God intervened when cheap beef caused me to have periods at four years old

Holy protection when cheap beef caused me to have periods at four years old

When my parents were first married, they lived in Texas. Back in the 1990s, cattle owners would pump hormones into their cattle to get them to grow quicker and produce more meat and, for a newly married couple, cheap beef became a staple of my parent’s diet. But research was starting to come out that showed the connection between growth hormones in food and repercussions in children. My mother had seen an article talking about the link and read it with little concern at the time. However, God was preparing her for what was to come. 

It came just days before my fourth birthday, when I began to bleed into my underwear. My mum was instantly terrified. The articles from years before came straight to mind and she immediately knew in her heart what was happening. I had precocious puberty.

Precocious puberty is when girls under the age of eight begin to exhibit signs of puberty. At the age of four, I was developing breasts and having to learn how to cope with periods. But God was gracious in surrounding me with family and teachers who were compassionate, and He settled it in my mother’s heart that so long as we listened to what He was saying and obeyed what He told us to do, we would get through this.

Praise God, I was never embarrassed. Even when I was taller than one of the teachers by the age of six. Even when other parents made comments in the playground, God protected me and amazingly my childhood innocence was protected through it all.

Meanwhile, we were taking regular trips to the hospital where I had blood tests, X-rays, CT scans and ultrasounds as the doctors tried to figure out what was wrong. They confirmed that my mum’s suspicions were correct, but that they had never seen precocious puberty in anyone this young before.

They began to speak diagnoses over me. The hormones would cause me to have bone density of someone twice my age. The hormones would stop me from growing taller than four feet. The hormones would also result in early menopause in my 30s, and end my chance of having children.

The only treatment was puberty blockers.

Though my parents didn’t know what to do, their heart was to seek God and do the right thing for me. With every decision they made, they prayed and fasted, asking for God’s wisdom. It wasn’t for another 20 years that he revealed how he had been at the centre of those choices.

Together, my parents chose to decline any medical intervention and instead to remove chemicals and hormones from our lives. Too scared to tell our consulting doctor face-to-face that we were not going to take the treatment, my mum wrote him a letter, and his response confirmed to her that this was the right choice.

As soon as my grandmother heard that I would never be taller than four feet, she prayed for years that I would reach five feet. Praise God, He heard her prayers and I am a normal 5ft 3in. 

God assured my mum that she need not worry about the diagnosis of early menopause, because I would marry young. When I came home engaged at the age of 19 it was another confirmation of God’s word to her.

But the greatest way in which God protected me we only realised after reading Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier (Regnery Publishing). The puberty blockers given to transgender patients today are the same drugs that had been offered to me 20 years before. The Holy Spirit had stopped my parents from giving them to me, which was God’s goodness because they had no idea of the harm these drugs could do. The claim is that these blockers are reversible – in reality, in just a few months they can cause infertility.

God protected me and cared enough to lead my parents to decline treatment. Even when it felt like they were walking in the dark with no understanding, God was there! 

Beth

Prayer brought peace to Southampton during summer riots

On 7 August 2024 news had already spread on social media that immigration offices around the country would be targeted, as part of anti-immigration rioting. I work in a public sector setting and, for staff safety, we received regular updates on intelligence relating to possible times and venues for trouble. That afternoon some incidents took place on the east side of Southampton, and we were told to cancel all visits and appointments and work from home. Many of my colleagues are immigrants of black African descent and I cannot begin to understand how they must have felt in this atmosphere. It was like fear had our city under siege.

In response to all the speculation of violence, one of the local church leaders set up a zoom meeting that was quickly disseminated across the churches in Southampton. Just before 8pm that Wednesday, there were over 100 sign-ins to the meeting, requiring another zoom link being sent out. I joined as part of the Southampton House of Prayer.

In our city, around 8pm, approximately 30 anti-immigration protestors gathered and hundreds of counter protestors gathered in response. They were separated by a police line. For a moment it seemed that the situation would escalate, with police needing to make a couple of arrests. However, by 8:25pm the protests started to dissipate, and the crowd gradually dispersed. 

Prayers had been answered. In one sense it was not a very dramatic moment. We were very glad and grateful that there was peace; that there had not been the eruption of violence that had been witnessed in other areas of the country in the preceding weeks. However, what did feel exhilarating was the sense of hopeful camaraderie in gathering with a large, diverse, motley crew of fellow prayers in a time of national crisis and fear. As it says in Psalm 133: “Oh, how wonderful, how pleasing it is when God’s people all come together as one…It is there that the Lord has promised his blessing of eternal life” (vv1,3, ERV).

It can be difficult to maintain unity when highly

politicised issues like this come to the fore, with multiple layers of entrenched injustices at play towards different groups of people. However, when praying for God’s kingdom to come, we necessarily surrender ourselves and our own vision of desired outcomes to God. Some people may have wanted retribution towards the anti-immigration protestors, some may feel a fear of immigration and loss of some national cultural identity bound up with their vision of Britain as a Christian nation. I am reminded of Joshua’s encounter with the commander of the Lord’s armies: “‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’ ‘Neither’” (Joshua 5:13-14). 

My hope is that 7 August serves as a catalyst for prayer across churches, across the city; that we would be galvanised by the blessing that comes with unity and answered prayer to seek the kingdom of heaven for all other seemingly intractable problems.

Fran