Finding Peace On A Tough Day

I was listening to a pastor give a talk on church planting last week, and he reminded everyone that we can plant a seed, and we can water it, but only the Lord can make it grow. I know he was talking about ministry, but since it was just a few days after our embryo transfer I instantly thought about how getting pregnant is exactly the same. We can plant the seed, literally. I watched on an ultrasound screen as our dr. intentionally placed our 2 little embryos in the exact spot that they would be most likely to implant. We can water the seed. Every day I received several injections, wore hormone patches, took vitamins, stayed on bed rest, and did anything and everything else to give our babies the best chance at surviving in there. We planted and watered about as perfectly as we possibly could, but just like in ministry only God can make it grow. He holds all of life in His hands, and in His goodness and infinite wisdom He decided that this one would not grow. We got the call this evening that our pregnancy test came back negative, the In-Vetro didn't work.

Obviously, we are so sad. We hoped and prayed and begged the Lord that this would be our time. But we did our best to do so with an open hand, asking God to give us a heart that said "not my will but Yours be done". We are mourning right now, but not as those without hope. We can have comfort that we serve a God who loves us and is for us, and withholds no good thing. If He has chosen to withhold this from us right now, we can find comfort that it's only because He has something else in mind for us. Something that is beautiful and will be perfectly tailored for us, and will glorify Him in ways we can't comprehend. 

We want to thank you all for being so incredibly encouraging and supportive of us during this past month. It was a roller coaster of emotions, but having such an incredible community of friends and family encouraged us more than you know. We constantly got texts and emails encouraging us and praying scripture over us, many of you prayed for for us in person, we got financial help and even anonymous gifts, and so much more. Thank you all for walking this journey with us, we love you guys and are so thankful for you all!

We will be going back to our Dr. to see what further steps he recommends, we will keep you all posted of any future developments. Love you and God bless!

Transfer is today!

We are currently on our way to Dallas for our embryo transfer! We are nervous, excited, hopeful, and about a million other emotions all balled up together! The retrieval last Thursday went great, they were able to get 13 mature eggs which is awesome. We had them only fertilize 8, and of those 6 of them took! So today we will be transferring 2 back in, and we will freeze the other 4 to use later. This means we will eventually do this 3 times, transferring 2 back in each time.

Thanks so much for all of your support and prayers, it really means so much! I can't even put into words how encouraged we have felt by you all this past week, you have gone above and beyond! Today and for the next 48 hours we would love prayer that these little embryos would implant successfully! We will keep you all posted on how everything goes. Love you all!

Holy Cow, Thank You All So Much!!

We have been blown away by the amount of support that you all have shown us these past few days! From the beginning we have been very open about our struggles with infertility. Probably a little too open, I’ve been known to tell people all about our story within minutes of meeting them! The amazing thing about that though is we truly feel like we are not going through this alone. We’ve been flooded with texts and emails, and some of our friends have even started a prayer schedule so that we would have prayer every hour tonight and tomorrow morning! Wow, we really are just so humbled and speechless by how amazing you all are. Thank you so much for caring about us and lifting up our desires to be able to get pregnant! You all are amazing and we are so encouraged by you all! 

We are hanging out in Dallas tonight, ready to go in for my egg retrieval tomorrow morning! We will be getting there at 6:45 am, and the actual retrieval will happen at 7:30. We would love prayer that the retrieval would go well with no complications, and that they would be able to retrieve the exact amount of quality mature eggs that we need! One of the most stressful things for us about this whole process has been deciding how many eggs we will allow the doctors to fertilize. It's common to have quite a few eggs at retrieval, and most of the time all mature eggs get fertilized. If you then get pregnant on the first attempt you are faced with the tough decision of what to do with the extra embryos. They can be frozen to implant later, or they can be destroyed, donated to science, or adopted by other couples. We have made the decision that every egg that gets fertilized will eventually be implanted, as we weren't comfortable with any of the other options. The hard part is that every couple is different as far as how many embryos it takes to achieve a successful pregnancy, since not all embryos will grow at all, or if they do grow initially there is still only a 50% chance that they will result in a pregnancy once implanted. If we pick too small of a number, we drastically reduce our chances of it working at all if we end up being one of those couples who have a lot of failed attempts, but if we choose too high of a number and more than average “take”, we are essentially saying we are committing to eventually having that many kids. So needless to say its been a tough decision. We feel confident that even in all of this, God is ultimately in control and He is the one who breathes life into all living things, and in the end we will end up with exactly the number of children He has for us! 

Thanks again for your prayers, we will continue to keep you all posted!

We Need You All!

