Let's Linger Here

DocuSign is one of the greatest inventions of the digital age. Being able to sign things in real time has made the otherwise time-consuming and laborious processes of just about any legal transaction remarkably smooth and efficient.

But I will confess, I think it has also taken some of the momentousness out of the felt experience. There’s no extravagant conference room with a big oak table, fancy pens, and expensive paper. There’s no driving to an appointment, and maybe going out to lunch afterward to celebrate. It’s just click, finger scribble, next, done.

I can guarantee you it still hasn’t fully registered that the morning of September 3^rd we signed the document that legally transfers one tiny frozen embryo into our care. The legal language may describe ownership, but stewardship feels much closer to what that moment means to us. This life, created eight years ago, has now been entrusted to our care, with every hope and prayer that it will grow into someone we will love, cherish, guide, and launch into the future God has intended for them.

We did it at 6:30 in the morning, sitting on our couch, drinking coffee in our PJs.

Because, well… DocuSign.

There was no ceremony. No one gathered around us. No one took pictures. We didn’t even put on real pants, but something quite significant took place.

This is still nowhere near the end of the road. We won’t get there until, hopefully and God willing, this embryo survives the thaw, a transfer results in a successful pregnancy, and ultimately a child we get to hold. In many ways, we could still be about a year away from an end that would really only be another beginning. But this is also a big deal.

We are now legally connected to another family. Our lives have the potential to remain intertwined with theirs for the rest of our lives. They have entrusted us with something unimaginably precious, and we have agreed to receive that trust and carry it forward.

As I sat there thinking about the weight of what we had just done, my mind went to the marriage vows Jacob and I shared seven years ago. Drawing parallels helps me to process things, and I found quite a few.

A wedding is interesting because this sacred covenant also includes a legal contract; however, I don’t think anyone would suggest that the license adequately captures the significance of a marriage. Its role is to give legal recognition to something we understand in much higher terms: the joining of two people before God. The other thing I have found, especially now that I have attended weddings since getting married, is that these words hold more significance and shades of meaning the longer people are married. I have a sneaking suspicion that the same will be true of the contract we signed. 

We agreed to receive the life they created and entrusted to us. To do everything in our power to give this embryo the opportunity to become a child we can love and raise. To honor the family and history that will always be part of who that child is. And to remain open to the relationship our two families have agreed to build over time.

We might not have exchanged vows with this family, or had a ceremony to honor this moment, but in a different way, two families have now been joined by the hope of one new life we are all praying will be born.

And the more I sat and reflected on it, the more I realized how much I needed to create space for this moment. To take a minute to recognize what has been entrusted to us, to thank God for this little life, and for the family who created it. To pray for the road ahead and ask Him to help us steward what we’ve been given well. And for Jacob and me to marvel at where this road has taken us and where we are standing now.

And more than anything, those signatures at 6:30 am on a Thursday demonstrated so clearly that ceremony isn’t what makes a moment sacred. It just helps us recognize the sacredness that was already there.

That’s one of the strange things about life’s biggest moments. Sometimes we know they’re coming, and we give them all the pomp and circumstance they deserve. We gather the people we love. We play music and take pictures and eat cake. We create ceremonies because we know something important is happening and we want to remember it. There’s a reason God gave His people ways to do exactly that—days and occasions set apart to stop, remember His faithfulness, and celebrate. And sometimes the moment arrives unheralded early on an otherwise ordinary morning. There was nothing built into this one to make us stop. We had to choose to.

Strangely enough, I’ve spent much of this week surrounded by people doing exactly that.

The night before we signed our embryo adoption contract, we had a rehearsal for our church’s 30th-anniversary service, happening a week and a half later. This is the church I have attended and served in for almost twenty years. I started going there in sixth grade and playing in the worship band in eighth.

There is something almost overwhelming about standing in a place where so much of your own history has unfolded while preparing to celebrate thirty years of history that extends far beyond you.

This milestone will get a fanfare. There will be music, stories, and old pictures. People who have been part of this church for decades will gather alongside people who walked through the doors for the first time last week. We will intentionally stop and remember what God has done here. The celebration doesn’t make those thirty years significant. It gives us a chance to recognize everything that has happened to make them so.

