The Time of Preparation

If you put off everything till you're sure of it,

you'll never get anything done.

-Norman Vincent Peale

After our honeymoon Mark and I moved into a small apartment just south of Wilmington, De. and I took a position at what was then Wilmington Medical Center on an oncology unit. I learned tons on that unit and was tempted to change my site from obstetrics to oncology but God very sternly turned me back again. He has a way of doing that! So a little over a year after I started at the medical center I accepted a position in Labor and Delivery.

Talk about learning! At that time Wilmington Medical Center, now Christiana Medical Center, did over 6,000 deliveries a year. It was the third largest maternity center in the United States and I lovingly dubbed it a "baby factory"! For the most part I loved working there and learning the kind of things that only experience can teach.

Then on the same day that my maternal grandmother passed away we learned that I was pregnant. Can you say "mixed emotions"? The very next day I began to bleed and that began a 3 month emotional roller coaster of being uncertain that I would be able to carry the pregnancy to term. But praise God, I went back to work in the 13th week of the pregnancy and had to call in sick when I went into labor on my due date! Jason Zachary Evans entered the world!

By this time we had moved back to Pennsylvania and when the time came to go back to work I wanted to work closer to home so that I could get to Jason quickly if he needed me. So in October of 1983 I began to work at Crozer Chester Medical Center in Upland, Pa. I worked for a year on the maternity floor and then moved to Labor and Delivery, where I've been ever since.

I continued to learn over the next 4 years but always in the back of my mind was that nagging question: if God called me to Labor and Delivery, why?

And then came Peanut...