‘You need to sit down.’
My first thought was, Oh great, he got fired, and I just gave away $50. But that wasn’t it. ‘I happened to walk in on a conversation with the guy who manages that Pizza Hut,’ Virgil told me. ‘He was talking about this lady who came in and gave a waitress a $50 tip. I said, “That was my wife.’’’
It turns out the waitress’s husband had just lost his job, and they couldn’t afford to have their two children join them for Thanksgiving. So she prayed to God to somehow let her earn the $100 she needed on her last shift. By the end of her shift, she’d only made $50. Her kids would not be joining her for Thanksgiving.
And then, of course, I walked in – her very last customer. And she got to bring her children home.
When I heard this story, I was dumbfounded. There was no way this could be just a coincidence. ‘You have to be real,’ I told God. ‘There’s no other explanation.’ I finally had the proof I’d been searching for all those years. God, wouldn’t you know it, was real. That feeling filled me with a huge sense of relief and joy.
Or at least it did for the next three or four days.
After that, whatever sureness I felt slowly faded away. I couldn’t convince myself this was how God worked – by nudging people in Pizza Huts. I went back to thinking it had all been a big, annoying coincidence.
And just like that, I let God slip through my fingers.
When I think back on that incident now, I can see how incredibly patient God was with me. Over and over he spoke to me, and over and over he answered my prayers and gave me proof of His existence, and every time I chalked it up to coincidence. God even used me to answer someone else’s prayers, and instead of acknowledging that, I gave myself a nice little pat on the back for my good deed – when in fact it had nothing to do with me. Truth be told, I wasn’t even completely obedient to God when I left that tip. The Pizza Hut waitress had prayed to make $100 that day, and in the end she did, and she praised God for answering her prayer. But, God didn’t want me to just match her $50 that day. He had asked me to give her the entire $100. He wanted to go above and beyond for the child He loved. He wanted to give her more than what she’d asked for. I believe that sometimes God wants to bless us beyond whatever blessing we pray for. And sometimes what stops that from happening is us.
Through all of the dreams and scares and nudges, one thing was constant – my wonderful husband Virgil. He was always a rock of support for me, and he knew how to defuse the drama that seemed to swirl around my life. He never got tired of all my questions about God – and he never tried to overwhelm me with his own beliefs. He just shared his incredibly strong convictions and waited patiently for me to come around.
We’d been married for almost five years when, out of the blue, I cornered Virgil in the kitchen and asked him a question.
‘If it were possible,’ I said, ‘would you want to have a child?’
Me having a child with Virgil wasn’t all that simple. The fact is, after Sabyre’s birth, I had a tubal ligation – which means your fallopian tubes are tied off and you can’t have any more kids. I did it, because I couldn’t handle another pregnancy that wasn’t part of a sound and loving relationship – and there weren’t too many of those floating around my life. Virgil knew going into our marriage that I couldn’t have kids. He loved me enough to marry me anyway.
But now, I was feeling guilty that I couldn’t give him a child. I could see what an amazing father he was to JP and Sabyre, and it pained me to think we couldn’t have a son or daughter of our own. I mean, JP and Sabyre were his kids in every way, except he didn’t get to experience the whole process with them – the birth, the early years, all of that great stuff. One day after brushing my teeth, I sat on the edge of the bathtub and started talking to God about it.
‘God, I know I don’t deserve another child,’ I said, ‘but please do not punish Virgil for what I’ve done. He is such a wonderful father.’
This was the start of a series of bargains I made with God – a string of tests through which He could prove to me that He was real. I wanted to believe – I was leaning toward believing – but I was still a long way off from actually believing. I was the ultimate skeptic, demanding proof, setting conditions, challenging God. I don’t know what made me think I was in any position to do this. It wasn’t like God owed me something – in fact, it was me who sinned greatly against Him. Still, in our conversations, I set up hurdle after hurdle. The Pizza Hut nudge had been forgotten.
