Just over 4 years ago, the Colin and Grace Jones family consisted of 2. In just a few short months, we will have grown to a family of 6! Here’s a brief timeline of the past 6 years:

2004: We start trying to get pregnant

2006: We are seeing a fertility doctor, using meds, and eventually artificial insemination, and find out we’re pregnant by the end of the year. Super excited!

2007: We have our first kid!

2008: 3 months after Elias is born, apparently those fertility issues resolved themselves, and we find out Grace is unexpectedly expecting! Kinda scared, but hey, we wanted kids anyway, so what the heck.

2009: 6 months after Gabriella is born, and despite the use of contraceptives, we find out we are pregnant again. 3 kids in less than 2.5. It was almost like someone told us we were being sent to a Siberian prison for the next 20 years. We were pretty depressed about it for a long, long time.

2010: We have Lieve (you can read about how I unexpectedly had to got to deliver her myself). We prepare for a tough year of 3 kids in diapers, but we thought we’d probably survive it. Then we would take 3 to ∞ years off from having kids.

2011: We learn that the effective use of contraceptives is one of the many things that we are not good at… we’re pregnant with #4. But something weird happened this time. You might expect that we would be the most devastated yet, but we weren’t. Ever since we found out we were pregnant with Lieve (in an effort to ward off violent depression), Grace and I meditated on this passage from Psalm 127:

³ Children are a heritage from the LORD,
offspring a reward from him.
⁴ Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are children born in one’s youth.
⁵ Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame
when they contend with their opponents in court.

If 3 kids in 2.5 years felt like self-inflicted torture, then 4 kids in 4.5 years should have felt worse. However, even we were hoping to take a sabbatical from pregnancy, childbirth, and diapers, something funny started to happen: we started to BELIEVE this passage. So when we found out we were pregnant, both Grace and I thought, “wow. God is really blessing us.”

2 questions I’ve had to ask myself over the past 2 years:

1. How does God view family, and am I aligned with His view?

2. How does God view children, and am I aligned with His view?

I don’t know if this means we’ll have 30 kids and become like the Duggars. Maybe God’s teaching me that I should get a vasectomy. Maybe He’s showing us that we should have more kids. At this moment, I don’t know. But I do know that I embrace God’s decision to bless us with 4 kids. Because if He says, “blessed is the man whose quiver is full of children born in one’s youth”, maybe I should view children the same way.

*Oh yeah. And it helps when all the kids are totally awesome, hilarious, fun, and entertaining.