I was asked earlier in the week to give a talk in church about recognizing the Lord's hand in our lives. The references I was given included one of my favorite talks of all time by Brother Bednar titled "The tender mercies of the Lord" https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2005/04/the-tender-mercies-of-the-lord?lang=eng#watch=video along with a few other talks on gratitude. I had a lot of menial work this week- including spending hours peeling and scraping paint of my front door which in and of itself was a blessing because it gave me time to contemplate the topic. Really it was overwhelming, thinking of all the experiences I have had in my life thus far that have helped me to see the Lord's hand in my life, and how could I even start to count the tender mercies?? Of course the topic that stands out most is our experiences with infertility and adoption but that story is 16 years long and how could I even begin to scratch the surface in 12 minutes! But like most times we are asked to talk or teach, I found that I was the one that needed the teaching. I realized that although I have come to the place were I recognize the blessings that have resulted from our trials, I had never actually thanked my Heavenly Father for them. As I opened my mind and heart to remember different experiences and to pull all the pieces together it humbled me once again to recognize that He does know me and I can better understand and appreciate the experiences I have had thus far in my life and why I needed them.
Since I tend to talk too much and give too much detail I typed my talk out so that so could organize my thoughts and see how long it was going to take because I didn't want to steal time from the other speaker. Even in typing it out I had to cut out some significant parts of our infertility story and really didn't even begin to tell our adoption journey at all. This isn't word for word what I delivered because I tried to speak without relying on the text and on top of that my time ran out so fast that even with going a little over I just had to sit down without even sharing a single tender mercy. Someday I may have time to write it all out but the truth is if I ever do that it will be not be a blog post it will be a novel!
So here it is a high level view of my reflections on these past 16 years...
Today I’m going to talk a bit about recognizing the Lord’s hand in our lives and His tender mercies. I think that recognizing the Lord’s hand in our lives starts with understanding the purpose of our lives. In 2 Nephi 2:25 we read:
Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.
Our eternal happiness is God’s great design, we were taught the plan of happiness in the Spirit world and not only did we chose it we rejoiced over it! We understood the purpose- that we would be given the chance to come to this life, to have the precious gift of a body and to pass through trials in this life that would shape us, refine us, and prepare us to fulfill his ultimate design which is to become like Him. This is the grand scheme of things, but the plan of happiness has been personized for each and every one of us. The truth is our Heavenly Father knows us intimately. He knows our potential and he knows our weaknesses. He knows where we are today and exactly what it will take to get us from where we are to where He wants us to be. It is our understanding of the great plan of happiness and our faith and trust in His design that give us hope! And I would suggest that it is our ability to recognize the hand of the Lord in our lives and to see his purposes being fulfilled through and in us that fill our hearts with gratitude.
It can be hard at times to feel joy and gratitude in the face of adversity. Especially when our sincere prayers for things that we believe will bring us great joy seem to go unanswered. Early in our marriage I offered sincere prayers for Matt and I to be able to purchase a Honda Civic, that was a nice car for us and I wrestled over the fact that everyone else seemed to have a nice car so why couldn’t we? At that time in our lives that was the extent of our trials- being able to afford the things we wanted. Those are not the sincere prayers that I am referring to today. In this past year alone we have prayed for a niece that nearly lost her life delivering a healthy boy- and her first son. Due to complications during delivery he went without oxygen for more than a minute and hours later they said goodbye. We prayed again when my cousin’s four year old son was diagnosed with cancer, again when Matt’s father had a heart attack and was in an induced comma while we wondered if we would be saying goodbye to him when he woke up. And then there are all the other trials that those near to us have faced. Which include everything from divorce, to the challenges that come with blending families, to addictions, to praying for teenagers that are struggling to make the right choices, to dealing with physical handicaps…the list goes on and on.
For Matt and I one of the sincere prayers we have offered for what we felt was a righteous desire was to have children. It’s really impossible to share all the experiences we have had over the last 16 years of our marriage but I will try and at least share some of the defining moments. First, I am a firm believer that it was not our father’s design to make us go through doom and gloom and if we endure to grant us joy and happiness as our reward at some far distant time and date. While adversity is a reality of life we were promised that He would send the comforter and it has been my experience that we can feel joy and happiness today in spite of our trials. A few years into our marriage it was starting to become apparent that we were not going to just get pregnant like seemingly everyone else does. During that time there was one specific experience that stood out. I had a conversation at work with a guy that was newlywed that was distraught over the news that it would be difficult for he and his wife to have children. While I understood his pain I was a little surprised by his words- he expressed that they would never be able to fulfill their purpose in life now as if their life would have no meaning without children. I knew a few people that struggled with infertility that seemed to walk around with this dark cloud over them, it consumed them, and like many trials I saw that it had the ability to destroy the most precious relationship in my life- our marriage.