Within a week of that little bathroom prayer, I got a random email at work from a fertility clinic in Oklahoma City. I knew we couldn’t afford the fee – it was something like $35,000 – but since the first appointment was free, I scheduled one anyway. At the clinic, the doctors were kind and wonderful, but they told us they only accepted a few patients at a time and were completely booked for the next few months. Oh well, another disappointment – no big deal. Virgil and I were halfway out the front door when I heard someone say, ‘Wait.’
Incredibly, some time during our appointment, another couple had cancelled, and the slot was ours if we wanted. Not only that, but the fee was drastically less than I’d first believed. If we scrimped and saved, we might be able to afford it. Virgil and I looked at each other, and a big smile crept across his face. We both knew what we were going to do.
The next few months were full of shots and tests and visits to the clinic. The idea was to harvest eggs and sperm and create an embryo in the lab. The embryo would be monitored in the lab for a few days before it was implanted in my uterus. We actually got to see pictures of the eggs dividing in a lab dish. We took to calling the fertility specialists our babysitters.
Finally, after several weeks, I was implanted, and after that I had to go home and lie down with my feet up for two weeks before I could find out if I was pregnant. There were no guarantees, and I knew many women went through fertility treatments for years without success. Those few days after I was implanted were agonizing. Not surprisingly, I had another little talk with God.
‘If you’re real,’ I said, ‘then I will be pregnant.’
Just one day shy of two weeks, I couldn’t wait any longer. They wanted me to go to the clinic to take the pregnancy test, so they could be there to counsel me if it was negative. But I just couldn’t delay it another second. I got a home pregnancy test and locked myself in the bathroom. I looked at the strip and waited for a symbol to emerge.
And then it did – a small, simple plus sign.
I called my fertility doctor and asked if a positive result on a pregnancy test could be wrong. He told me there were no false positives, only false negatives. That was it, then – I was pregnant.
I was pregnant!
A bit later Virgil found me in the living room, and casually I told him, ‘Oh, we’re pregnant’ – as if I were talking about a bag of groceries I’d left on the counter. I have this thing where I sort of shut down when I get too excited – I guess it’s some kind of defense mechanism. There are plenty of times when I lose my cool, but other times, when you might expect me to be jumping out of my skin, I’m completely calm and collected, in a world of my own. This, strangely, was one of those times. Virgil, on the other hand, lost it. He hugged me and kissed me and told me he loved me and said, ‘I’m so, so happy!’
A few days later I talked to God again.
‘If it’s twins,’ I said, ‘then I’ll know you’re real.’
After a blood test confirmed I was pregnant, we went in for an ultrasound. The nurse tilted the monitor so we could get a better look at the miracle inside me. After a minute or two, she spotted something and said, ‘Okay, there’s your baby.’ My heart sank for a moment, but then I was grateful that at least one of the embryos had made it. And then the nurse said, ‘Wait – there’s baby number two.’ I covered my face with my hands and started crying.
Virgil looked at the nurse and said, ‘Okay, you can stop counting now.’
The next bargain I made with God was about the gender of my babies. ‘If it’s a boy and a girl, then I will know you’re real.’ At fifteen weeks, an ultrasound showed I was having a boy and a girl. Incredibly, my bargaining with God wasn’t over. ‘If one has green eyes and the other has blue eyes, then I’ll know you’re real.’ I know, ridiculous, right? Somewhere along the line, I even asked God to help me find an affordable van with low miles and a DVD player for the kids. The first car dealer told me we would never find one that met our price. At the second lot, we found it.
‘Come on, Virgil, that’s just a coincidence,’ I said. ‘People get deals on cars all the time.’
‘God is answering your prayers, and you still don’t believe it’s Him,’ Virgil said.
When I told a friend of mine how receptive God seemed to be to my prayers, she said, ‘Would you mind asking God for a couple of things for me? ’Cause I’ve never seen anyone ask for stuff and get it like you do.’
And still, what I wanted most of all I didn’t have. What I wanted most of all was to believe.
And then, when I was just twenty-five weeks along, I felt a sudden, blinding burst of pain in my stomach.
