Speaking of miracles…A conversation.

3 / 29 / 163 / 29 / 16

Until now, we have not let Shep in on just how close he came to loosing his life. He knew he got REALLY sick when he fell in the pool. He understood that he rode in an ambulance, that doctors and nurses worked incredibly hard to make him better. He likes to talk about how mommy and daddy, all of our friends and family, and a ton of people we didn’t even know where praying for him to get well.

But the fact that he almost died, that death was supposed to be his outcome, has never been mentioned.

Erron and I knew we’d let him in on the details eventually, but we figured we let much of that play out naturally, and offer up more detailed information organically as conversations arose.

Last Thursday, on the way home from school, Shep started asking me about the story of Lazarus. He was quizzing me on all the details until I finally just told him to chill and I’d read it to him straight from the source. When we got to the house, I quickly tried looking it up in his Jesus Storybook Bible. I couldn’t fine Lazarus but I found the one about the Dad who goes running into town desperately searching for Jesus to save his daughter from dying. Before they get back to his house, Jairus, the father, hears he’s too late. They didn’t make it time to save his daughter. Everybody’s devastated. Except Jesus, because he knew the story wasn’t over yet. Instead he walks into the girl’s room and wakes her up as if she were only sleeping. P.S.:She’s hungry, can somebody please get this girl some food? It defies logic. A total miracle. Can you imagine how Jairus felt? I have an idea.

As Shep’s question’s continued, it became obvious it was the right time to let him in on some of the more difficult truths from his drowning. We talked miracles and I revealed to Shep that he was our own miracle. “Did I die?” Shep asked me. “No…but you came really close.” The doctors did great work, they did everything right, but God was the ultimate player in that game. I have no reservations saying this because it’s what every doctor who’s had professional experience with Shep’s case has confirmed. Before Shep was discharged, our favorite super doc from Children’s PICU told us he could count on one hand cases he’s seen like Shep’s. He just did not see it turning out the way it did. He’d done his best to consistently to prepare us for the worst, or at the very least, a different version of Shepherd… until eventually it was undeniable. We had gotten Shep back.

Having that conversation with Shepherd wasn’t difficult, even though some of technical “why” questions were hard. All in all, I’m impressed by how easy it was, and how appropriate it felt. The opportunity basically fell in my lap, and the fact that it led up to Easter, a time dedicated to the ultimate defeat of death, made the conversation feel special instead of painful.

I can’t truthfully tell you what I’d be like if we hadn’t gotten our miracle. When I really think about how our story should have ended, I’m honestly not sure I could’ve survived it. Even with Shep’s incredible recovery, I nearly fell off the deep end last year more times than I’d like to admit. But I believe that because of Jesus, death is not The End and I’m banking on the fact this belief would have stayed true for me even if Shepherd was not mine to keep. In fact, I’m counting on it being the only thing to get me through an unimaginable loss like that. This belief, this hope in something unseen, was the only reason Erron and I made it through our first night in PICU without loosing our minds. We had a peace that was greater than our circumstances. It was bigger than us, and bigger than Shep. As time moves us further away from Shep’s accident , it’s a feeling that’s undeniably harder to grasp now, but I will never forget it and I know I didn’t make it up. Nothing about it made sense, it just was.

Like that father in the Bible, I’m so thankful for my second chance. I’m just as grateful for a God who prepared a way for Love to trump death. I adore Shep’s storybook bible because it makes that point so clear. LOVE is what wins that battle. I know not everyone subscribes to this belief, maybe they are made of stronger stuff than me…but there’s no question, I couldn’t get very far without it.

Shep Easter 2016 — Shepherd Boy-words cannot describe how we feel about this kid.

Strep took our family down Easter weekend, so this is the best, and only family photo I got. — Strep took our family down Easter weekend, so this is the best and only family photo I got. I LOVE this crew.

Weig’s reclaim the day

6 / 25 / 15

Last weekend was our Reclaim the Date party and it was everything I hoped it would be. Lots of family, so many friends, and we threw in Pistol Pete for good measure. Everyone who came mattered to me: our families, friends who drove in from different cities and states, Shep’s swim teacher and his nurse from Tulsa…everyone there contributed in making this year move forward for us. We had a blast seeing them all in one place, meeting each other, making connections, and enjoying life.

I felt like I was at a wedding, I couldn’t move around fast enough, greeting, hugging, catching up. I was in heaven. Erron and I agreed, it was a perfect day.