For Matt and I we had both been promised children in our patriarchal blessings and I think that was one of those tender mercies that allowed us to let go, to put it in the Lord’s hand and to decide that it would happen in His time.
President Monson once said “We have all experienced times when our focus is on what we lack rather than on our blessings. Said the Greek philosopher Epictetus, “He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.”
Matt likes to tell me I am the luckiest girl alive because I am married to him, and I always laugh when he says it but I really do feel that way, he has always loved and cherished and honored me and our relationship has always been one of my greatest sources of joy, peace and comfort. And at that time in our lives I had to consciously decide that even if I had been sent to this earth for Matt alone I could be happy with that! I hate the cold and I hate winter with one single exception- snowboarding! Isn't it funny that we actually watch and wait for the worst snow storms because it means that it is dumping snow and there is nothing better than surfing through the deep powder that is left behind. So if I can make a comparison I will compare our years of infertility to the winter of our lives and tell you that we chose to snowboard through it. Honestly in many ways it was a blissful period that was simply mixed with hard moments along the way. There was stretching ourselves and asking questions, working to figure out what faith really meant, getting answers and feeling like we were moving in the right direction only to have doors shut in our face but despite all of that we lived in the moment and held onto each other. In many ways the world was oblivious to what was happening, there were people that prayed for us and hurt for us, but truly aside from our Heavenly Father the one and only person that knew exactly what I was going through that faced the disappointments with me was Matt. The beauty of it all is those experiences took us out of our newlywed bliss to a higher degree of love and appreciation for each other.
Elder Uchtdorf once said, “"We sometimes think that being grateful is what we do after our problems are solved, but how terribly shortsighted that is. How much of life do we miss by waiting to see the rainbow before thanking God that there is rain? Being grateful in times of distress does not mean that we are pleased with our circumstances. It does mean that through the eyes of faith we look beyond our present-day challenges.”
In 2011 after 12 years of marriage and 5 years of infertility treatments we finally came to the end of the line. A year prior we switched doctors and what was “unexplained infertility” was suddenly explained and another year of treatments brought us to our last doctors appointment. It was in March and while we still had options to consider they were not options we were comfortable with so we closed that door and chapter in our lives without even shedding a tear and decided it was time to try and build our family through adoption. There is really so much more to that story but I will simply say I believe it took us that long to refine us and to prepare us for the next leg in our journey. As we made that choice we were filled with hope and were so excited to see how it would all unfold.
One of my favorite stories in the Book of Mormon is the story of the Jaradites making their way to the Americas on the barges. In that story it says that they did all they could to prepare and then they got aboard the vessel and set forth in the sea “commending themselves unto the Lord”. In many ways this is the perfect comparison to the adoption process. We did all that we could to prepare- we went through the mountain of paperwork, we fasted, we prayed, we made profiles and then we put it all in the Lord’s hand.
The story in Ether chapter 6 goes on to describe how “The Lord caused that there should be furious wind blown upon the face of the waters, towards the promised land, and thus they were to tossed upon the waves of the sea before the wind”
“and it came to pass that there were many times buried in the depths of the sea, because of the mountain waves which broke upon them, and also the great and terrible tempests which were caused by the fierce winds”
Isn’t it interesting that the Lord gave them those winds, that they were necessary to get them from where they were to the promised land- or where He needed them to be.
What was their response? While they were in these tight quarters commended to an unknown future, literally not knowing when they would be delivered but living on the faith and trust they had in the Lord, they chose to pray, and to “Sing praises unto the Lord" and thank and praise the Lord day and night.
And my favorite part “no monster of the sea could break them, neither whale that could mar them, and they did have light continually, whether it was above the water or under the water”
That really became my motto. When things happened that were out of our control I would simply have to say to myself “no whale can break me” and the light in our lives was simply the peace that we knew that Heavenly Father was in charge and that we could enjoy happiness no matter if we were under the water or above it.
