Hope is a choice. It is both a noun and a verb. It’s something you can have, but also something you can do. To me the more important of the two is always in the doing. If we have hope, but aren’t actively hoping, then we are missing a crucial component. The hoping is God’s grace in action in our life. It’s that confident trust we place in Him to bless us regardless of the circumstances, the difficulties, or the downright impossibilities.

When you are walking this road and your heart is feeling weary from another failed round of treatment, it’s easy to want to avoid the pain and jump right back into another round. This is my classic go to strategy to avoid feeling the things: just fill my life with busyness and it won’t hurt as bad. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work! I want to share with you all the beautiful things that came from our time of paused treatment.

If you are here, it’s because you love someone walking through infertility. I want you to know that you are doing the right thing by taking the time to be here to listen and to learn about how you can better support your friend, sister, daughter and/or daughter in law. I know that you may feel confused about the things she is feeling or not quite understand why she seems so closed off. I know it may seem like you’re never saying the right thing or doing the right thing or being the kind of support she needs and that probably feels frustrating. I know that you’ve probably wondered why she can’t “just snap out of it” or “be happy for them” or “move on from this.” My goal in this episode is to meet you in your frustration and provide some more context and put words to the things she is experiencing which will hopefully give you a little bit more empathy and understanding for her pain. I also hope to give you very practical and helpful ways that you can love her well in this storm.

Very early on in my infertility journey, I realized there were three types of people I would encounter.

Someone that doesn’t get it and doesn’t try to get it. These people can be very toxic to your heart, so I’d recommend putting up boundaries and loving these people from afar.

Someone that doesn’t get it, but tries really hard to understand. Keep these people close because they are incredibly valuable. They will not always say the right things, but it’s easy to give them grace because they care deeply and they try hard.

Someone that gets it because they too have walked this road. The value that someone brings to your heart when they can raise their hand and say “me too!” is deep. Even if their story is different, there is an immediate understanding and validation of the pain you are feeling. If you don’t have someone like this in your life, join our free Sisterhood community.

During my darkest and most uncertain days, I had a friend invite me into her life and let me love on and serve her family. Little by little, day by day, God healed my heart as I was able to love on the two most precious little blonde girls. It was during this time in my life that I found so much purpose in my pain. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t big and world changing. It was through simple acts of showing up when my friend asked and serving her family. This time taught me a lot of things and I want to share some of those with you today.

True surrender is hard, but it brings so much freedom. In life, there is always something to worry about and there is always an area of our lives that we want to control. I want to challenge you to do the work you need to do now so that you can release control.

In this episode, we are talking with my friend Raven, a licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, about the topic of processing fear and sadness. Raven is one of those friends that can get deep and these kind of friends are such a gift. While she hasn’t walked the road of infertility, she has walked through some hard stuff and has had to wait on God. I love that she brings a personal level of understanding to the emotions that waiting can bring.

One of the hardest parts of this journey is all the lies we allow ourselves to believe. These lies can come from other people and they can also be lies from the devil that we allow our heart to believe. It’s important to distinguish what is true from what is not.

One of the biggest lessons I learned as I navigated the emotions of my infertility journey was that grief and joy can coexist. It seems simple, but once I recognized that this was possibly, my heart felt lighter. I could more freely and confidently express to others that my tears over their joy were not actually about them. They were about the brokenness of my story. If you are feeling overwhelmed and confused each time your friends share joyous news with you, you are not alone. I hope these truths help you put words to the things you are feeling.

Grief can encompass the loss of anything in our lives, tangible or intangible. In the journey of infertility, it can often feel hard to explain the depths of grief you experience. I often struggled putting words to the things that I was feeling so that others could understand. Here are some truths that I hope will give you the peace and freedom to grieve as you need.

Someone once told me that having a baby should be fun and free. For me, it was neither. In this episode, I am sharing my story. I'm going to talk about all the twists and turns of the past eight years as we walked through infertility and how I learned to be content through the suffering and season of waiting. I’ll discuss marriage, the ups and downs of our IVF treatments, our Give Grace campaign and the heart behind it and how all the heartbreak led me to my miracles.

The Infertility Sisterhood exists to provide empathy (because you don’t have to walk this road alone), encouragement (because there is hope even in the hard stuff), education (because the decisions you make matter) and empowerment (because you have a purposeful path forward).