When Mandrakes Don't Work: Confronting the Challenges of Becoming Pregnant and Having Your Baby.

By Malcolm O'Dean

Author Malcolm O’Dean and his wife, Shane, secretly endured years of agony for not being able to have a baby. After everything else had failed, a seldom-thought-of statement from Psalm 113:9 became their encouragement, their motivation, and their empowerment for fulfilling their desire to have their baby. The O’Dean’s personal experience with the highs and lows of having a baby is held dearly as their only qualification for sharing their story with the world.

In When Mandrakes Don’t Work, Malcolm confronts the social pressure to become pregnant and have a baby, and he dispels the myth of being cursed if you don’t get your baby. This story reveals that with God, neither time nor age, nor can conditions or circumstances, impede your destiny. It discloses how to end the frustration of unsuccessful rounds of in vitro fertilization, ritual cleansing, feng shui, and conjugal positioning.

When Mandrakes Don’t Work helps you understand why people of all ages are either secretly or openly zeroed in on having a baby. Above all else, it bears truth to the words of the songwriter Jim Reeves: “It is no secret what God can do. What he’s done for others, he’ll do for you.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664254176

Malcolm O'Dean

Malcolm O’Dean is a former teacher who initially specialized in secondary science education and adult education. For the past twenty-five years, his focus has been the science of salvation.

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Copyright © 2022 Malcolm O’Dean.

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Scripture marked (KJV) taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation,

copyright ©1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of

Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (AMP) are taken from the Amplified Bible, Copyright ©

1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked (RSV) are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible,

copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the

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Scripture marked (WEB) taken from the World English Bible.

ISBN: 978-1-6642-5418-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-5419-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-5417-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021925689

WestBow Press rev. date: 03/29/2022

DEDICATION

To my unique wife, Shane:

Your quiet speech has been the hallmark of refinement. Your deportment is still a reflection of your intellect. Your first impression on me left a lasting aftereffect. When your faith embraced God’s forecast About the childless woman in Psalm 113:9, our relationship rose to a new dimension.

Your faith encounter motivated this written production.

I love you more today than yesterday,

But only half as much as tomorrow.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 – The Urgent Quest for Mandrakes

Chapter 2 – Making a Deal with Mandrakes—Rachel and Leah

Chapter 3 – Death in the Water—Miscarriages at Jericho

Chapter 4 – Menostop—Abraham and Sarah

Chapter 5 – God Remembered Her—Hannah

Chapter 6 – Then It Happened to Me

Chapter 7 – Mandrakes or No Mandrakes? (Just Venting)

Chapter 8 – Your Turn Now—Yes, You

Chapter 9 – Beyond Mandrakes—Baby Syndrome

PREFACE

IT WAS BY God’s grace alone that years of intense desire for a baby blossomed into immeasurable satisfaction and unbridled enjoyment. However, while basking in the comfort of fatherhood, I was awakened to the realization that there are thousands of other human beings whose desire for a baby has not yet been satisfied. Maybe sharing my story would bring some encouragement to them. Then procrastination held me captive from telling the world what God had done for me. Nevertheless, God used the constant reminder of my wife’s faith and the bold suggestion of our friend Madeia to deliver me from the chains of procrastination. Consequently, the unheard cries of those who are still craving for their baby energized me to do something.

I am a natural sympathizer with the less fortunate, the underdog. I am impassioned to fight for their cause. Therefore, an I-must-do-something-quickly attitude seized me, and I began writing. My passion for advocating on behalf of the underdog intensified when the mother of a newly married couple approached me about their baby plight, which was like the one that I had encountered. At that time, the stakes became even higher. How many others are going through life in that perplexing struggle? That question was answered when a Nigerian Movie called Baby Blues was released on YouTube. The movie highlighted the summit of all fears when trying to have a baby: an interfering mother and a meddling mother-in-law encapsulated in the same human body. Baby Blues epitomized the ceaseless efforts made and the myriad of challenges experienced by so many people just to conceive and give birth to a live and healthy baby.

From that moment, it became a sprint to the finish line. My passion was intensified to get my fellow humans across the gulf of childlessness, up the homestretch of Baby Express, and across the finish line of motherhood and fatherhood. It was like Usain Bolt going around the final curve of a 200-meter sprint and driving up the last 100 meters of the track to another world-record performance. It was as Secretariat galloping down the homestretch at Churchill Downs towards the finish line at the Kentucky Derby. I locked in on the words of Psalm 51:13–14 (KJV): Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee. Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.

God had delivered me from childlessness, and now my pen must broadcast of his righteousness. Like King David, I must now tell others of God’s ways, and assuredly, childless men and women