Ali Spitsbergen spent her youth seeking spirituality while learning to surf in Australia and joining a mission to Thailand. She ended up meeting her future husband, a Christian worship leader, on the sunny beaches of San Diego.
He literally paddled up to her on his surfboard and said hello.
The twist in Ali’s story is that her doctors vehemently told her she would never bear a living, breathing child. She credits God for making four miracles happen.
Ali grew up Catholic in Chicago, but after college, she “wanted to figure out all the religions in the world,” she told The Epoch Times. She wondered: “Why do they believe what they believe? Why does this religion believe this? Who’s right? Who’s wrong?”
She calls it “crazy” how she traveled the world but finally felt “the power of God through the work I was doing with prostitutes in Thailand,” and that “God really does miracles.”
After returning stateside, she grew tired of the cold, dark skies of Chicago. She relocated to the sun and beaches of San Diego where she worked as a nurse and found a circle of like-minded, nondenominational Christians. She met her now-husband, Joshua, a music teacher from a religious school that their children now attend.
But there were no kids in the picture at first.
The couple married and tried for children. After two miscarriages, the doctors told Ali and Joshua that “babies might not be in the cards.” The doctors wanted to test his sperm, and he threw the cup in the trash, Ali recalled. Rejecting the prognosis, they trusted in God, not in man.
“We just really held on the scriptures that ‘I’ll be fruitful and multiply,’” she said, “that God was going to give us the desires in our heart.”
The doctors believed there would be prohibitive risks of hypertension and eclampsia in a pregnancy, but that didn’t stop them from trying. Of course, what’s amazing is that the Spitsbergens now have four thriving children, though Ali did experience complications along the way.
The Spitsbergens did get pregnant again—naturally, with twins! But one of them passed early in utero at 12 weeks while the other, their eldest child, Anna, survived but stopped growing at 23 weeks.
“They told me that I needed to have an abortion because the baby was no longer growing and was not going to survive,” said Ali, who always wanted a big family so that her kids would have siblings around them. “I walked out, bawled my eyes out, called my pastor, and told him the news.”
She told him, “I will not abort this baby, it’s murder. I will not murder my own child, and I trust that God will heal her.”
Ali had to carry Anna for as long as possible so that she could survive outside the womb. But it came at a cost.
Over the next seven weeks, Ali suffered pregnancy-induced hypertension and felt like the “walking dead for days.” She bled profusely. Her blood cell count hit the floor, and the doctors said she was about to have a seizure or stroke.
“I knew I was going to die,” she told the newspaper, adding that she had committed her spirit to the Lord. Anna had also flatlined. But when the doctors said they were giving up and nothing was working, her husband suddenly grabbed her arm and said, “You’re going to be fine.”
He said it with such faith that Ali dug deep and fought to live.
“At that moment things began to turn around,” she said.
Describing a “miraculous” scene, she says her in-laws then walked in to witness the birth of their first grandchild. Anna’s heartbeat suddenly blipped back onto the monitor as if God “commanded Anna’s spirit back into her body.”
Of course, the Spitsbergens found it supernatural. But the doctors weren’t on the same page. One was convinced Anna was “a true miracle baby,” while the anesthesiologist didn’t want to risk killing Ali to bring her daughter into the world. They delivered Anna via cesarean section. Although she was hardly breathing and suffered from heart problems, she survived.
Anna is a happy and thriving 13-year-old today.
“She is a champion, she has her own struggles from [having an] extremely [premature] birth date,” Ali said, adding that Anna is “small for her size” but “her future is so bright” and “she sings like an angel.”
Anna wouldn’t be an only child. Undeterred by Ali’s hypertension and eclampsia risks, the Spitsbergens fulfilled their dream of a big family. They surrounded themselves with hopeful voices, not doubtful ones.
What’s strange is her second childbirth was “perfection,” she said, without any complications throughout the pregnancy.
“I think God wanted to show off and be like, ‘Hey, you put your trust in me, I do miracles, watch this!’” she told The Epoch Times.
Naomi, now 10, was born flawlessly healthy. She loves sports and wants to work in cosmetics one day.
But the Spitsbergens weren’t done.
Four children were in the cards, though it wouldn’t all be smooth sailing. They had another loss. After announcing a pregnancy to their family and friends, Ali suffered a miscarriage. At around 12 weeks, their unborn child’s heartbeat faded away. “I had to deliver that dead baby at home,” she said. “That was probably one of the worst experiences that my husband and I went through together.”
The Spitsbergens seemed to finally come full circle when, soon thereafter, they were surfing in Australia. While there, they conceived their first son, John Samuel—another perfect pregnancy. John is 7 and loves baseball.
Next came Jacob.
One day when John could talk, he pointed to his mom’s belly and said, “Baby.”
“I took a pregnancy test because I hold stock in these things,” Ali said. “And it started reading positive.” She told her husband, “We’re having another boy.” They never asked the doctors the gender, but soon their second son entered the world.
Jacob, now 5, announced he wants to be a religious leader like his dad. However, his parents won’t be raising their children to be religious the way Ali was raised.
Religion is “doing things to do things,” she said.
“I went to church, I had no relationship [with God],” she said. “So we are definitely raising our kids with a relationship, knowing that there’s a loving God, who is for them, not against them, who has plans to foster them, who will make the impossible possible.”
