Baby Rien

August 5, 2009 by Audreys · Leave a Comment 

This is the story of baby Rien, born in Heaven on December 22, 1996. He was stillborn, but he was Still Born.  Thanks to Suzan Doedens for sharing her story.  Her testimony shows that God is good and He will restore us from our grief and bless us with more than we could ever imagine. Since Suzan is from Holland it is a reminder that stillborn babies are born everywhere, and that there are families all over the world that are grieving the loss of a child.  It truly is a small world after all.

My husband and I married in 1993 and from that moment on we very much wanted to start our own family. But while waiting and praying time went by and I didn’t become pregnant. After 1 ½ years we went to the hospital for a fertility examination. The diagnosis was that my hormones were that disturbed that I would never get pregnant without medical treatment. My husband and I believed that those treatments were not the way God wanted us to go. So we had to accept the fact that we would not have children of our own. In the following time we focused on becoming foster parents: Taking care of children that cannot live with their own parents due to various problems. On the 21st of December 1996 something strange happened. … I noticed something was wrong with me. I was really terrified because I thought I would die. My doctor examined me and told my husband and me that I was pregnant and that it was the umbilical cord that I felt. I was completely in shock.  Pregnant??? I was going by ambulance to the hospital. There an echo graph was made and I appeared to be around 20 weeks pregnant, but the baby already died inside my tummy. My husband and I stayed at the hospital that night and the following morning I was given medicine to activate the delivery. 2 hours later our son was stillborn. We called him Rien. We were overwhelmed by emotions. Within 24 hours we had to find out that I was pregnant without knowing, than we heard that the baby already died and finally, totally unprepared for this, I delivered our baby son. Through all of the emotions we felt that Jesus was on our side to comfort us and carry us in this difficult situation.

In the years that followed our family grew.  In 1997 our son Nico was born. A year later another son, Tijmen, was born. In 2002 Amir, a foster-baby son came to live with us; in 2004 another foster-baby son came into our family. We feel very blessed with our boys. We know our Rien is in heaven and we long for the day we will meet him there with Jesus. We don’t understand why Rien couldn’t stay here with us, but knowing that he is with Jesus comforts us.

So that’s our story.