This ASK SARAH series will help answer some of the questions my readers have had about me and our family. If you have any other questions for me, please let me know by leaving them in a comment below. Your question may be the next one I write about in ASK SARAH.
Our journey to get here
Danny and I were college sweethearts — meeting in college, having mutual friends, dating, getting engaged, and then marrying when Danny was finished college, but I had one more year left. We knew we wanted to be in ministry (Danny a pastor and I a teacher), but in the back of my mind, I just really wanted to be a mommy someday. We talked about having children, and I used opportunities to teach Danny how to hold a baby, how to play with toddlers, and how to feed a one-year-old finger foods, and more. Since Danny comes from a small family with two children and I come from a family with five, we settled that four seemed like a good number. We also chatted about the possibility of adoption since adoption has been part of my family and extended family.
When Danny started seminary about a year after we were married, we knew it was going to be hard with both of us working to also have children and provide for them. We knew that waiting until after seminary would be a good idea, but we didn’t really want to wait that long. What we didn’t anticipate was that God was going to family plan for us and not give us children for the first seven years of our marriage… only finding out that I was pregnant the month after Danny graduated from seminary. Yes, that was hard. We wondered if something was wrong. We shed tears. People asked insulting and insensitive questions about it. But God. But God had a different plan, and we learned in the waiting.
Our children
Well, if we thought people were insensitive when questioning us about not having babies, the questions were worse when we kept having babies! In the summer of 2006, I found out that God had blessed us with our first baby. We didn’t find out the gender, so it was fun having the youth group kids name the baby while I was still pregnant. Baby Bud-Light-Ner was named after the “Bud-Wise-er” Super Bowl commercials (with the frogs). We made the decision for me to stop working so I could focus on being a mom, but that was a hard financial decision for us. Danny got a part time job to help with that. Baby Grace’s diaper was the first one that he had ever changed… but if you know our story, he would be changing plenty more in the next several years!
Everyone was very happy for us when baby Grace was born in 2007. We cherished her, knowing that she was a gift from God and thinking that may not have the privilege of more children since the first one was so difficult. I rejoiced and mourned each milestone that she hit! But…in the summer of 2008 God had blessed again and baby Hannah was on her way… then 19 months after she was born, we welcomed baby Josiah… then 19 months after he was born God gave baby Caleb. Wow… what a change! From teaching first grade in a Christian school to practically having my own school in a matter of about 5 years our hands were full, but our hearts were fuller. We never imagined the joy and chaos of having so many little ones.
Surprise!
Caleb was born in May 2012. As he was starting to grow up and I wasn’t pregnant again (a constant subject to tease us about at our church), we reasoned that we were probably complete… we DID say we wanted four children, right? Well, weren’t we surprised in the summer of 2014 when the two lines of the pregnancy test showed up! Number FIVE! Lydia was born in the spring of 2015 with lots of thick dark hair… and with two little mommies waiting to tend to her and two little bodyguards with Nerf guns waiting to protect her. A family of seven… it seemed too good to be true! Our miracle family… what we had hoped and prayed for…. but we just didn’t know we could be this exhausted!
Just as we were settling into our routine with five children, God put orphan care on our hearts through a series of sermons, events, books, and articles. That lead us to moving our family to Zambia, Africa, for our family to serve with Family Legacy Missions International (www.familylegacy.com). I will share more on that call and move in another blog post.
We boarded the plane to Zambia when Lydia was just 18 months old, and God blessed again right after she turned two by giving us the shocked of our lives with baby Elijah… we celebrated year one of living in Zambia from Florida waiting for baby Elijah to born! Our baby boy is now six-years-old.
Our future
As of right now, we feel content where we are. Our six children are such a blessing to us… but with that blessing is also overwhelm. It is a lot. While we have felt over the year that God might be calling us to adoption, He hasn’t put those pieces together to make that happen, and we haven’t been pursuing that. That doesn’t mean that we would not be open to that, but we are not actively going through the steps for that. In Zambia I often thought that we would wake up in the morning with a Zambian baby wrapped in chitenge waiting at our gate. While God didn’t provide like that, I wouldn’t be sad if that happened literally or figuratively in our future.
We feel a big task, though, to disciple our children well and to launch them off into adulthood. Our oldest is already taking university classes and will be full time in 2025. There is much to do and so much for them to learn… time will certainly run out before the list does. So…we are savoring the moments with the eight of us and making memories!
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