So I don’t know who needs to read this today but I’ve had it on my heart for a few years now to share this story of one of the ways God has carried our family with His faithfulness and sovereignty. I know so many people, especially right now with COVID and racial tensions at an all time high, who feel like their world is spiraling out of control. It can feel overwhelming to not know how the school year will look for your kids, if your job security is there, how the elections will go down this year, and so on and so forth. There is so much that is out of our control but I am always reminded that we are not subject to the whims of fate when there is an almighty God who has us in His palm at all times. Here’s one short testimony and example of how even when things seem to be spiraling into a disaster, God is always orchestrating HIS story and plan – I hope you find it to be an encouragement to you!

The year was 2013; this was supposed to be a good year for our family. A big year. THE year. To give you a little bit of context, my husband (who had been in law school & business school the entirety of our marriage) was set to finally graduate with both his degrees that year. He even already had a job lined up at a firm where he was currently law clerking. We’d finally be bringing in a real income! I was also pregnant with our second baby, a boy we would soon find out, and we were over the moon excited to be adding to our little trio. It felt like the world was our oyster, like what could go wrong? The possibilities were only just beginning to open for us.

Unfortunately, literally everything that could go wrong, went wrong for us that year. To start, J did graduate from law school but he ended up failing the bar exam. In other words, he wasn’t a licensed attorney and if you’re not licensed, you can’t practice. The people at the firm he was clerking for were the sweetest, most genuine people, but they had an attorney spot to fill and couldn’t wait another year for him to retake the bar and find out his results. They did offer to let him keep clerking, though, which was helpful but there would be no “real job” waiting for him even if he were to pass the bar the second time around. More important than that was that the next bar exam date was 6 weeks after my due date with our son. J would be retaking the bar exam with a toddler AND newborn at home. If he couldn’t pass the first time without the newborn, how could we expect him to pass with the new baby here?!

2013 was also the year that we found out about E’s autism. I had been slightly concerned about her speech development as we hit the end of 2012 and into the beginning of 2013. If you’ve read previous posts of mine, you’ll know that while her developmental progress (or lack thereof) had been on my radar for awhile, her pediatrician was not concerned. After being brushed off at her 18 month check up (fall 2012) I told myself I’d wait until her 2nd birthday and if I still felt uneasy, I’d either push for a developmental screening or just pay privately to have one done outside of our insurance. Well 2013 is when she turned 2 and … you know how that story ends. Our entire world shifted from what we knew into the world of special needs parenting.

Knowing about E’s autism only made me more fearful about the birth of baby #2. Autism risk runs higher among siblings and boys tend to have it more commonly than girls. With E’s sibling-to-be a boy, I felt like the odds were impossibly stacked against us; in my mind, it was pretty much a given that I’d have more than one special needs child.

It was a hard year – to start off thinking that there were so many exciting and good things in store for us only to end the year completely broken and emptied. Every single thing we were anticipating and looking forward to was flipped onto its head that year.

But you know what they say – yet God.

God stood in the gap between what we expected to happen and what actually happened. It was such SUCH such a trying time for me; I wrestled with knowing that God was good and a giver of good things, but looking at what He’d actually given and feeling like it wasn’t very good at all.

The months going into 2014 are honestly a blur. A lot of it had to do with the fact that baby D was born in January and J pretty much disappeared to study 18 hours/day for the bar exam. A lot of it had to do with my grief following E’s autism diagnosis. And a lot of it had to do with the daily battle to choose joy and faith instead of bitterness and anger.

And here’s where I also started to see God’s providence and blessing heaped onto our family in letting 2013 unfold the way it did.

Jan 2014: Little man D came out of my womb knocking down every fear and worry I had. E had been born via emergency cesarean and I was trying so hard for a VBAC with D. My doctors were so skeptical, I can’t even tell you how many times at prenatal appointments they tried to just convince me to schedule surgery. Well, even though D was a whopping 9 lbs 6oz, I managed to have my VBAC. What a blessing.

March 2014: It’s like D wanted his mama to know that there was no need for me to be scared he’d have autism. At 6 weeks old, almost to the day, he started giving me a social smile which is one BIG marker that a child will NOT have autism. He seemed almost advanced in his social skills, giggling, making eye contact, and cooing all before I anticipated he would, giving me lots of reassurance that he was developmentally OK. What a blessing.