Virgil rushed me to the doctor, who told us my body was trying to go into labor. He gave me a shot of terbutaline to stop my contractions. It did the trick, and the doctor prescribed bed rest and sent us home. For the next month I lay around, caught up on all my TV shows, and watched my tiny babies move around in my tummy. Everything was fine, until the day Virgil started retiling the kitchen floor. Before he started he asked, ‘Honey, are you sure you’re okay? This is going to take a while.’ I assured him I was fine and told him to get to work. He slipped on his kneepads and began digging up grout.
Well, no sooner had he flipped his first tile that I said, ‘Uh, I think I need to go to the hospital.’ I’d been fighting off mild cramps earlier, but they just got stronger and more frequent, until one of them felt like I’d been kicked by a soccer player. ‘Crystal, I just started tiling!’ said Virgil, but he didn’t waste another second getting me to the hospital.
The doctors monitored me for a while, then let me go home again. But that very night, while Virgil was at Wal-Mart picking up some tiling materials, I collapsed in the bathroom with the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. This didn’t feel like a cramp or a contraction – this felt like something was seriously wrong. I called Virgil, and he raced home and drove us to the emergency room at close to 100 miles per hour. In the ER one of my waters broke. I was only twenty-eight weeks along.
My doctor called for an ambulance and sent us to the Oklahoma University Medical Center in Oklahoma City. Virgil couldn’t ride in the ambulance with me, so he followed closely in the new Uplander van I’d prayed for. The pain was getting worse, and the paramedic sitting beside me in the ambulance kept talking to me in a soft, low voice to try and keep me calm.
‘All I need is something for the pain,’ I told him. ‘Please give me something for the pain.’
‘I’m sorry. We don’t have any pain meds in the ambulance,’ he said.
‘What kind of ambulance doesn’t have something for pain?!’ I screamed wildly.
The ride to Oklahoma City was endless. We hit road construction a couple of times and had to be detoured. Then we took a wrong turn somewhere. At one point I remember yelling, ‘I’m going to have these babies right here!’ The ambulance guys were sweet and kept assuring me I was okay. ‘How many babies have you delivered,’ I yelled out, ‘because you’re going to deliver mine.’ The paramedic closest to me said, ‘I helped deliver one baby.’
‘None,’ said the driver, ‘because I drive fast.’
Still, traffic is traffic, and we were still a way from the hospital. The pain cascading through my body was only getting worse. I heard my cell phone ring, and it was Virgil, calling from the van behind us. He told me he loved me and that everything was going to be okay. I wished I could believe him, but I knew something was terribly wrong with me.
Then my cell phone rang again. With the pain ripping away at my insides, I managed a faint hello. It was a friend of mine calling to chat.
‘You’re not going to believe the day I’m having,’ she said.
For some reason, I listened to her tell me about her day. Maybe I was shutting down, like I do in moments of emotional crisis. I think she got a parking ticket, or maybe her dry cleaning was lost. After a few minutes I finally said, ‘Okay, well, I’m in an ambulance, so I gotta go.’
We finally made it to the hospital and in to see a doctor. He immediately put me on a magnesium drip to slow down the contractions. I was only dilated one centimeter, not the ten I needed to be to deliver my babies. The doctor said he wanted to keep me in the hospital for at least six weeks, so I could reach the thirty-five-week mark. That meant Virgil would have to take time off from work, but what else could we do? I got my mother to watch my children, and we settled in for the long haul.
Yet no matter what the doctors did, the pain just wouldn’t go away. It only got more and more intense. I kept telling everyone, ‘Something is wrong, something is wrong,’ but the doctors kept saying it was just premature labor. It got to the point where after every single contraction I’d scream at the top of my lungs. I remember Virgil’s utter frustration and him laying his head on my stomach one night and just weeping. He kept badgering the doctors to find out what was wrong and so did I, but nothing anyone did made the pain go away.