The next morning, Father’s Day, and the actual one-year anniversary of Shepherd’s accident, the four of us drove down to Great Wolf Lodge and spent the rest of the weekend playing in the water. I’d like to say it was just as dreamy as our party, but reality kicked in and that actual day was a little more…complicated. Erron and I let the kids go down one of the big slides. In a last minute change-up, I went first, Erron sent down the littles one by one, then was to follow behind. As soon as I got to my feet I turned and prepared to catch Charlotte, who was “iffy” about going down in the first place. Looking up, I saw Erron gesturing from the top of the slide, clearly pointing down, but I second guessed, and thought maybe he needed me to come get a terrified Char from the top of the stairs. I moved a few feet away from the slide, and missed her. I turned around to check the slide again just in time to see a stranger helping her out of the chute; she was scared and confused, caught near the jets. My heart sank and I rushed to get to her. Erron was frustrated; without telling me, he’d foreseen a similar scenario play out in his head and wanted to be the first to go down. He also couldn’t comprehend how I miss-read his cues when they were so obvious. I was….how shall I say… I was not pleased. I felt like I’d repeated a really bad day all over again on a much smaller scale and to say I was ticked would be underselling it a bit. However, we recovered…we worked it out, moved on and enjoyed the rest of our time there. Great Wolf did not disappoint.

And that’s how it goes. Erron and I aren’t perfect and neither is life, but this weekend served its purpose. We had fun in the water, we gave thanks, and we showed June 21st who’s in charge. We survived one hell of a year, thanks to incredibly supportive families, rock star friends, and some amazing people we’d never known before this journey started. Our faith that God is as good as He says He is has been tested, and proven true. Hitting the one-year mark doesn’t magically make all hard feelings about what happened go away, our slide experience is proof of that. But it has brought lots of perspective…we are all together, we have everything to be thankful for and we believe we can handle whatever life has to offer. It’s time to just enjoy the ride.

Shep and Pete — Pistol Pete arrives on the scene. If you were 8 or under, this party just became legit.

Parents meeting swim teacher — My family meeting Megan, the fabulous swim teacher.

Party- babies — Prayer group girls…all the babies and their crazy “look over here” mommas in the mirror.

Journey of Sarah: The Choose Joy Project

6 / 18 / 156 / 18 / 15

In a few days we will hit the one-year mark of the day we found Shep in the pool and thought we would loose him. To mark the date, we are having ourselves a little party to re-claim that day for good. Might sound like a weird thing to do, but to me it’s necessary. If I didn’t have something fun to look forward to this weekend, something to remind me to celebrate and feel grateful, I might go dark. So we are choosing joy. Which is exactly what my friend Sarah is doing next month to mark the second anniversary of her husband, Joel’s, last day on Earth. This post is about her and her gift for choosing light over dark and finding ways to celebrate life in the midst of great sorrow.

Sarah and I have never met in person but I count her as a friend. She and I connected after we were both initiated into the “Our Child Should Not Have Lived” club in the same year. Sarah has been on a wild ride the last couple years and she writes all about it over at journeyofsarah.com. To make a long story short, before loosing Joel to cancer two years ago, he told her, with 100% certainty; they would have one more child, a girl. And they would name her Ellis. After Joel passed, Sara decided to use their last two remaining embryos from an earlier IVF treatment and was blessed with sweet baby girl Ellis. Just like Joel said it would be. But weeks after Ellis was born she contracted bacterial meningitis. Sarah and I have mutual acquaintances, and Sarah’s petition for prayer was all over my Facebook feed last December. I remember being glued to her updates, agonizing with her, begging for a miracle, clearly the only way Ellis would survive. Doctors took Ellis off her ventilator and a broken Sarah prepared herself to say goodbye to someone she loved, again. But survive Ellis did, in the most incredible way…. you can read about here, if you haven’t already heard that part of Sara’s story. It’s astounding.

Sarah has gotten really good at choosing joy instead of sorrow. In fact, she has created a whole movement out it with her Choose Joy Project, which will take place July 23^rd. It’s the perfect way to honor Joel’s life and the type of man he was. The concept is simple. On Thursday, July 23, choose to do a random act of kindness, big or small, in honor of Joel. Buy someone a meal, leave an encouraging note for a friend…you get to decide the “who” and “how.” But that’s not all. Before June ends, email Sarah at choosejoy@journeyofsarah.com to get your Choose Joy cards. (Your email info is confidential and will ONLY be used for the Choose Joy Project.) Include your card (which has a link directing recipients to Sarah’s family story) in your random act of kindness. If you can, email a picture of your random act of kindness to Sarah, or post it on your social media using the hashtag #choosejoyproject. Sarah will be posting all the pictures she receives that day on her blog. Last year Sarah had 80 families participate in the Choose Joy Project. Her goal this year is 100. The message you will be spreading is that hope and faith can shine light and joy into hard things. And let’s face it….if you don’t choose to find joy in the middle of hard, what other options are you left with? Choose joy friends, and pass it on.

Check out Sarah’s Choose Joy Project here.

