It was late on the evening of the 5th of January 2013 when Olivia doubled over in pain. We had no idea what was wrong but the pain seemed so severe that I rushed her to the emergency room. At 01:30 in the morning, after various tests the doctor came into the room and drew the curtain. I will never forget the words she spoke next, "congratulations mommy and daddy." 

We had just resigned our jobs, moved in with my parents and lent all our furniture to a friend for a year (this after reading Acts 4:32 and they needed furniture) so that we could do the Church Leadership School. Unemployed, living with your parents and pregnant, this did not feel like God's plan. We were excited for sure but at the same time we began to question, "are we crazy?" I am sure that those who looked at us from the outside thought we were.

Never the less we continued with Church Leadership School and then the morning sickness began to set in. Olivia got it pretty badly, she felt sick all day, every day and as a result began to lose weight. She couldn't keep any food down and nothing seemed to help. Eventually we came across a really expensive medicine that lowered the symptoms to a manageable level but Olivia still ended up 2 kg's lighter at the end of her pregnancy than what she had been before. 

With just a month left to go in our school we began to pray more intentionally about France. We thought that God would send us soon after our son's birth and so we asked for a specific city to aim for. We took out a map of France and asked God. To this day we can't quite remember how it happened but for some reason the city of Grenoble jumped out at us. So we would aim for Grenoble. Then we prayed for our son. We asked God to show us who he would be and we felt that he would be used like a light in a dark world. So we looked for a name that means light, a french name, he was going to grow up in France after all. So we called him Luc. 

Luc came much earlier than we thought he would. The doctor told us he was due on the 7th of September, but early in July, Olivia suffered an abrupture. She had to be rushed to the hospital and completely unexpectedly, Luc was born at 31 weeks, a whole two months earlier than planned! 

Our little Luc was born weighing only 1.83 kilograms

(Author's note: This is an older blog post as part of our missionary support page at thevorsters.com)