Most of you know that we have been trying to start a family for many years. We’ve been trying to get pregnant for over seven years now, and trying to adopt internationally for three years, neither of which have worked out so far. We are still in the process of trying to adopt from Uganda, but since things have slowed down to a snails pace with the Ugandan adoption process our agency has been advising us to “pursue other options”, which is never a good sign. Basically the country of Uganda is moving away from international adoption right now, which obviously stinks for us. We are planning to stay on the Uganda waiting list for as long as it takes, unless the country closes the doors to international adoption completely, but while we wait we decided to do one more big push to try and get pregnant. So right now we are actually in the middle of the in-vetro process, and we decided that we need the prayers of our friends and family now more than ever. I decided to get back to blogging in an effort to get as many people praying for us these next few weeks as possible!

Over the past seven years, we have been to six fertility specialists, none of whom were ever able to tell us why we couldn’t get pregnant. We have tried everything other than in-vetro, which we were holding off on for several reasons. Mostly because there are certain aspects of the in-vetro process that we didn’t feel completely comfortable with, and also because we didn’t know what was causing our infertility so there was no way to know if in-vetro would even be likely to work for us. Through a friend, we heard about a doctor in Dallas (a 3 hour drive from Norman) who is amazing. We decided to give him a try, and within a few months he found several things that could potentially be contributing to our infertility, and based on what he found he strongly recommended in-vetro as our best option. He also said based on what he found that its sort of now or never for us, so we needed to get started ASAP. He also was willing to work with us on our ethical concerns, and we are able to pick the maximum number of eggs we would like them to fertilize so that we don’t end up with a bunch of extra embryos at the end that we don’t know what to do with. Win. So here we are, driving to Dallas 2 or 3 times a week and doing 4 shots in my belly every day getting ready to do this. Yikes. 

So here is what the next few weeks is going to look like, and what you can specifically be praying for when you think of us!

This week: Continuing daily injections and driving to Dallas every other day to monitor my follicles. Pray for endurance, it’s been a long month already and we are tired of all the driving and multiple daily shots.

End of this week: Egg retrieval- a small surgery where they remove all the eggs they have been getting me to produce. That same day, they will fertilize the best eggs with Jeremy’s sperm and watch for 3-5 days to see how many of them become embryos. Pray that the retrieval goes well, and that the exact number of embryos form that the Lord would have for us!

Beginning of next week: Egg Transfer- they will put 2 of the embryos back in and we will wait to see if either of them “take”. If we have more than 2 embryos, the rest will be frozen for us to use at a later date. We plan to implant all embryos eventually. Pray that my body is able to support one or both of the embryos and that we are able to get pregnant!

The following week: I will start having blood tests every 3-4 days to see if we are pregnant, and if the levels continue to rise as they should. If the tests are positive, we aren’t really in the clear yet, that’s why they have to do multiple tests every few days. Pray for the tests to be positive, and for my levels to continue to raise as they should, resulting in a successful pregnancy!

And throughout the whole process, please pray for our hearts. Pray that we will continue to trust in the goodness of our God and Father. Pray that we are able to come to him with the deepest desires of our hearts with fervency and passion, holding nothing back, knowing that He is able to bless us with a baby if He wills, but at the same time that even if He doesn’t allow us to get pregnant we can still say with confidence and truly believe that He is good and He is for us! 

Thanks friends, we love you all and we will continue to keep you all posted here on the blog over the next few weeks!! Thanks for your prayers!!!!!

Love the Hagers

Still Waiting.... And Waiting... And Waiting Some More...

I've been a little absent from the blog lately... fall is my busiest season for photography and that has unfortunately left little time for much else. I wanted to hop on though just to keep you all in the loop on our adoption progress. (If you can call it that!)

When we first went through the application process we were told that there would be around a 6 month wait for a referral (which just means a photo and history of a specific child that we can decide to accept or not). Shortly after, we were told the wait may take more like 7-9 months. Then a few weeks ago, we got another email saying that because of some in-country delays that are out of our agency's control, the wait will probably be closer to a year. Yeah. Not really what we wanted to hear.

It got me thinking about how much I want so badly to be able to control everything in my life, but at the same time how incredibly grateful I am that I can't. Not just that I can't, but more importantly that I serve a God who can and does perfectly. In my limited vision I flounder through life making "plans" and thinking I know what's best. I can't help but shudder when I think what my life would be like if I got everything I thought I wanted, when I wanted it.

Any good father loves his children enough to tell them "no" or "not now" when he can see the consequences of what they are asking for, or when he know's there is something better waiting for them  instead. Like a child, sometimes I want to throw a tantrum or stomp off when my heavenly Father responds to my prayers for a house full of children with a gentle "not now". But I also know that He is good, and He is for me, and He is completely in control of all of this. Who am I to think my plans are better?

