“Grace is truly amazing isn’t it? A miracle that none of us deserve, but that we are all blessed to receive. It holds so much potential for empathy, healing, and comfort. It calls out to each of us, beckoning us to accept it for ourselves and share it freely with others.

I hope that my story has helped you see how big a role grace can have in each of our stories. We will all walk through dark times that feel too difficult to bear, we will all mess up and desperately need forgiveness, and we will all do things that leave us feeling ashamed or stupid or small. And those things aren’t a matter of if, but when. Life is hard, but grace is the balm that we all need during those times.”

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.

The other side of infertility is a strange place. And it’s a place that I was not expecting to be so blindsided by fear. It’s something that people do not talk about enough. Whatever your other side looks like (becoming pregnant, adopting a baby, adopting an embryo, etc), there is still doubt and fear and trust issues there. If we don’t deal with the fear now, it will rob you of the joy on the other side. The fear and worry keeps you a place of longing for the next thing and it takes away the joy of today. But then you get to the next thing and it’s not enough. You still feel the worry and fear.

Decision fatigue is real . So much of infertility and the treatment options that are available fall into the grey area of life and of Christianity. The list and depth of the decisions on this road are daunting. I love clarity, but so often we don’t get. Walking this road, especially the road of IVF, challenged me to create a decision making process and put rhythms in place to avoid decision fatigue. I did not create this process or these tips. I’ve learned from others that are a season ahead of me about what it looks like to make hard decisions with confidence, even when the road ahead feels so unclear. I hope these tips help you on your decision making journey.

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.

Having babies should be fun and free. If you’re walking this road, it’s likely neither of these things for you. The financial strain that fertility treatment can put on a couple just adds to an already incredibly hard road. In this episode, I introduce you to my friend Adam Parsons. He’s a financial coach over at AP Financial Coaching. Adam and his wife Michelle went through IVF in 2020 at CCRM and just welcomed their precious miracle girl. Over the last year, Adam has become a friend and a trusted resource as we have developed a lot of financial tools to help other couples walking through IVF. We cannot wait to share those tools with you this year.

If you haven’t listened to episode 14, go listen to that first. Once you’ve mapped out a financial plan, then it’s time to work toward your goal.

Having babies should be fun and free. If you’re walking this road, it’s likely neither of these things for you. The financial strain that fertility treatment can put on a couple just adds to an already incredibly hard road. In this episode, I introduce you to my friend Adam Parsons. He’s a financial coach over at AP Financial Coaching. Adam and his wife Michelle went through IVF in 2020 at CCRM and just welcomed their precious miracle girl. Over the last year, Adam has become a friend and a trusted resource as we have developed a lot of financial tools to help other couples walking through IVF. We cannot wait to share those tools with you this year.

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.

Getting a second opinion was the best clinical decision that Blake and I made in our infertility journey. It changed the trajectory of our story. In a simple phone call, I was able to have Dr. Schoolcraft review my records and ask him all the questions. I very much valued his opinion because he didn’t need my business. He is a world renown doctor and he cares about his success rates. For these reasons, I trusted his opinion and felt confident that he would tell me the truth. I needed to hear from him that he thought he could do things differently and that the results would be different if we came to CCRM.

When we were finally ready to try for kids, it was heartbreaking to see that same negative test result over and over. Nothing like finding out this news, both positive and negative, on the toilet, right? After we had been trying for about six months, I just knew something was wrong. I was scared to take the next step, but I knew we needed to pursue testing. If this is where you are in your story, I have some encouragement for you!

Going through struggles like infertility can either make your marriage stronger or it can drive a huge wedge between the two of you. It’s a battle every single day to prioritize each other when you’re feeling so down, lift each other up and make decisions with unity. Here are some things that helped us fight for each other on the darkest days.

After our failed IVF, my mom ordered me the book called It Starts with the Egg. It was in reading this book that I heard Dr. Schoolcraft’s name again and also learned about all the things that can impact our egg and sperm health. It was a wake up call to dig into taking better care of myself. Here are the simple steps that Blake and I took during our season of waiting to clean up our lifestyle and take care of ourselves.

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.