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.

psalm 126:3

To our precious blog family,
First, let me apologize for being so delinquent in making any posts. It has been a whirlwind of a weekend and now we are at home! I am trying to figure out how to put pictures up here because there are so few words that I can come up with to express my joy and my gratitude.

We went in on Friday, filled with apprehension and some shock - after living for so long under a cloud, having to accept things as they were and embracing the bleakness of our reality as a part of a plan that we didn't choose but could live through with the Lord - it seemed strange, almost wrong, to be anticipating something so enormously wonderful. The surgery went smoothly, however, and within moments of delivery, we heard the first sweet cries belonging to a child we'd waited on not just nine months, but years. Conor and I wept. She had a head full of hair and, upon really getting a good look at her, we realized she was almost a carbon copy of her big sister! Five years difference in age doesn't seem to affect how genetics work. We even see resemblances to Copeland in our newest girl.

Many of you have asked about her name, even when we learned we were having a girl. For a long time, we deliberated and the only real consensus Conor and I could reach was that we needed it to be unique - after all, we had Sellers and Copeland as our first two! - and we wanted it to have significance. Emerette was Conor's great-grandmother's name. We never knew her, but this was the first time we'd chosen a name from his side of the family. I agreed that it was time to do so, but I wanted her middle name to somehow connect back to Copeland, which was my great-grandmother's maiden name. Looking back at family records, we found that the first Copeland to this country - a man by the name of George - had married a certain Sarah McClure in something like 1755. I immediately loved the way the names sounded together, and it seemed like a special way to honor our precious daughter who won't ever get to know her new baby sister.

We are, as I recently said to some friends, "delusionally happy"! It seems as though we have entered a season of tremendous joy and we are walking in it with great appreciation and deep praise for the Father. May He be given all the glory and all the honor!

More to come...

Emerette McClure Farley

She is here! I am so sorry for the delayed posting. Boothe is a bit worn out, and I am not good at updating things. Thank you for your prayers. Emerette is doing amazing! She was born yesterday at 12:35(lunch time) at 6lbs 15 ounces. She looks just like her sisters, and I am so proud of her. Here are a couple pictures until Boothe updates.

Conor

the big day

Most of you probably know: we are going in tomorrow at noon to deliver our third daughter. I can hardly believe it. Actually, I almost sort can't believe it at all. As i recently told a friend, it's a strange sensation to walk into something that has been so fraught with anxiety and sorrow and just feel, well, normal about it. It's almost beyond my own faculties to take it all in. After living in "survival mode" for so long - operating under the mantra of, "well, this isn't good, but we'll survive it" - it's an odd thing to actually try to prepare yourself for blessing. To embrace it and believe it. And hope for it. I have struggled, for several days now, with fear, apprehension and unrest. I realize this is the work of the enemy. But the mind is often a bleak battlefield and were it not for your prayers, I know I'd be in an all too often losing fight.

We are asking specifically for prayer that the delivery (a c-section) will go like clockwork, no complications to speak of. I've never had a baby forego the NICU, so this would be the first. My prayers are that she will come out kicking and screaming - literally! The sonogram I had on Monday estimated her weight at a little over 7.5 pounds; while we know this is really just an educated guess, it warmed my heart to think she might actually be 'chubby'. So we shall see! It's a strange thing to have her so near even as I type and yet so totally unknown.

We will post pictures as soon as we are able. I can't wait to to show her off to all of you, the ones who've walked so diligently with our family through so much. It is with great excitement and joy that I look forward to witnessing the Father reveal Himself tomorrow.

three weeks, 2 days

Tonight I realized it'd been six weeks almost since i last wrote on the blog and I felt compelled to put something down. I'm sorry. I suppose a part of me has wanted to sort of withdraw and just relax mentally. it's hard to believe that in a little over three weeks - three weeks from this Friday - we will be meeting our third daughter.

Even as I sat beside Sellers tonight while she "read" a Berenstain Bears book to me before bed, the whole time feeling the baby kick around at her sister's voice, it just doesn't seem real. I can hardly believe a few inches separate me from her now, let alone a few weeks' time. Every evidence is there to prove she's on her way... soon... but it still doesn't seem real.

Just for you to know the details, we are going in on Friday, November 21 for a c-section at noon (Nashville time). We will of course be posting pictures and sending updates as often as possible! I know for many of you this feels like it's as much a part of your own story - in its way - as it is for Conor and I. We, too, are anxious to see what marvels the Lord has up His sleeve. My only requests at this point are for a smooth, easy delivery. I've not yet had a baby who wasn't in the NICU (Sellers was delivered three weeks early due to an infection and consequently spent a few days there), so I am praying this will be my first!

If you get the chance, please go visit Youtube.com and watch Matt and Ginny Mooney's video documentary about their son, Eliot. I'm sure most of you have; it's fresh on my heart today because the Mooneys got to spend a few moments on "Oprah" this afternoon discussing their story. It wasn't nearly as long as they should've had to talk about that precious boy, but I can only imagine how many people have since watched the video and heard the Gospel proclaimed through the simplest terms: God loves to show Himself through weakness. I look forward to getting to meet Eliot when I've got Copeland back in my arms again.

More to come...