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pensacola

beauty of order
Beach Living, City Living, Responsive Living

Order

I had a miscarriage recently, and I’m actually OK.

It’s been awhile since I posted anything of actual substance online. I update my Instagram regularly, mostly with absolutely pointless videos of my son eating breakfast, or playing with dinosaurs, or coloring. You can follow those exciting updates here #yourewelcome
 
I’ve tried sitting down and writing many, many times since we moved here, but it’s been awhile since I had something concrete that I could actually process from start to finish. Something defined. Black and white. Easy to process.

For some reason, this miscarriage has been that for me.

Most of you probably didn’t even know I was pregnant. I was only 7 weeks or so. While it definitely wasn’t planned, we adjusted quickly and welcomed the news.  I knew I was pregnant for about a week before the miscarriage started, and there have been some gloomy and wistful days. Not just for the loss of life, but also for the loss of another plan. 

Since leaving CO we’ve watched so many plans come and go. Living life completely open-handed is not easy. Holding out everything to be redistributed, redirected is exhausting at times. We’ve left nothing behind for a Plan B. Moving forward into the things that are before us is often… Daunting. Exciting, for sure. We’re both adventurous people. But everything’s turned out just so darn different than what we had planned or consciously hoped for. There are so many factors that are up in the air right now. So many unknowns in the midst of walking out the path we find ourselves on. When we found ourselves expecting a child again, we accepted that as another factor to consider as we move forward. Because of the pleasant surprise of Ellis (we weren’t exactly the most enthusiastic parents-to-be before Ellis), we knew this child would be the same; an absolute joy.

So you’d think that when I experienced miscarriage, peace wouldn’t be the primary experience. But it was. And I’ll tell you why. Or I’ll try to, without offending anyone.

When I was pregnant with Ellis, I read several books on natural pregnancy, labor, and delivery (See my Goodreads if that kind of thing interests you). The main thing that stuck out to me out of all the literature I consumed was this quote

One cannot help a physiological process. The point is not to hinder it.” 

When I was in labor, I made the controlling, Type A part of me (the part that wants to know what is going on, why it is going on, and what I can do about it) chill out. I trusted my body. I let my body do what it needed to do. And it did.

Side Note & Disclaimer: I 100% realize that this cannot be the case each and every single time. There are things that go wrong where medical intervention is absolutely necessary. For those times, I’m so grateful for the medical professionals trained to right the wrongs happening in our bodies. But the majority of the time, our bodies are created to operate a certain way and they are fully capable of doing so. 

The point is that I gained a deep respect for my body through the experience of labor and delivery.
And in the same way that my body can, when operating correctly, sustain a life for nine months, my body knows when it cannot.
 

Here are some facts that I learned while having a miscarriage:

  • They are very common: Statistically, about one in every four confirmed pregnancies end in miscarriage. See here & here & here 
  • Of those miscarriages, most of them occur because of chromosome abnormalities. See here & here.
  • Also, most women report feeling emotions like shame, isolation, and guilt as a result of a miscarriage.

Maybe this is common knowledge to most people. It was new information for me and instead of experiencing extreme sadness and shame that most women report feeling when experiencing a miscarriage, I experienced peace. 

I just deeply respect the order of things that is set up in our bodies. In a weird way I feel like this miscarriage has broken through a cloud of confusion around me. In our life right now with so many unanswered questions, plans that constantly change, constantly weighing the pros and cons of a new decision – a concrete thing happened. Definitely not the outcome I would have chosen, but I’m OK because I know that my body is operating as thousands and thousands and millions of other women’s bodies have operated since the beginning of time. Being apart of something solid, something bigger than myself feels grounding in a way that I’ve been craving. Even through the midst of a dealth, I feel such light and peace.

The opportunity to have this perspective shocked me.

And of course we’re sad. This was a precious life. And we would have loved and cherished him/her regardless of any abnormalities present. And granted, I haven’t been trying to have a baby for years, I don’t have any past traumatic experience with having a baby, not to mention I was only 7-8 weeks along. All that to say, there are so many factors that go into my emotional response. If you’ve had a miscarriage and had a very different experience, I’d love for you to feel free to share that experience. Everyone is different and this is not my attempt to write a trendy post to contradict what everyone says about something standard like being emotional when there is a death.

I guess I just wanted to share our experience in the small chance there someone out there who needs to hear a story of how we went through a miscarriage and were OK.