March – May 2014: Once J finished retaking the bar exam, he was basically free with no obligations. He couldn’t actively search for a job because there is a 3 month gap between when the bar exams take place and when they release the results and no firm will hire an attorney without knowing if they’ve passed the bar (esp if they’ve already failed once). You know what the silver lining to that was? With E’s fresh diagnosis, there were SO many therapies to start, phone calls to make, decisions to make, and insurance to battle. I couldn’t do it. I was crippled in sadness and completely overwhelmed; also, I had a newborn to take care of if you remember. Guess who stepped up and handled, literally, all of it? Yep, you guessed it – J. And if you know J, you know that he’s exactly the type of person who you’d want researching options and advocating for you. What a blessing.

May 2014: We finally find out J passed the bar exam when he took it the second time in Feb WITH TWO KIDS TWO AND UNDER AT HOME. What a blessing.

June 2014: We decided it would be best to try and move to a different town close to where we were living at the time. At this point, E had turned 3 and was eligible to receive free services through the school district for things like speech therapy. We started her in the school district of the town we lived in at the time and it was TRASH. I mean, we’d heard good things but once we actually put her in, I was shocked at the lack of attention and care given to her. The teachers didn’t even read her IEP, the classrooms were overrun and over-stimulating (the WORST environment for a toddler on the spectrum). We’d heard good things about the school district a few towns over – nothing specifically related to special needs per se but good things nonetheless. It was a beautiful little suburb that J & I had always admired but never really considered making a reality because of the high cost of housing. It was also closer to our church which we felt like was an added bonus.

We sold our house and the buyers gave us two months of FREE rent back – that meant we had 60 days to find a new house. We house hunted and put a bid on SIX different homes in the new town we wanted to move to, and every single time we got outbid. The housing market was no joke in that area we wanted to move to. Just as we were thinking we’d better just realign and expand our home search to other areas, we had not one but two offers accepted at the same time. We weren’t the highest bidder but we had the cleanest offer and for some reason that pushed the seller to take our offer over others. We moved in and started E at her early intervention program through the new school district … which coincidentally was within walking distance of our new home. No, we did not know that at the time. We knew there was a local elementary school down the street but didn’t realize the very program she needed was also held there. After all the other homes that we were passed over for, the one that we ended up landing was a 5 minute walk from E’s new school. What a blessing.

September 2014: The one downside to our new home was that it made J’s commute to work (the place where he was a law clerk) 2 hours each way. He wasn’t a practicing attorney but he still had to work to bring in some income to feed our family (lol) and the commute was definitely exhausting on him. He’d put in a few job applications for practicing attorneys here and there over the months but nothing had come to fruition. The only place that called him back for an interview was a firm about 40 minutes away from our new home – better than 2 hours but still a pretty sucky commute if you think about it. J took the interview because beggars can’t be choosers, you know? By some grace of God, it turned out that the firm not only wanted him, but they also had a second branch 10 minutes (literally) away from our home and they wanted him to work THERE instead of at the location where he interviewed. What a blessingl

December 2014: The early intervention program at E’s new school was not only free of cost to us but completely run by speech therapists. Let me explain what that means. As a child with an autism diagnosis, E was eligible (at the time) for an hour of free speech therapy a week through her school district. In our old school district, that meant she got to go to the free early intervention program (basically preschool) and a speech therapist would spend 30 minutes, 2x a week with her to fulfill the state mandated service she was eligible for. Since her new program was completely RUN by speech therapists, what that meant was that instead of only getting the 1 hour/week of speech she was “owed”, the entire 25 hours/week she spent at school in that program was essentially all speech therapy time. I can’t even tell you what a huge help that was for her. She started the program in September literally unable to say “mommy” and by Christmas was staying simple sentences such as, “Mommy, I want milk.” It was such a drastic change for the better in her development; she blossomed in her new environment. What a blessing.

So if 2020 feels like your version of my 2013, I want to encourage you to choose joy, choose faith, don’t fall into bitterness or anger; pour out your heart and cries to a God who cares, is loving, and above all GOOD – trust that His care for you is greater than any alternate path that you could have carved for yourself. I know what it feels like to have an entire year just implode and everything feel like it was for nothing … but I promise you, He is faithful, He is worthy of praise, and He will have His glory in and through those who call upon His name. Drop a line below if you’d like me to pray for you; I’d be honored to!