Last week, I wrote my last post for 2023 and signed off for the year…. or so I thought. Something miraculous occurred about 14 hours after I wished you all a Merry Christmas. Something too wonderful to keep to myself. Psalm 105:1-2 says,“Give thanks to the Lord and proclaim His greatness. Let the whole world know what He has done. Sing to Him. Sing praises to Him. Tell everyone about His great works.” That’s exactly what we wanted to do so, with the permission and collaboration of Blair and John Samuel, I want to share with you what we’re calling a Christmas miracle. 

Something most of you don’t know is my sweet Blair and son-in-love, John Samuel, have been trying to have a baby for years. They were married in 2017 and the natural progression of life is usually to start a family within a few years. This was their plan, too. They’d traveled, had their careers in a good place, and had settled in a new home. They decided they were ready for children.

One year passed. Two. Three. They watched their friends, one by one, get baby bumps and cut cakes or pop balloons to reveal the gender. They hosted baby showers in their home and visited friends on the OB floor of the hospital with gifts for the new additions. They’ve taken casseroles to their friends with newborns and wished them well and they meant every word. They’ve held friends’ babies and family members’ babies while trying to keep a happy face and fight back the tears it always seemed to induce. No matter how delighted they were for their friends or family, it was always a reminder of their own longing and the possibility that they’d never experience that joy themselves. 

As a mother, there’s nothing worse than seeing your child in pain. We’d rather bear any illness, want, crisis, affliction- we’d take any kind of suffering on ourselves to keep one of our children from feeling those things. For those of you who don’t know Blair personally, she is delightful. I know all mothers say that about their kids, but that’s truly her personality. Since the moment she arrived, she’s been bubbling over with joy and personality and her eyes twinkle with life and light. She even bounces when she walks and it just fits her sunny disposition. She laughs with her whole body. She is a joyful soul. A dear friend of mine, who’s been praying for their situation, recently told me Blair is still Blair on the surface, but she’s felt a hint of sadness in her the last few times she’s been with her. Like there’s something heavy she’s carrying. Of course, my friend knew exactly what that something was. There are few things more emotionally taxing than infertility. 

Going on four years, they’ve struggled with this. They’ve seen doctors, embryologists, had countless blood tests, dozens and dozens of ultrasounds, three surgeries, three invasive diagnostic procedures, two diagnoses, 74 hormone injections to date, and a previous failed cycle of IVF. Between the two of them, they were taking 50 supplements a day, made drastic diet changes to eat cleanly, and a lot of other things that are too numerous to list. John Samuel even worked a side job for a while to help finance all of it because fertility treatments are very expensive. I tell you all of that just so you’ll know the background and appreciate the next part of their story. 

During the Thanksgiving weekend, Blair started a second round of IVF. They’d prepaid for two cycles of IVF and the first round had failed about a year ago. Because of the cost, this would be their last try with this type of treatment, so they were excited and more than a little nervous. In some ways, this felt like their Hail Mary pass. John Samuel gave Blair the first shots of the series while they were here visiting for the Thanksgiving holiday. After more than a week of those, they went to the hospital on December 7 and the doctor retrieved her eggs. After putting their ingredients together in an incubator, they had 12 little embryos and were ecstatic. 

The usual course is to leave them in the incubator for a week, see how many survive, and chart their progress before freezing for implantation. For those of you who aren’t embryologists, for the first three days, they look for cell division. They should see compacting on the 4th day and expanding by the 5th or 6th day with the baby and placenta both visible. Isn’t that amazing? In a routine that was familiar to them from the last time, the embryologist would call every day and give them an update on how many embryos they had and their scores based on those expected milestones. 

Starting with 12 embryos, the number went down each day with each phone call. From 12 to 6 to 4. With every decrease in number, the parents’ spirits fell right along with it. By day 5, the embryologists were not seeing any activity in any of the embryos. They waited 24 hours just to be sure as they weren’t eager to make the dreaded phone call. Finally, after seeing no activity indicative of life for a whole day- no division, no compacting, no expanding- they felt confident that there was no hope of life coming from this final cycle. The last count was 0. There would be no embryo to implant. There would be no baby. The clinic called and broke the news and, given their situation and history, advised Blair and John Samuel to look into adoption or other options. There was nothing more they could do for them. 

We got word of the news and we were all devastated. Blair and John Samuel were grieving. They were trying to come to grips with the fact that they may never experience one of the most basic and taken-for-granted physical functions of having their own child- something that seemed to come so easily to others around them. Everyone dreams of seeing traces of their own face in another human being. Being told you might not experience something you’ve always assumed would happen is a loss that has to be faced and processed and mourned. Blair called and was sobbing. It was the kind of weeping that comes up from the deepest parts of the heart and it broke mine. This is where we were when I wrote what I thought to be my final post of the year. I was grieving for my daughter and my son-in-law and was writing therapeutically as much as anything. Something we’d all prayed for for so long was seeming less and less likely. Godly grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, great-uncles and great-aunts, cousins, second cousins, first cousins- twice removed, our close friends and circles, their close friends and circles. So many people had prayed for this. We know God is good, but -if I’m being honest- it wasn’t feeling much like that in the moment.

The next day, after 24 hours of crying and walking around in a daze, Blair got another phone call. They told her to sit down. The embryologist who looks at little embryos develop, all day every day, told her he didn’t know who they had praying for them, but he’d like to put some things on their list. The morning after their call to break the bad news, they’d done the required morning check on their embryos and still nothing. As a matter of routine, they checked again in the afternoon. He couldn’t believe what he saw. After sitting lifeless and unchanged for all that time, one embryo had divided, compacted, expanded and was hatching. All the things. Two days of growth and development had taken place in just a few hours. Just hours before their time was up, God did this miraculous thing. 

The doctor was sure to communicate that this is not how this usually works. This is not how it normally goes. Things do not typically happen this way. This is not the standard pattern of development. That’s why they were so certain it was time to break the bad news that it was over, the previous day. Looking at it through a scientific lens, it was over. But God. I believe if it had happened in the usual, normal, typical, standard way, we might have been tempted to give credit to modern medicine or gloss over God’s role in it all. We believe God stopped all life processes in the embryo and then started them again to remind us He is the Giver of life and He is able to do far more than we could ever imagine. He, alone, has the final say in all things. They were able to freeze the very healthy embryo for implantation in February and we give God all the praise. 

I know what you’re thinking- there’s a lot of distance and time and hurdles to clear between a frozen embryo and the birth of a viable child, and you’re right. But, to get to this point is huge for them and we choose to have faith that if God put life into that baby where there was none, He will keep His hand on it all the way. That is our prayer for the new year- that Blair and John Samuel will be holding their miracle in the glow of the Christmas lights next year. If you would give us the honor of adding it to your prayers, too, we’d be humbly grateful. 

Thanks be to the One who didn’t come to us at Christmas in a typical, normal, standard, ordinary way. He has given us hope and invigorated our faith, this season. 

Merry Christmas, 

JONI