Finally, one of the contractions was so horrible I screamed until I couldn’t scream anymore. My mother, who was visiting, watched the color drain from my face. Then she looked at the floor beneath my bed.
It was covered in blood.
Nurses and doctors scrambled into the room. Someone yelled a Code something. I saw Virgil slipping on scrubs before they wheeled me out of the room. I remember hearing someone say, ‘Knock her out,’ and I remember the mask coming down on my face, and then I don’t remember anything else.
The next thing I knew, I was back in my hospital room, and Virgil was standing over me. I was groggy and confused, and it took me a moment to realize I didn’t know if my babies had made it or not. I looked at Virgil’s face for any sign of grief or panic. I couldn’t bring myself to ask the question.
‘Everything is okay,’ Virgil said. ‘The babies are here. They’re really little, but they’re here.’
There had been something wrong with me after all. The pain I felt wasn’t only contractions. I’d had a placental abruption, which meant the placental lining was ripping away from my uterus. The doctors figured they had plenty of time before I actually delivered, because I was still only dilated two centimeters when they checked. But I went from two to ten in under an hour, and those little babies were coming. Doctors panicked when they couldn’t pick up one of the fetuses’ heartbeats on a monitor and rushed me into surgery. The babies were delivered by Caesarian section.
When Virgil said they were little, he wasn’t kidding. The boy, who we named Micah, was only three pounds, and the girl, Willow, was just two pounds. When babies are born, they get an Apgar score, which gives you an idea of their health and vitality on a scale of zero to ten – with zero being all but dead. Willow was given a six. Micah got a one.
The curse of my family – our babies come out fragile.
They put our babies in separate incubators in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, or the NICU. It was only two babies per room, and they had a round-the-clock nurse. The second night they were there, we heard a loud siren go off in the hospital. Virgil and I looked at each other; we knew what the siren meant. It was a tornado warning. Tornados come out of nowhere in Oklahoma, and sometimes you only get a few minutes to find a safe place. We could hear the rain begin to crash against the windows. We had no idea what the hospital’s tornado plans were, so we rushed to the NICU. The babies there were among the most vulnerable patients in the whole hospital, so the policy was not to move them unless it was absolutely necessary.
But then the sound of the rain outside grew louder, and all of a sudden water began leaking from the ceiling right onto Willow’s incubator. Six nurses rushed in, frantically unplugged the incubators, and moved them to a drier spot. ‘This has never happened before,’ one of the nurses told us, and Virgil and I looked at each other and for some reason started to laugh. Like I said, we do that a lot in my family – laugh instead of cry. Our tiny twins were vulnerable enough without a tornado thrown into the mix. And yet here it was, raining inside the NICU. What else could we do besides laugh? Eventually the tornado moved on and the rain stopped, and the NICU went back to normal.
The very first time I laid eyes on the twins was a moment I’ll never forget. It was a mixture of joy and horror at how small and fragile they were. My twins weren’t any bigger than a flip-flop, and yet they were each hooked up to a million tubes and wires. They were so tiny the smallest diapers available for preemies were still too big for them, and the diapers had to be rolled up and doubled over so they wouldn’t swallow the twins whole. Both Micah and Willow had these miniscule blood pressure cuffs around their tiny wrists – cuffs so small they might not even fit around my pinky. Worst of all, the twins showed no signs of life. They didn’t cry or wiggle or move their hands or legs at all. Their eyes never opened, and they didn’t make a sound. We weren’t allowed to hold them, but we could put our hands through a tube into the incubator and touch them that way. A nurse told us, ‘Just touch, don’t rub, because if you rub you could rip their skin off.’
The next few days were a nightmare. I begged the doctors and nurses to give us a prognosis, but no one would tell us anything concrete. I was looking for any little scrap of hope, but hospital staffers were careful to give us none. We heard things like, ‘We can’t predict’ and ‘It’s too early to say’ over and over again. Specialists came in and out, and still we had no answers. And so we looked for solace in even the tiniest sign of progress. ‘The first twenty-four hours are an important hurdle,’ one doctor told us, and we found great comfort in the fact that our twins made it to day two. A nurse assured us she’d seen even smaller babies in the NICU, and that made me feel a little better, even though I couldn’t imagine babies coming any smaller than mine.