I wish I had the time to share the stories of how our boys found their ways into our arms, for us it was nothing short of miraculous. Never in my life have I seen our Heavenly Father’s hand so plainly. We have had the opportunity to come in contact with a number of expectant mothers along the way and although not all of them resulted in a child being placed with us I would not trade any of those experiences. In each and every case my eyes have been opened to see and understand the atonement in a new light. You see, our heavenly father isn’t just concerned about that unborn child’s future. We are all his children, and I have truly felt the overwhelming love He feels for those mothers that are carrying children from an unplanned pregnancy. He loves them just as much as he loves their babies and it has been my blessing to feel just a portion of the love that He feels for them. It has taught me that we are never lost to Him, we are known to Him and in our deepest and darkest moments He is always near. I have been witness to the tender mercies that the Lord pours out upon individuals to help carry them through the unimaginable.
Elder Bednar once taught, “I have come to better understand that the Lord’s tender mercies are the very personal and individualized blessings, strength, protection, assurances, guidance, loving-kindnesses, consolation, support, and spiritual gifts which we receive from and because of and through the Lord Jesus Christ”
He went onto explain that it is “often, the Lord’s timing of His tender mercies helps us to both discern and acknowledge them… Some may count [these] experiences as simply a nice coincidence, but I testify that the tender mercies of the Lord are real and that they do not occur randomly or merely by coincidence.
In February of 2013 we met an expectant mother on Valentine’s day who wanted to place her soon to be born daughter with us. The way that it all came together seemed miraculous, like the stars had aligned in her life and in ours. But in just a matter of weeks it all unfolded when the father’s mother stepped in to stop the placement. That experience stretched me in ways I needed to be stretched, I asked questions I never had before to try and understand what having faith really meant, it changed me in ways I needed to change. But it also prepared me for one of the tender mercies that led to all of us knowing Jed was meant to be in our family. I met Sarah a few months later at an LDS Family Services activity. I had come to provide some service and show some love for mothers that had already placed and expectant mothers who were still in the process of making hard decisions. It’s a night that they called pamper night. When I heard Sarah’s voice the very first time I had my back to her and I can’t really explain it but something inside of me made me turn around, like a tap on the shoulder that I should be paying attention. Later on in the night we were introduced when she came to my table and I got to sit and chat with her as I helped her make the craft I was in charge of. At the end of the night when we were cleaning up my case worker at the time pulled me out into the hall and told me that Sarah had already been looking at our profile and that she had actually come that night because she had heard that I was going to be there and she wanted to check me out. Apparently she had enjoyed our talk and I had moved to the top of her list but she and the baby’s father were both making lists and then they were going to come together and probably narrow it down and meet a few people before they decided. The feeling I had felt when I heard her voice the very first time started to make sense so me, I didn’t know what the future would hold but I simply prayed that if it was meant to be that the father would have the same confirmation. On mother’s day I was sitting at the table with all my family when I had this sudden urge to find my phone. When I located it I discovered a new email, it was from Sarah. She asked if I remembered her and then shared that they would like to meet us, she went on to say that she had been with the father the night before and that he had told her he had picked his couple. He said “I don’t remember their names but they have a picture of their son on a surfboard” she hadn’t told him anything about us but immediately knew the picture he was referring to in our profile. Not only had their prayers been answered, but the timing, story and delivery of that answer to us on Mother’s Day was a tender mercy for us.
One of the other tender mercies for us was the discovery that Ollie, our oldest son, was conceived in March of 2011. Only a few weeks after we closed the door to infertility treatments and opened our hearts and began the process to adopt his little life began- almost like he was waiting for us. He was born that December on Christmas Eve, our little Christmas miracle. His name Ollie signifies the Olive Leaf, a symbol of peace, joy, sacrifice and healing and it truly reflects all of the things he has been not only to us but to his first mother and her family as well. It is amazing to me how his little life has changed so many of us. There is purpose in our pain and purpose in the trials we are called to pass through. I always knew that I wanted to be a mother but nothing on earth could have prepared me for the joy I would find in becoming one. Yes, it is the hardest most demanding thing I have ever done. But I could not comprehend the love I would have for them and the joy that their smiles and hugs and kisses and laughter would bring to our home. And beyond the boys themselves we have been so blessed to know and love their first parents and their families, I can not even begin to express the gratitude in my heart that I have for them!! While I wouldn’t wish infertility on anyone, I have found gratitude in my heart for our experiences as a result of it. Heavenly Father truly knows me and He knows the experiences I needed in my life to get me from where I am to where He wants me to be and for that I will forever be grateful!
"Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he has been robbed.
“[The fact is] most putts don’t drop. Most beef is tough. Most children grow up to be just people. Most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration. Most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. …
“Life is like an old-time rail journey—delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed.
“The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride” -Jenkins Lloyd Jones (“Big Rock Candy Mountains,” Deseret News, 12 June 1973, A4).