The comeback

1 / 14 / 156 / 29 / 15

For whatever reason, my first memories of Shep’s drowning have made a resurgence these last few days. It’s unexpected and seems unprompted but still they’ve come, late at night or even in broad day. This Sunday I sat next to Erron in church listening to worship music but in my head I was walking into Shep’s hospital room for the first time. It was loud, from the oscillating ventilator that was pushing air in and out of his water logged lungs at 200 breaths per minute. It made his whole chest vibrate. The room was filled with staff. I remember a nurse walking me in then immediately guiding me to a chair just inside the doorway. Later, I learned she sat me down because my legs were giving out. I never even noticed. What I do remember is asking for a bag and dry heaving into it as I tried to wrap my head around what was happening.

The other night, when the memories wouldn’t relent, I suck out of bed and crawled into Shep’s, wrapping my arms around his breathing body while I begged God to make the movie reel stop. I’m beginning to wonder if I am going to have to write the memories all out. I wasn’t ready to take that on yet. It will wreck me.

But maybe it could heal me also? Writing about the guilt over Shep’s accident was certainly a game changer for my aching heart.

I think the shock of it all was, (and still is) the hardest part. I was just so unprepared, so oblivious to the fact that losing Shepherd could even be in the realm of possibility for my life. Yes, I had definitely felt that fear when he was born much too early….but nothing like the day he fell in. That very day, I’d sat by the pool with my parents and told them about the secondary drowning article that was circulating the internet last summer. I described the symptoms…just so we all knew. What I didn’t know, was that an hour later I’d be back at the pool’s edge, scrambling to reach for my beautiful boy as my mom struggled to drag his body to the stairs. His perfect skin blue, his unusually large eyes cloudy and fixed…staring. I was certain we were too late. That he was gone. I wasn’t ready for it. I wasn’t ready.

I don’t want this blog to forever focus solely on what happened to Shepherd. I don’t want to forever focus it on it. There is so much other life to write about, the beautiful parts, and the parts that are funny, the hard, the fun, and the pretty, so much more life then those terrifying moments. And I’ve learned I love to write about all of it here. But Shepherd’s accident, his miraculous recovery, and God’s peace in the midst of our pain and panic will forever be a part of our family’s story. So… to move on without really telling it may not work for me.

But it’s going to hurt to like hell to write and I’m still not convinced this is the best medium for it. As painful as it is to write, I know it’s also hard to read.

So in the meantime, I’m going to stall a bit longer with some way more enjoyable things to write about. Things that matter to me. Like sister Charlotte turning 2 next month. And my crazy talented sister-in-law, Chelsea Ahlgrim, will grace this space with some photography tips for the totally untalented moms like me, who are only comfortable capturing little moments with an iphone. The hard stuff will always be there, but right now I’m in the mood for a little fun.

I made this my profile picture the day after Shep fell in. I love his eyes in this picture. The 3 of us were having so.much.fun. We are still having so much fun. And I’m so thankful.

Faking it

11 / 11 / 1411 / 13 / 14

Some of you may be surprised to know that much of my life I’ve felt like a faker. I am fairly skilled at being what the situation demands…and this is especially true in the spiritual department. Growing up it was never hard for me to make the “good” decisions. I’d of told you they were based on my Christian belief system but mostly I think I just wanted to be good. Because being good made life easy in every sense of the word. And good is what I needed to be in my family at the time. By the time high school arrived, there was enough “not good” going down in my family that I made being good my J-O-B. It was no skin off my back anyway. Want to be well liked by quality friends? Be good. What to go to college and get a job? Make good grades. Want to marry a nice boy and have a nice family? Be good, so you can land a good boy. I believed in God, sure, but I think if I’m really honest, being good was just a lot more practical. And for the most part, it wasn’t hard to do. I’m hardwired to not have to wrestle with the “Should I?” or “Shouldn’t I?” of most decisions. Making the right one was just frankly, not that hard.

I will admit this: I SO wanted the Christ thing to be real. I really did. I even convinced myself I was all in, time and time again. But I could never fully find common ground between what my heart wanted and the pestering questions of my head. There was still lot that didn’t add up for me and I couldn’t ever settle on the answers. So, I faked it. To others, but mostly to myself. Again, not that hard when you wish it was true in the first place.

When Erron and I moved to Dallas right after we got married, I was basically friendless. Literally, Kidd Kraddick and Kellie Rasberry from the morning radio show became my BFFS on the drive to work. How am I admitting to this? So sad. Anyway, thanks to one of Erron’s best friends, I met a girl, who invited me to a prayer group her girlfriends had. The girls were mostly praying for their future husbands. Well, I already had a husband, but I needed friends….so off I skipped to this ‘prayer’ thing.

Ya’ll.

