I am a forty-eight year old wife and mother and a former school teacher. I enjoy reading, logic games, spending time with my family and volunteering in my daughters’ school. I have two interrelated stories that demonstrate how I know that God is aware of me and loves me, and that He answers our prayers.

In the mid nineteen eighties I served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Belgium and France. The President of the Belgium Brussels Mission at that time was G. Perrin Walker, an attorney from Tacoma, Washington. In 1992, I moved from Virginia to Washington state. In 1993, I met the man who is now my husband and we were married in 1994. We were married in the Seattle, Washington Temple, and my former mission president and his wife were able to join us there. Both my husband and I were looking forward to having a family and hoped to have four children, ideally, two boys and two girls. In 2002, when our third daughter was seventeen months old, we learned that we were expecting another baby. We were thrilled since I had just turned forty-one and we were eager to have our fourth child before I got much older.

The early part of the pregnancy went smoothly and the baby seemed to be developing normally. Then at nineteen weeks we learned that the fetus had died. It was a baby boy with trisomy 18, a chromosomal abnormality. After delivering the baby our doctor strongly suggested that we not have another child. My initial feeling was that I didn’t want to risk going through that experience again.

However, within a few weeks I realized I still longed for another baby and my husband felt very much the same. We soon began trying to conceive but as the months passed without any success we began to worry that my age was making it unlikely. Our daughters were so disappointed that we had lost their baby brother and they prayed each night that Heavenly Father would send a baby boy to our family. My husband and I offered similar prayers. Not only did we pray about it, but we fasted on several occasions to be blessed with another child.

After months of disappointment I began to consider that the Lord didn’t intend for us to have another baby and started to ask the Lord if it was His will that we have another child or if I should stop focusing on that and put all my energy into caring for the children I already had. I tried to feel some response in my heart to these prayers but I really didn’t feel that I was receiving an impression either way. One particular weekend I chose to fast about this issue. As I fasted, I prayed fervently that I would feel an assurance either that we should continue trying to conceive, or that I should try to lay aside my hope for another child. In spite of the effort I expended I did not feel that I was any closer to an answer to my prayer. I went to Church Sunday morning feeling very frustrated and questioning my ability to feel the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

During the worship service my toddler became disruptive and I got up to take her out of the chapel. As we walked through the back of the chapel I saw my former mission president sitting in the congregation. Though we live only about forty minutes away from one another, we had only seen one another a handful of times since returning from Europe. He was (and is) serving as an Area Authority for the church in addition to his work as a lawyer so he had very little free time. When I asked what he was doing there he told me that I had been very much on his mind recently and he felt he needed to come see me. His wife told me later that day that it was only the second Sunday in a two month period that he had been free from assignments at Church conferences and he chose to spend his free Sunday driving all the way out to see me at Church. It was a wonderful surprise, and I was thrilled to be able to spend time with the two of them.

It was only later that I recognized that this was a response to my fasting and prayer. I could no longer deny that the Lord was aware of me when He had prompted one of his very busy servants to go well out of his way to check on my welfare. I was overcome with feelings of humility and gratitude. Although I still didn’t know if there was another baby in our future, I did know that the Lord was aware of me and I felt surrounded by His love.

Later that year a good friend of ours gave birth to a beautiful baby girl and early the next year a young family with a particularly cute baby girl moved into our ward/congregation. Our family had continued to pray for a baby boy to join our family but as my daughters saw those two baby girls at Church each week they decided it might be fun to have another baby girl. Soon, we began praying that, though we had all hoped to have a baby boy in our family, we would also be happy to welcome a baby girl. Within a few months of beginning these prayers, we learned that our fourth daughter was on the way.

We realized that our Heavenly Father had been answering our prayers all along: we had been asking for a baby boy, and
in His wisdom, He knew that this was not what was best for us, so he answered no; when we asked for a baby girl, His answer was yes.
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My name is Heidi. I am 44 years old and have been a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints all my life. I currently serve in the Primary, and I love working with the children. My husband and I have been married for almost 23 years. We are parents to three children who are currently 19, 14 and 7. It has been interesting to have them so spread apart (by chance, not by choice) and it has given us the time to enjoy each one of them as individuals.

I love my husband and children very much. Loving them up and seeing to their needs does take up most of my time. However, when I do have extra time, I love to garden, read, write and, in the past, dance.  I am too old and tired for the dancing, now, but I absolutely adore music. I also love photography and doing family history research. Lately, blogging is pretty high up there on my list of hobbies, as is finishing my latest novel.  I am a total anglophile and have done a ton of reading on the British Isles. I adore well-researched historical fiction or any book that spoon feeds you history in a fictionalized setting. I love flowers and the color pink–those are two things that always have the power to lift my spirits, along with the best kinds of music.

