For the first time in almost five years, I have begun a year where baby making, infertility and the adoption process will NOT be on the forefront of my mind.

It is almost mind-boggling to think about because all three of those have been such a HUGE part of my life for the past five years.

2007…Dave and I had been engaged the previous October, our wedding date was set for May and (my plan) we hoped to be pregnant by Christmas. My mind was consumed with wedding and then, baby making.

2008…Quite possibly the worst year of my life to date. Nothing went the way I had always imagined it. Everything was one disappointment and failure after another. My mind was consumed with infertility.

2009…This year started out with the hugest disappointment of all, but ended with a miracle – our Little Bug! My mind was consumed with the adoption process.

2010…That year was beautiful. We had a beautiful daughter, but I knew our family wasn’t complete and we would go through the adoption process again, which brought on so many various emotions.

2011…Last year was an amazing year. It started kinda rough but then it was like God was asking me, Do you really trust me? and I knew I DID trust Him so I just had to let him do His thing for adoption #2. And He did. He did something more…again. A second miracle in as many years – Sweet Pea.

And now here I am at the very beginning of 2012. I don’t know what this year holds for us but I do know one thing: we are not trying to get pregnant, we are not doing any infertility treatments (ever again!) and we are not entering this year hoping to adopt.

In some strange way I feel like I am standing at a point in my life where infertility truly is completely in my past.

It is a chapter in the story of my life that has come to a close, but at the same time I know that what I learned from going through infertility will follow me all the days of my life for rest of my entire life.

And I am so glad about that because what I learned during the past five years and the way God grew my faith and stretched me in ways that really hurt when the stretching was going on – I DO NOT ever want to forget any of that.

I am who I am today because of infertility. It has left it’s mark on me – forever.

Yes, a mark and not a wound.

There was once a wound. It was a very ugly, painful wound. But, through the years God has healed that wound in only a way that He can.

He has restored me.

He never chose to bless my womb with life, but I can tell you today that God has blessed me in ways that I count it a huge privilege that He chose this path for me and not the path that I once desired for myself.

I never in a million years would have signed up for this standing at the altar with Dave on the day we were married.

I look at myself on that day and I am just astounded at where GOD took me after my Grandpa declared us husband and wife.

I was on top of the world. God had blessed me with the most wonderful man in the world to be my husband, my partner in life until death do us part and I could not wait for life to be growing inside of me.

Sometimes I think I was more excited about FINALLY being able to get pregnant than I was excited about finally getting married! (Don’t be alarmed. I love my husband, but that statement is just the best way I know to convey the message I am trying to say right now about how excited I was about pregnancy! My dreams were FINALLY going to come true!!!)

Then…

Oh, we humans are so humorous. We have everything planned out just so. Just perfect.

On my wedding day, I loved the Lord. I’ve always been a “good girl”. I never gave my parents any grief. I grew up in church. I knew my Bible. I knew truths about God. I knew that He had good plans for my life. I knew that as a Christian, I was to trust God. I trusted God.

My plans were not panning out the way I imagined they would. Something terribly was wrong. I could feel it in my bones. Something wasn’t right within. It shouldn’t be taking this long.

Instead of a growing belly I found myself growing more and more weary every month as my dream just wasn’t happening.

I was walking the road of infertility. My biggest fear in life was always that. Isn’t that crazy? While I grew up dreaming of the day I would learn I was pregnant, I also grew up fearing that I would never be able to give birth and have children.

Instead of my wildest dreams coming true, my worst nightmare became a reality.

Infertility became my life.

It came in like a lion seeking to destroy me. To destroy my faith. To destroy everything I had been taught growing up.

I saw infertility as the great enemy. My God saw my infertility as the tool He was using to chisel my character to be more like Him and to perform miracles for the world to see His Glory.

Infertility tested my faith like nothing in this life ever had.

Was I going to turn from God because He was not giving me the desire of MY heart or was I going to cling to Him as I never had before because everything I had ever known had been stripped away and I was left with circumstances that were completely and utterly out of my control?

I couldn’t make a baby get in my belly! I was helpless. The very core of my being was tested and I knew I had to choose SELF or GOD.

So I looked to see what each had to offer.

SELF? I had nothing to offer. My body was failing me, plagued with endometriosis that had all but rendered my reproductive organs useless.

So I looked to my Savior. The One I had grown up learning about in Sunday School. The One I had a relationship with since I was eight years old. The One I knew was a loving God. The One I said I trusted. The One I knew had a good plan for my life.

I knew all that, but standing there on the road of infertility marked with darkness and disappointments at every turn and every fork in the road, I KNEW it was time to believe it all – with my whole entire being.

It was time to believe that God DID have a plan for my life. It wasn’t pregnancy, which was pretty devastating to me, BUT, God’s word told me He had a plan to bring me HOPE, a plan to PROSPER ME, a plan to give me a FUTURE.

Not only that, but the Word of God told me that He desired to do something immeasurably MORE than I could even dream of.

What??! Really??!

Because I always thought getting married and having my four babies three years apart each, was a pretty big amazing dream!

God has more than that in mind?

It was time.

It was time to trust in my God in a way I had never been called to trust in Him before.

It was time to lay my dream to rest and wait in great expectation for the things that GOD wanted to do.

It was time to surrender my plan, for His.

I think back to those days, especially March 8, 2009 – the day I knew without a shadow of a doubt that pregnancy was not in God’s plan for my life, but adoption was.

It wasn’t so much that I was disappointed that we “had to adopt”. It was more of me still hanging onto my dream, if only by the smallest thread possible. In those first days, it was very hard to see why God wasn’t allowing me to achieve my childhood dream. Why He wasn’t answering our prayers in the way we thought He should answer them.

I had spent a lifetime dreaming about something that was never to be and I knew I wasn’t going to “get over it” in a matter of a couple days or even a couple months.

But what I did have to do was walk blindly towards the place God was leading.

And that was adoption.

If you’ve been reading here for long, you know the rest of the story so I will summarize it by simply quoting Scripture: God is able to do immeasurably more than we can imagine.

I have never been pregnant a day in my life, but I am a mother to two precious girls through the miracle of adoption and THAT was the something more that was God’s Plan for my life when I felt stranded and abandoned on the road of infertility.

This year, I feel like I have truly come to the end of that road.

I am a mother.

When I turn around and even take a small glimpse back onto the path that God has taken me on, I am truly astounded that this has been my life for the past five years. I am incredibly grateful to God that His Plan wasn’t my plan.

As I turn around and face the future, I sort of have those same feelings one would have when they are graduating high school and are about to enter the real world! You know life will never be the same. You know you are leaving one phase of life and entering another.

That is how I feel. I feel like I am leaving one phase of my life (infertility) and entering another.

More than anything in this world, I do not want to ever forget a moment of these past five years.

It is time to move forward. To truly move past infertility and head into the next phase of life – being a wife to my husband and mother to my children.

If I peel back the layers of what I have labeled as “my desire”, I can see that all along I just wanted to be a wife and mother. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be in life. Yes, I went to college and got a teaching degree and then taught for 4 years, but ultimately?

A mother. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.

The journey to this place has been more than I ever could have imagined.

It’s the faithfulness of my God.

- Elaine