Like, really OK.

And maybe this perspective can bring this converstaion out of the realm of only emotions, (all of which are valid) to also include facts, which are just as valid.

Maybe it really just helps me to write it all out, document and process it in some way.

Either way, that’s what has been going on with us lately.

That and many other things.

Maybe those will be in the next blog post.

 

Photo credit:Madison Grooms


Beach Living, City Living

Update from Pensacola

I’ve sat down to write this blog post probably once a month since we left Colorado. But we’ve had so much going on, with so many new changes almost every month, that I wasn’t always sure what to say because things might be different next week. LOL this still might be the case. I’ll try to update you somewhat briefly on the last 6 months in Pensacola.

We had a great last month at our homestead, selling furniture and animals, finishing up projects, and saying goodbye to friends.

I’m not going to lie, it was really hard. It still is.

I can’t say enough how much we love Colorado.  We had some family photos taken before we left, and it is still kind of hard to look at them. They are amazing (I’ll post some soon just for fun) – they just show us at our farm. I love them. It just makes me miss Colorado.  We have had some really great experiences since moving here (I’ll share more about Florida, keep scrolling) , it is just different.

Before we left Colorado, I heard this song by Amanda Cook that resonated with me, even though I didn’t want it to.

What if the path you choose becomes a road
The ground you take becomes a home

I’m an introvert. I like to have a safe cave to retreat to at the end of a long day. Colorado was my safe cave. Westcliffe was my safe cave. Our homestead was my safe cave.

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I know that life is a journey. I know that some “destinations” aren’t that at all, but rather stops along the way. Westcliffe has been woven into our journey for many years now.

Many of you may not know this, but when I (Hannah) was in college, I thought that I would be living in China after I graduated. I studied Chinese for two years, I taught English for a summer in Shanghai, and took Chinese in Shenyang one summer. I was really excited about the things that God was doing in China, and I was really not excited about the American church that I was seeing. But one of those summer while I was in China, God started giving me pictures of some mountains. I somehow knew this was in Colorado. After I graduated from school, I took an internship at a family camp in a small mountain town called Westcliffe. I didn’t realized until after I moved there that the pictures that God had given me years before, were of Westcliffe. 

I don’t really know how to put into words what these mountains mean to me. To my heart, they were more than just a pretty landscape.

For some reason they signify something so deep inside of me. Like, the actual relationship part of my faith. Adventure, risk, and beauty. Yet there was also such a safety. Like the safe cave I described above. Even the Bible describes mountains being a place of refuge.

And every story has that part when it’s time to step out of the cave. This has been our move to Florida.

Aaaaanyways.

We closed on our home at the beginning of May and started driving south. We were able to make some stops on the way to visit family and friends.

 

 

 

 

After living in Colorado for almost 7 years, living in the south again is definitely an adjustment. We’re enjoying living so close to a beach!

 

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There have been a couple of times where I’ve (Hannah) even been able to sneak away for a mom’s day off at the beach!

 

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We are also really enjoying our church here, Jubilee International. We’ve met a lot of awesome people and have just really loved getting connected here.

 

 

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Fourth of July with Jubilee people

 

We’ve been able to do some traveling this summer too.

Ryan went on a ministry trip to Bogota, Columbia with our pastor, Len.

 

 

He had his first experience speaking and prophesying over the pastors convention. Bogota is at 8,600 ft, so it was a cool break from the humidity of Florida.

 

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We also traveled to Cleveland Ohio for a conference with an organization called TheCall. It was two days of praying, fasting and interceding for our nation. 

 

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We had some friends (Jordan and Georgia Wells) visit us in Pensacola, and while they were visiting, Jordan spent several nights ministering to the young adult and youth groups at our church.

While we moved down here to pursue some kind of ministry, we’ve had doors open up for us to start a business: Gulf Coast Recreation. We now sell commercial playground equipment all over the gulf coast region! This has kept both of us very busy lately and we anticipate that this will be a “tent-making” business for us to be freed up in the future to pursue other things. Since this has taken much of our time lately, we’re so grateful for the opportunity to send Ellis to “school” at our church’s child care! He’s absolutely loving it! Here’s some pics from his first day.

 

While this move hasn’t been exactly what we expected, we are learning what life in Florida looks like and means for us. We are confident (most days) that we made the right move and are still excited to see what happens.

 

As always, questions, conversations and connections are welcome :)

Thanks for reading!