I have had many experiences when I knew that my Heavenly Father was fully aware of me and my struggles. One that I often share is when my oldest was four years old. By this time I was 29 and the mother of only one child. Though we loved him with all our hearts, he was born with many disabilities and his future was unsure.  Coming from a family of eight children and the aunt of numerous nieces and nephews, it felt lonely and odd to be the mother of only one child.  Since the work of a parent is, in my estimation, the greatest/hardest/most enduring thing a person can do, I had been making our future family a matter of much prayer.  It weighed heavily on me that I felt like I had accomplished so little of lasting value at that point in my life.

Finally I felt sure that I was pregnant, however, I took a pregnancy test and it was negative.  Great was the despair at our house but we were careful to not discuss it in front of our four-year-old.  A few days later my husband and I were sitting at the breakfast table feeling glum when our little boy walked into the room and said, “Jesus is bringing me a little sister!”  I was so upset about my negative pregnancy test that I snipped at him.  “Well, did He tell you WHEN?”  My husband was wiser and started asking questions.  After conversing with our son, we felt positive that he had had a spiritual experience that told him he would soon be the brother of a baby sister. A few days later I took another test and I was indeed pregnant.

Eight plus months later, we were thrilled to deliver a baby girl.  During the course of my pregnancy many people tried to prepare us for a boy as my parents had mostly all boy grandbabies, but I knew without a doubt that it was a girl.  People shook their heads at my foolishness in proceeding with girly decor in the nursery and buying all girl baby clothes but I didn’t let that bother me and even announced her name to everyone several months before she was born.

When my son feels discouraged and that his life amounts to nothing, we remind him of the day he answered his parents’ prayers by announcing the arrival of his baby sister.  It helps him to remember who he truly is, indeed, who we all are: children of a loving Heavenly Father who knows our joys and sorrows and who loved us enough to send His Son, Jesus Christ, whose atoning sacrifice for us is the greatest gift that any being could ever receive.  Often we forget that this atonement not only pays for our sins but also makes up for our lacks.  As humans we are far from perfect and never will be in spite of our best efforts.  It will only be through His sacrifice that our imperfections can be made perfect.  On days that I feel especially inadequate for the tasks and responsibilities with which I have been blessed, I remind myself that whatever truly needs to happen, CAN happen if I have the faith to believe in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Heidi Ashworth is the author of Miss Delacourt Speaks Her Mind (a Regency romance novel), and is currently working on the sequel to this lively book.

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Something happened yesterday that reminded me that God watches out for me. I was reading books with my son at the library (I don’t go to the library very often). After about 45 minutes we walked up to the desk to check out the books we had chosen. There was a woman standing at the desk asking about library cards, and she looked really familiar to me. I was pretty sure I knew her from my previous hometown, in another state. After I was finished checking out my books, we walked out of the library at the same time, and I asked her, “Who are you?” (Yes, kind of uncouth, but I needed to know who she was.) She said, “Emily.” I said, “I KNOW you! What are you doing here in this state?” She said, “My husband got an internship nearby and we will be here for the summer.”

Now let me back up a bit. We only lived in the previous location for a year, but it was a wonderful year. Everyone at church was so welcoming and kind. We loved the town. We grew up a little bit there because we had no family to rely on, but our ward became our family. We miss our friends. We miss our ward. We miss a lot about that town. When we moved to our current home, I had a really hard time at first because I missed so much about our wonderful year, our wonderful town.

Emily and her husband Pete were in our previous ward. Her husband was my son’s nursery teacher (and he was awesome). Emily was in the Primary presidency, and I was in the Young Women’s presidency, so we didn’t get many opportunities to get to know each other. When she found out she was moving for the summer, some people in the ward told her to call me, but she said, “Erin and I didn’t get to talk much. She wouldn’t even know who I was if I called her.”

Since they are only going to be here for three months, they found a place that has cheap rent on a month to month contract, and is furnished. But it is in kind of a questionable area. They only got here on Wednesday night, and they are already having concerns with where they live. Emily was just hoping she could find a stay-at-home mom that she could hang out with over the summer, because her husband will be gone a lot (and they have a five-month-old baby boy).

I love how God put us both at the library at the exact same time, less than 48 hours after Pete & Emily moved here. I love how God knew that Emily would need me this summer, because she has no family here and she would likely be lonely. I love how God knew that bringing Emily into my life right now would be like bringing a little piece of our little town back to me for a moment. And now I have the chance to build a new friendship with someone, which I always love. So thank you, God, for reminding me that you care about me and that you watch out for all of us.

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