The first week of July I was brave and decided to make the trip with my parents and aunt to Beersheba Springs, Tennessee. Dave was on a mission trip to Haiti that week. I remembered going there as a child to my mom’s highschool reunions and I thought it would be a wonderful place to take the girls.

My mom attended highschool at a boarding school in Brazil because her parents were missionaries to Brazil. So all the missionary kids (MKs) would go to this boarding school for high school. Everyone was like family because no one had any family living nearby due to living in Brazil, so the other missionaries became your family. The bond between these people is remarkable and it stretches through several generations which is why I really wanted to go this year.

The last reunion I attended was in 2003. I was 22 years old and fresh out of college with my 4th grade teaching position lined up for the fall. That summer, my family decided to take a road trip with the Reunion being one of our stops.

A few days before we set out for this trip, my mom completely surprised me by saying, “They’ve asked me if you would share your testimony the first night we are there.”

My first thought was, Seriously?! I am going on vacation! I don’t want to have to think and talk in front of a big group of people!! But, of course, I knew the answer……yes, I will share. But not before I asked my mom first, Can I just stand up and tell them all to just go read my blog??!

I got to thinking about sharing my testimony in this place and realized this was actually a full-circle event for me.

Because, 10 years ago when I was there as a naïve 22 year old with her whole life ahead of her, I had an idea of how my life was going to play out over the next several years.

I think back to the me of ten years ago and I am a very different person than I was a decade ago. I was still in the mindset of teach school, get married, teach some more, quit teaching to have babies.

Getting married and having babies, even fresh out of college, was on the forefront of my mind. I was never really career-minded; all I truly desired was to be a wife and mother.

As I walked around the Beersheba Springs campus ten years ago, those were my life goals. Getting married and having babies (4, to be exact, but not all at once!) is what I saw myself doing. If I had been asked where I’d be ten years down the road, I would have said, “I’ll be married and have four children.”

As I told the group that Wednesday night, my life did not play out in the ways I thought it would when I was a 22 year old college graduate about to start my first year of teaching.

Infertility met my dreams, shattered them and then God’s faithfulness redeemed everything. And He redeemed so much more than just my barren womb. He redeemed the lives of two baby girls and the two special women who chose life for them and then chose to place them with me.

Ten years ago I would have said being faced with infertility would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to me as far as fulfilling my dreams – and it was! But, now, ten years later, I can say with absolute certainty that infertility is one of my greatest blessings in this life.

I assumed my womb would bear much fruit, but God chose to close my womb – and not as a curse or punishment – because He had a different plan for my life than the one I saw set before me at the age of twenty-two.

At 22 years old, I knew the verse Jeremiah 29:11 about God having plans for us that will prosper us and not harm us, plans that will bring us hope and a future.

But now, at age 32, I know and believe that verse with every fiber of my being. That verse is my life.

God did have plans that brought me hope and a future – a very bright future with two of the most precious daughters I ever could have dreamed of.

- Elaine