Hello. I did not intend to write this story at a snail’s pace, but that is where life has me right now. Baby prep is done (that was the month of June) and now I am hoping to get more of the story written and published before baby is born this month.

For tonight, I am just here to write about something that has been on my heart over the past couple of days.

Every morning, my alarm goes off at 7am and I reach over and turn it off and then I reach for my headphones, plug them into my cellphone and turn on the Bible app. Since my Bible study at church is on summer break, I have been listening to the Psalms over and over and over again. The app will read to me, so I lay there listening to the Psalms for about half an hour before getting out of bed for the day.

One morning this week it hit me like a ton of bricks how many times the Psalms mention “the steadfast love of the Lord” and “His faithfulness endures forever”.

If we can’t find HOPE in those words that are repeated over and over and over again in the Word of God, I don’t know where we can find hope.

Waiting to adopt a baby - even when it is your 4th - is never an easy process and those words made my heart soar when I had been in a low place.

If I just stop and reflect on the past decade of my life which includes meeting and marrying Dave, going through infertility, adopting our two daughters, going through the devastating circumstances that lead me to believe my marriage was over, walking through the restoration of my marriage and rebuilding it from nothing to what it is today and adopting our first son in the midst of all that…and now standing on the brink of bringing a 4th child into our family.

If you’ve read this blog long enough, you know I have always desired to mother 4 children, but none of this was ever about little ol’ me and my desires.

In fact, all along the way, God has asked me to lay down my desires at His feet.

I constantly hear people talking about trying to figure out “God’s Will”. I remember as a teenager desperately desiring to figure out what “God’s Will is for my life”. I didn’t want to mess up, but I didn’t quite know what it meant to “do God’s Will”.

The past decade has lead me through some pretty tough and desperate times. I’ve come to the end of myself multiple times and realized I wasn’t anymore in control of my life than I am in control of the sun rising every morning. I found myself in circumstances that seemed hopeless. Infertility and infidelity leave you feeling empty.

All I had was my faith in Jesus Christ.

Every time life brought me to a desperate situation, God whispered in my heart that I needed to surrender.

We don’t like to surrender because surrendering means giving up control of our lives. Even if it is a false sense, we like to believe we are in control of our lives. When tragedy strikes we quickly learn we are not in control and we are at the mercy of our circumstances.

It is in that place we can chose to continue to rely on ourself or we can choose to put our faith in God.

When we choose to put our faith in God, we then have to choose to surrender to His Will and I can guarantee you His Will is going to look different than what you desire.

Why is that?

It is through desperate and hopeless situations that God can show us Himself!

A decade ago, I was in my mid-20’s with all my hopes and dreams staring me in the face. I was a 4th grade teacher at a local elementary school, but what I really desired to be was a wife and mother. God brought me Dave is early 2006 and that was step one to all my dreams coming true. All I had to do next was get married and then the babies could start coming.

Except they did not.

Oh how many times I cried in the dead of the night, “Why, Lord??? All I want to do is be a mother! Why would you allow me, of all people, to be infertile?”

It made no sense in those desperate days.

A decade later, I see why every day in the faces of my 3 children.

This was never about me. That is what I see most right now.

All the muck I had to tramp through to get to where I am today has brought glory to God.

I am a barren woman, but I am also the mother of 3, almost 4, children.

My marriage was doomed to end, but instead it is stronger than it has ever been.

You can’t read this blog and hear the testimony of my life over the past decade without seeing the steadfast love of the Lord and His faithfulness written in every single circumstance.

God took my barrenness and did what only He could do…for His glory.

God took my broken marriage and restored it…for His glory.

It was never about me; it was always about Him receiving glory in and through my circumstances. That took surrender on my part and then God did the rest.

His steadfast love and His faithfulness humble me and make me thankful for it all.

Tonight, if you are in the middle of the muck of life, if you find yourself in a hopeless situation and you are crying out to God “why?”, surrender it all to Him and then stand back in great expectation of what God will do for His glory.

Let the steadfast love of the Lord and His faithfulness overtake your life. Get yourself out of the way so God can do His work in and through your life - no matter your circumstances - for His glory.

- Elaine