Many of you dear friends have asked how you can pray for us during this adoption journey. Of course I want you all to pray that it would move fast, and that everything would go smoothly without any hiccups. What I want prayer for more though, is that we will continue to trust in the Lord's goodness no matter how many delays we face, and that we would desire His plans above our own. I wan't to be able to look back on this time in my life and see the fruit that comes with trials, not a wasted opportunity to know Him more intimately.


The heart of man plans his way,
but the LORD establishes his steps.
(Proverbs 16:9 ESV)

How To Encourage A Friend Going Through Infertility

Many of us tend to be fixers, and pretty much all of us like to avoid any kind of pain. Even if it's not our own. I know when I've had friends experiencing profound loss or pain, I've wanted so badly to know what to say, or how to be there for them. But the truth is, regardless of our good intentions most of us are just plain clueless on how to be a friend to someone walking through suffering. I've had a few people ask me over the past five years how they can be an encouragement to me as I struggle with the pain of infertility. I've also had some friends, that I am incredibly thankful for, do an amazing job at this very thing, so I thought I'd pass along some of the gems I've learned in the hopes that someone will be able to bless another in the same ways.

It would be easy to write a whole post about things not to say, believe me I've heard some crazy things from well meaning people! But I really want to focus more on the good takeaways in this post, so I'll just touch on this. To keep it simple, just know that there is really not anything you can say to magically make someone's pain go away. The fixer in us likes to try and offer a solution... "you just need to relax, take a vacation, believe, adopt, etc etc and then you will get pregnant". Or we like to try and minimize pain... "you're lucky you don't have kids, it's harder then you think, etc etc".  

What I have found is that I am most encouraged when people choose to actually enter into the suffering with me. When people don't offer "advice" to fix the problem, or try and quickly move past the discomfort of my sorrow, but sit in it and feel it with me. There have been two times in the past five years where sweet friends of mine have shed tears while talking with me about my infertility. THEY cried because of MY pain. Both times I wasn't even crying. And let me tell you, it ministered to my soul. More than anything else any person has done or said. Here were the words one of these girls spoke to me through her tears.. "every time we are in a group of moms talking about mom stuff, I am always thinking of you the whole time". Holy cow. Talk about entering into someone else's suffering. Don't get me wrong, I love hanging out with moms and talking about mom stuff. I learn a lot, and it's not usually too difficult for me. And it's not as though I want everyone to be worried about me during baby showers or to avoid talking about their kids around me. That's not at all what I'm getting at or what she was saying. But genuine statements like this from friends I trust make me feel like I'm not alone. They give me encouragement that even though I may be the only one in my circle who is experiencing infertility first hand, I'm not the only one facing the sorrow of it. They tell me that I have friends who care enough to enter into my pain, rather than offer a quick "fix" and move on. What a blessing and encouragement these friends have been to me. 

So if you know someone going through any form of suffering, be it infertility or something else, I hope this helps you change the way you think about being there for them. They don't need a cliche statement about the "silver lining" or anything like that. They may just need someone to hurt for them and with them. This is hard because it requires something from us. It requires us to engage our hearts, and to experience the discomfort of someone else's sorrow. So maybe next time you are wondering what to say to your friend who is suffering, instead just hug them and tell them how much it sucks. You don't necessarily have to cry with them, but you can tell them how much you hurt for them, and let them know that they aren't alone. 

I feel a bit schizophrenic...

I was hanging out with a few good friends today, and the topic of grocery budgeting came up. Ugh. Chances are you already stopped reading. I would have. ;)

The three of us have also read Jen Hatmaker's book "7 : An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess". If you haven't read it you should. It's awesome. In the book there is a part where she describes her different personalities that come out when she goes grocery shopping. The part of her that wants to spend less looks for the cheapest food, the part that wants to care for the environment and her body wants to buy organic food which is definitely not the cheapest, the part that wants to support her community and local commerce wants to buy local, which may not be organic or cheap, etc. etc. (I'm totally paraphrasing and probably got that totally wrong, but you get the picture!)


I feel this tension every week when I go grocery shopping. For me health wins out, and I always end up spending more than I want to. What's crazy is that I'm spending more on what really should be less. Less processing, less factories, less genetically modified organisms that I'm sure cost our country millions to create and implement, less packaging, less potentially harmful non-food ingredients. Just real food from nature. Why it is so much more expensive to eat this way I just don't understand. 


In many countries, people don't have all these choices when it comes to food. They don't get to go to big supermarkets and make these choices between cost and health. Many people are not getting to eat at all. I realize this "problem" is trivial in light of the suffering of millions around the globe, and I would be lying if I said that doesn't make me feel just a bit ashamed of my selfishness. However, I also don't think adopting a minimalist approach and not taking care of the bodies God gave us is the answer. 


So what do you think? Is it better to spend less? Eat healthier? Buy local? Somewhere in the middle? Leave a comment, let me know what you think!