Our founding and lead pastor is an enormous part of that story, but thirty years of a church can’t be reduced to any one person. A church isn’t a building, a pastor, or a particular Sunday morning. It’s people. People who showed up, served, gave, prayed, taught children, played music, stacked chairs, welcomed strangers, walked through difficult seasons together, and kept coming back.

Some have been here all thirty years. Some stayed for a season. Some of the people who helped build the church I walked into as a sixth grader probably never knew my name. They certainly couldn’t have known what this place would become in my life.

And standing there at rehearsal, I realized that this milestone and the one we had quietly crossed on our couch weren’t as unrelated as they initially seemed.

The interconnectedness of our lives with so many other lives has become so obvious in this season. There have been doctors and nurses, social workers and agency staff, friends who answered phone calls, family members who asked questions, people who prayed, people who shared their stories, people who wrote books, and people who simply showed up when we needed them—many of whom I stood on the stage with during that rehearsal. Over the past year, so many of them have demonstrated personally and beautifully what it looks like to be the church to us as we’ve walked this road. And I know our story is far from the only example.  

And now there is another family whose story has intersected with ours in a way none of us could have predicted. They carried this embryo this far. They made an impossibly personal decision about what came next. And now they have entrusted part of their family’s story to ours.

Maybe I’ve been particularly aware of milestones this week because I’ve also had the privilege of witnessing several in the people who surround our family.

The two friends whose pregnancies once bookended the timing we had imagined for our own second child have reached milestones of their own. One is rapidly approaching her due date, and we are actively on baby watch. The other has entered her third trimester, and we are praising God for a pregnancy that has continued to be healthy and smooth. Last night, another friend told me they had found out that afternoon they were having a boy. Another told me she thinks she might be pregnant.

At a point in the not-too-distant past, some of those moments might have hurt.

I would have been happy for them. I know that. But I also know there have been times over the past several months when I had to work to display the joy I desperately wanted to feel while privately carrying grief of my own. This week feels different.

For today, their joy increases mine.

My heart feels so full right now that, as someone who does not typically cry happy tears, I somehow feel remarkably close to them. There is just so much good happening around me. A baby who could arrive any day. Another growing safely into the third trimester. A little boy whose parents learned something new about him yesterday afternoon. The quiet whispers of a friend about the possibility of another life just beginning. Thirty years of a church that has shaped almost twenty years of my own. And one tiny frozen embryo, created years ago by another family, that this week was legally entrusted to ours.

For months, it has felt like joy and grief, hope and fear, excitement and anxiety have existed almost constantly beside one another. Even in the happiest moments, some part of me has had to work really hard to be present and not let grief, fear, or what-ifs swallow it up. Right now, it isn’t.

I’m not consciously laying my anxiety down. I’m not reminding myself that I can’t control the future. I’m not trying particularly hard to stay present. For this moment, the anxiety is simply gone.

I know it will probably come back. I’m not naive enough to turn one peaceful moment into a declaration that all is well and I’ve finally figured out how to let go of the future. But right now, I am completely captivated by the joy all around me, and I am so deeply grateful to feel it all.

I think that’s part of why we mark milestones in the first place. They give us permission to interrupt the relentless forward movement of ordinary life and say, This happened. This matters. Let’s take the time to really take it all in. Because as much as this week has made me think about celebrating milestones, it has also reminded me that none of them are really destinations.

Thirty years deserve to be celebrated. We should stop. We should look backward. We should tell stories, sing songs, and recognize the faithfulness that brought us here. And then, the following Sunday, the doors will open again. Someone will make the coffee. Someone will check children into their classrooms. The band will play. People will walk through the doors carrying things no one else can see. Year thirty-one will have already begun.

My favorite running coach often says, “The finish line is just another starting line in disguise.”  I think that’s true here too. The signatures that morning signaled the official end of matching but also marked the beginning of coordinating shipping. Endings and beginnings are often two sides of the same coin. But recognizing that is exactly why I don’t want to rush past this one.

So I’m building an altar here.

I’m thanking God for this little life and the family who has entrusted it to us. I’m celebrating babies almost here and babies who might just be beginning. I’m remembering all the people who carried our church through thirty years and all the people who have carried pieces of us through this one. I’m sitting beside the man with whom I exchanged vows seven years ago and recognizing that together, we just made another kind of promise. And somehow, for this moment, there isn’t an anxious thought crowding any of it out.

My heart is simply full.

Tomorrow can bring whatever comes next.

Today, I am going to let this be sacred.