Hey Everyone- This is Conor. Thought I would upload a couple of my favorite new photos...I cannot tell you enough how much we are blessed by your prayers and words. Thanks!

a word of life

"God is higher than anything and anyone,
outshining everything you can see in the skies.
Who can compare with God, our God,
so majestically enthroned,
Surveying his magnificent
heavens and earth?
He picks up the poor from out of the dirt,
rescues the wretched who've been thrown out with the trash,
Seats them among the honored guests,
a place of honor among the brightest and best.
He gives childless couples a family,
gives them joy as the parents of children.
Hallelujah!"
(Psalm 113:4-9, The Message)

How great is the God who does not dismiss our pain, who validates and acknowledges our suffering and gives voice to our sorrows in such a way that even poverty or friendlessness are not too mournful to be excluded from the list of agonies that includes infertility.

I feel compelled to speak a word of life to you tonight. I don't know who among you is struggling with the longing for children but I know that you must be there... I felt the Father urging me last night to share these words that I wrote a little over a year ago as a prayer of anguish lifted up to Him. I never intended to do so, but I will follow His lead. I pray you will feel encouraged in knowing that He does hear you and that so much can change in just a few months' time. I learned I was pregnant with Emerette only a month and a half after writing the following:

"The heaviness of my present sorrow is so much that i often cannot face it. In ten days, my daughter will be four - and still, she has no living sibling. Sellers has an amazing imagination, lots of 'friends' she chats with, and I often find myself experiencing a mixture of delight at her incredible ability to create and guilt over my inability to provide for her the reality of a sibling with whom she can actually play.

Father God, if prayers on paper - prayers spoken by footsteps and heartbeats and each and every breath - are enough, why? How much longer? I beg You, I beseech You, I cast myself and my anguish before You - Lord, please, grant me this request. Fill my womb with life as You once did. As David said, 'Bless me for as long as You have afflicted me'. Where are You, Lord? Why is what i pray so earnestly for so seemingly off Your radar? Hear me. Please, God. Please. Show Yourself as real and loving and gracious and just. Quench my thirst and satisfy my soul. Lift my weary hear and annoint me with Your favor."

I pray you will read these words and, no matter what your heart is uneasy over, no matter what the desires stirring underneath, You will know that I lift these up for you tonight. He is faithful. He is good. And He delights to reveal the greatness of His might and the tenderness of His compassion. Be blessed.

i feel a springtime in my soul

i have stumbled over how to open this particular post a thousand times. Not because there's something major that needs saying but, rather, because there's so little to say. Life has taken on that sweetness you feel in a quiet breeze; calm, still, thoroughly refreshing. I once heard that happiness makes for dull artistry, which, if you look at the greatest works of art throughout history, seems quite true. Literature and art and music and dance and poetry and everything seem to be the result of seasons of depression, sorrow, loneliness, heartache. I find I struggle to feel my own voice emerge amidst the joy I'm experiencing. Not that it's gone. But that, for now, it's buried beneath something with a weight I actually enjoy carrying. Like the weight of a child against your chest. It's a pleasant sensation, one that says being quiet isn't such a bad thing.

And yet there's that feeling that I'm not supposed to remain quiet forever. I actually have known for a few weeks now that I'm supposed to be writing, I'm supposed to be sharing what's going on. In my mind I pressure myself, wondering what compelling thoughts I can possibly have to share now, now that all is well - now that so much has been redeemed and transformed. Aside from a few pictures, does anyone really want to know what I'm thinking about? Even if they do, can I possibly deliver whatever it is they want to read? If it is, in fact, true that happiness makes for dull artistry, then you're about to get one heavy dose of humdrum, because I'm deliriously happy.

Emerette is everything I could've hoped she'd be and even more. It sounds so silly, but even her toes are a marvel to me. I find there's nothing I really dread in mothering now, not the diapers or the sleepless nights. Everything with her took on a feel of splendid opportunity when she was born. Each strand of hair waiting to be swept back, each little finger waiting to be held, everything was a symbol of hope and possibility. As I wrote the night before she was born, to go from years spent agonizing, wondering when the Lord would fulfill the desires of our hearts, wondering if He was even listening, to seeing, in flesh, the manifestation of so many prayers and supplications, was perhaps beyond my ability to express. I can only try to liken it to the sensation you get when plunging into a tub of warm water after standing outside on a very cold day. Every limb, every digit, seems to reel - and suddenly you realize you can feel your toes and your fingers and your cheeks are gaining their color again. It's like being reborn. It's like being alive in a new way. As Proverbs 13:12 says, "unrelenting disappointment makes the heart sick"; indeed, it seems to deaden a part of the spirit. "But a desire fulfilled is like a tree of life" - life. The kind of life you might have convinced yourself you'd never know again.

It's particularly cold tonight. We took Sellers to a park the other day to ride the scooter Santa brought her for Christmas. The park looked massive, and i realized it was because I could see farther than usual, with all the trees barren and the foliage that normally lines the ground dead and swept away by winter winds. I saw myself in those trees. I understand that lifelessness. Or, rather, the look of it. Do they know what is coming? Do they realize what gifts have been stored up within their very limbs, waiting to spring forth in just a few months' time? No matter how dead on the outside, there is potential and possibility and hope buried within every naked branch. Such is the God we serve, weaving redemption throughout all of creation, even knowing we might never notice. Despite the cold, I feel a springtime in my soul. And it is worth all the years of winter's chill.