The area around the NICU became the center of our world. I still hadn’t fully recovered from the pregnancy, so it was important for me to get rest. Still, I tried to be in and around the NICU as much as possible. Virgil and I occasionally snuck out to shower and grab a few hours’ sleep in my brother’s home in Oklahoma City where we were staying, but for the most part, we set up camp in the NICU. We weren’t the only anxious parents there, and we got to know some other people who were also going through this ordeal. We’d see parents and relatives in the waiting room rubbing their tired eyes just like us, and we’d watch them get their scrubs on so they could go in and see their children.
Sometime during our second week, we saw a whole family go in together. We knew that if more than two people were going in to see a baby at once, it meant the baby was dying. They were crying and hugging each other, and I burst into tears just watching them make the short, sad shuffle into the room to say goodbye.
And that’s when it hit me, right there in the NICU – I am waiting my turn.
The thought filled me with grief and sorrow, but I couldn’t banish it from my brain. JP’s accident had not been my punishment. No, this was to be my punishment. How long would it be before I, too, was pulling on my scrubs and shuffling in with my weeping family to say goodbye to my children? A day? Two days? A week?
And in that moment, ironically, my belief in God was stronger than it had ever been. Finally, He seemed real to me – finally, I believed. Yes, God exists, I thought to myself, and He is a punishing God.
Around that time, both Virgil and I stopped praying for the twins to survive. In the early days, we both prayed constantly: Virgil in his quiet way and me in my unsure way. But then we both stopped, for very different reasons. Virgil stopped, because he decided to turn the whole situation over to God. ‘I give this all to you,’ he told God around the second week. ‘Thy will be done.’
Me? I stopped because I was tired of my conversations with God. At first, I’d begged Him to spare my babies, but before long I resorted to threats. ‘If you take one of my babies, I will hate you forever,’ I said. ‘I will never, ever speak to you again.’ And then, after I had my realization in the NICU, the threats seemed pointless to me. God was going to do what God was going to do.
For the first twelve days we didn’t get to hold Micah and Willow. We could reach into the incubators and help change their diapers or swap out their bedding, but that was it. Sometimes they barely seemed alive in their sterile incubators: no smiles, no sounds, nothing. Just two pale, tiny creatures, clinging to life.
Then, on day thirteen, a nurse came into the NICU and said, ‘Okay, are you ready for kangaroo time?’
The nurse explained the babies were strong enough for a little kangaroo care. That’s when preemies are put on their mother or father’s chest, skin to skin, for an hour or two. It’s meant to give the child a sense of warmth and closeness with the parent, which is thought to help the baby but which definitely helps the parent. Neither Virgil nor I were expecting it, and we were happily shocked.
Virgil lay on a bed, and a nurse brought Micah over and laid him on Virgil’s chest. Then the nurse took Willow out of her incubator and brought her to me. Just before she put her on me, I panicked.
‘I can’t do it,’ I said. ‘She’s too small. Please, I can’t do it.’
‘It’s okay,’ the nurse said. ‘Just give it a try.’
She laid this little wisp of a thing on my upper chest, close to my neck. I gently put a hand on her tiny back – the first time I ever touched my daughter’s skin. I couldn’t believe I was finally holding one of my babies, and I wiped tears off my face so they wouldn’t fall on Willow. I held her for two hours like that, watching her body rise and fall with my every breath. She didn’t do much besides sleep and maybe twitch here and there, but that was okay with me. I had her now, and during kangaroo time the terrible fear in my gut subsided.
It’s true Willow didn’t do much while I held her; she never even fully opened her eyes. But at one point, she did open them a teeny bit. And when she did, I took a quick look at her eyes; I did the same with Micah when I held him later that day.
And that’s how I discovered that Willow had green eyes, and Micah’s eyes were blue.