Valor’s Story
After we had our first child we decided we wanted to have four kids total. We had been trying to get pregnant for a little while; with no luck. We decided, you know what, we are blessed with the three girls we have. They’re healthy, so we’re good, we’re done. I scheduled a little procedure to take care of that and wouldn’t you know, the week before I go in to have that done, we find out that we’re pregnant. We had multiple people come and give words over this new baby, even people calling it a boy before we knew that it was a boy. This child has a purpose, God has a plan for him, and he is going to be mighty in the Kingdom.
When I was 32 weeks pregnant I was lying in bed one night just praying over the pregnancy, praying over him, his health and that everything would go well. And I felt the Holy Spirit speaking to me, and saying that Satan was going to attack Valor and he didn’t want him here, but he would not prevail. So I woke Callie up and I told him what I was feeling, what the Holy Spirit told me and we began to pray about it.
I woke up the next morning and her face is swollen, her eyes are swollen shut.
Callie said you need to take your blood pressure. That’s a sign of high blood pressure with pregnancy and he talked me into going to the hospital and they ran some tests and they diagnosed that I had preeclampsia.
They say with preeclampsia that the only cure is to deliver the baby. 35 weeks they can come in and tell us they are going to induce labor.
So they induced that day, and everything went smoothly with the labor.
The labor, delivery, for me of course went real smooth; piece of cake. Baby is born, and from the moment he was born he was struggling to breathe. They had him under an oxygen hood for a while, it still wasn’t doing the trick, he was still having a hard time breathing. I come back out and looked in the nursery window and there is about six nurses, a couple doctors, standing around Valor. It’s very frightening.
Later that evening, Callie comes in and he has tears in his eyes and he said, “Don’t freak out, but Valor’s lung has collapsed and they are going to airlift him to Dallas.”
Amanda was dealing with the preeclampsia issue, so she had to stay in the hospital for two more days.
They airlifted him and I couldn’t go because they were still monitoring my blood pressure and making sure that I was okay. That was extremely hard. I was falling apart, I was of course hysterical. And I said, “I’ve got to be strong for Valor and I’ve already had the promise from the Holy Spirit that Satan is not going to prevail, Valor is going to be okay, God has him in his hands.
The positive Christian side of you says, “He’s going to be okay.” but fear definitely has a way of gripping you in those times. That’s why it’s so important to know the Word of God and to know how to battle that fear, how to combat that fear. I’m human, I let it get the best of me sometimes, for sure. The night before I actually went to go get Amanda after she got released, I just remember laying in a chair at the hospital, and I’ve never felt depressed, but at that moment, I think that was pretty close to what it feels like.
The doctor had told us that he had developed an infection and previously we had been told he would probably be there about two weeks, and she said it’s going to be at least a month or more because of the infection. So that was very discouraging. The next few days there wasn’t a whole lot of improvement, he wasn’t getting worse, but it was just slow improvement here and there.
That song “Great Are You Lord” had just been reeling in my mind and I felt like that God said, “you are his spiritual covering, you have to sing this for him.” So I just began to replace the words, where it says, “it’s Your breath in our lungs.” I would say, “it’s Your breath in his lungs. All the earth will shout Your praise. His heart will cry, his bones will sing.” It transformed this song, that you know, I enjoyed listening to, I enjoyed worshiping to, but now it’s this prophetic word that I am singing over my son. And I would say, at that point, was when I really had peace of mind that everything was going to be okay.
So Sunday morning, we wake up to get ready to go to the hospital, and we said we should watch church online.
And the song, Great Are You Lord was in the setlist that week. And I don’t know, probably thirty minutes after the 11:00 worship service I received probably four or five texts of people saying, “you are on our hearts, you are on our minds. We were singing that song over your son,” not knowing that was the song that had been ministering to us. We got ready, we went to the hospital that day, and a huge day of progress.
The doctor told us that we were able to remove the chest tube, and so we were very excited about that. And she said, “the infection is gone, and I think by tomorrow, we can remove the ventilator and he will be able to breathe on his own.”
We hadn’t been there for more than an hour and they came in and said, “he’s ready.” So they pulled the ventilator and moved him to a room where they send babies who are preparing to come home. They had initially told us, after they saw he was fighting an infection, to plan on being down there a month. We had only been down there a week, a little over a week, and they’re preparing us for home.
So much had happened in a 24-hour period that we would have just been thankful for just a slight improvement when we got there that day, but to hear, “he’s completely healed. He’s going to be home in a few days,” it was just so overwhelming, and we were so thankful and so grateful.
Just knowing that it doesn’t matter at that point, what the doctors say, what the reports say, what his lung condition looks like, he’s going to be okay. I mean, I heard from God that my son’s going to be okay and that one day, he will sing “Great Are You Lord.”