Merry Christmas, everyone! I wanted to share our Christmas card with you. I usually write a letter and print it out to send with our Christmas cards. I didn’t get around to that this year, but I feel like the caption I wrote on Instagram when I posted this photo sums up our feelings for the year and so it’s going to count as our Christmas letter. Thanks so much for stopping by to read my little blog! I’m so grateful for the encouragement and sisterhood that you bring to me and glad that we can all support each other through the “dark street” of infertility.
One of my favorite couple traditions has been sending out Christmas cards each year ever since the second Christmas after we got married. (Why didn’t we send one out the first Christmas after our wedding? Because we were still mailing out thank-you cards…haha!)
This year, we still don’t have any cute kids to show off in our holiday photo but I think that one day we’ll be glad we did this. We’ll be able to flip through a book full of cards and see that the years before our children came were still meaningful. These years may feel empty right now, but I want to remember them. These years of heartbreak, waiting, and growing in ways we didn’t want to will not be forgotten because they’re changing who we are. We will never be the people we would have been if we hadn’t gone through infertility. We will cherish our children and parent them with a unique kind of passion that can’t be understood without passing through this refiner’s fire. And as we thumb through old Christmas cards with those long-awaited children, we’ll look back at these years not exactly fondly, but reverently, knowing that as hard as these years were they were what God required and they eventually brought us to our babies.
Each year I try to choose a phrase from a favorite Christmas song or scripture that has meaning to us for that particular year. This year’s comes from “O Little Town of Bethlehem:”
“Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light.”
We’ve been walking through some dark streets this year and we know so many others have their own different “dark streets.” We feel blessed to know that even in our dark streets, the everlasting Light of our Savior Jesus Christ shines. He is the way, the truth, and the life who has paid the price to know how to comfort us as we each walk down our dark streets. May the season of his birth bring his light to each of you!