I can say this, because these girls are now some of my dearest friends. They were the first ones I contacted about Shep drowning and they dropped everything and drove hours to get to me. They are amazing women. But let me tell you about that first prayer group meeting. These girls took their praying ser.i.ous.ly. I was waaaaaaay out of my depth here. There was no amount of “good” that could fake my way into this. I just watched in bewilderment as these girls poured their hearts out to their God in good faith for a long, loooooong time. I half expected amazing godly husbands to just fall out of the sky bearing engagement rings. “It’s raining men….hallelujah…”

Conversations would look like this when I got home from prayer group.

Erron: “Hey! You were gone for a while! How’d it go? What’d you do?”

Me: “Um. We prayed?”

Erron: “Really?! But you were gone for, like 2 hours!”

Me: “No…really. There was a lot of praying.”

Prayer was not my thing. I had prayed HARD in high school for change and hope in my sweet family’s difficult time. My prayers were always met with radio silence. So by college, I had quit. But now here I was returning to this ridiculous prayer marathon the next week. For whatever reason, I could not tell you. Maybe I was tired with my one-sided friendship with Kidd and Kellie. Week, after week, I watched these girls wrestle with the bible, be broken, give praise, trust a God I had deemed untrustworthy, and encourage each other. And I learned a whole different side of Christianity. These girls were fun, smart, they went dancing (obviously this solidified our friendships) and they laughed all the time. But they prayed with a faith and intensity unlike anything I’d ever seen. Slowly… I took the practice of prayer back up again… and year after year, my heart grew a little softer and my soul a little more vulnerable.

A party bus dancing photo, this may have been the night I decided we could be best friends forever.

You can tell we are really close because we all have the same lipstick on. The true mark of friendship.

Fast forward 3 years… Erron and I are parents, and I had an angry case of post- partum depression after going back to work with a 6 pound preemie. It was time I took a serious look and what I really believed and what legacy I was willing to pass on to my new family. It was grueling and humbling but I had finally come to a place of acceptance between my mind and my heart. Broken and bitter, I laid down my good and picked up His grace.

I finally began to understand that praying to God didn’t always mean you got what you wanted, even if you were good and what you wanted was good too. Many times the answer was in Him walking me through the valley to the other side. But there was still a lot of faking going on, again, mostly to myself. I am the most undisciplined person in the world…there will always be room for improvement for me on the spiritual front. On any front, really. I yell at my husband, I don’t eat vegetables, and I suck at memorizing scripture. I struggle daily with feeling “less than” and this layer of insecurity clouds my vision so I can’t fully embrace where I’m at, or recognize how far I’ve come

But I will tell you, when I was thrust into the terror of loosing Shep it was not a conscious choice to begin praying. It was instinct. “Jesus save my son!” were the first words out of my mouth as I hovered over his blue body. I alternated between screaming at 911 and uttering “Jesus save my son.” Over. And over. And in that hospital, when I wrestled with God about handing my boy over….I didn’t feel ‘less than.’ I felt known. I had a self confidence during those 16 days that I have not experienced in my entire life. It was hell. But it was holy. And I’m not a faker anymore.

I was at a prayer retreat this weekend with those crazy girls I met years ago. How I love them now. One of the girls asked me where I thought God was when Shep fell in the pool. I felt sucker punched because I had to admit I didn’t know where He was in that moment, and if He was there, I’m pointing my finger at him. My son is the most cautious kid on the planet. He’s almost 4 and won’t go down the slide at Chick-fil-a. He knew he couldn’t swim and that his life vest wasn’t on. Shep IS NOT A DAREDEVIL. He hardly jumped in the pool and ONLY if we were there to catch him. There were no toys in the water he could have been going after. It doesn’t make sense. And while I felt God’s presence every minute after I made it to Shepherd, my friend’s question made me confront the painful truth that there is a part of me that feels like God kind of pushed my son in the water to write this story. And I’m a little bit pissed about it. While there is so much beauty and restoration in this journey, there is still a lot of pain. For me, for my husband, for my parents. Our whole family hurt. We are still healing. Why did it have to be our Shepherd? Why did it have to involve my sweet parents?

But there is a difference now. I know my God is good. The REAL kind of good. And not just because I got to keep Shep. But because good is God’s nature and I believe he can redeem the worst of circumstances. So He and I will work out our differences and our relationship will move forward. I might be feeling mad, but my relationship with God is real enough to take it. Because I am not a faker.

Prayer retreat a few years ago...before all the babies. We don't run races now. We just drink wine and sit. Blame it on the kids. — Prayer retreat a few years ago…before all the babies. We don’t run races now. We just drink wine, eat good food and sit down alot. Blame it on the kids.

This weekend's retreat. Love this momma. — This weekend’s retreat. Love this momma.