At 14 weeks, I’m finally getting back into the swing of almost being normal again. I’ve been nauseated for a pretty constant seven weeks, but hopefully that’s slowing down now that the second trimester is in full swing. However, lots of nausea means lots of couch time, and lots of couch time means lots of introspection. That’s where today’s post comes in.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen multiple Facebook friends announce their pregnancies, and I’m always surprised to find out they’re due around the same time as me! Then I think, wow, maybe we announced way too early. And apparently that’s a pretty common consensus, seeing as my pregnancy apps are all just now giving me advice about announcing my pregnancy. A few weeks late, I always muse, but that’s ok. Here’s why we chose to just go ahead and let everybody know.

It’s not because I wasn’t terrified of having a miscarriage. I definitely was. I am. Robert and I pray every single night before bed for our precious little one, and we have been doing so from the moment we found out that they existed. In those few moments just after taking the test, I was so very scared. I knew it was early. I knew miscarriage was common. I knew many, many friends who’d had them, and I knew I wasn’t immune. But I also knew that the life inside of me was just that…a life. And regardless of if we lost our baby before we ever really met him/her, it was still our baby. Our first baby. So miscarriage or not, we were going to tell.

We had concerns, of course, but ultimately it came down to our conviction that life begins at conception. It seems contradictory to be anti-abortion but then to also wait until 14-15 weeks until you finally concede it’s a baby. We knew our baby was a baby from the beginning, and we wanted others to share in that excitement with us. Now, just because you don’t announce as early as we did doesn’t mean you don’t believe it’s a baby, it might just mean you don’t want to grieve a possible miscarriage with the world looking on. And I definitely get that. We went back and forth on that one, too. But we finally decided that…well, our lives are pretty public already. My husband is a preacher, and a preacher’s life tends to be an open book. I have a blog, my husband and I both have multiple podcasts…so everything we do is already pretty much open to observation and scrutiny. If it was the plan that we would have a miscarriage, we prayed that we would be able to glorify God in that trial.

But here we are — 7 weeks later. Still not out of the woods as far as miscarriages are concerned. Still have no idea what to expect with this whole labor/birth/parenting thing. Yet God has been our Guide and Stay throughout our entire lives and throughout this entire pregnancy, so we are confident that He will see us through in whatever way He deems best. Be it loss, be it complication, be it sickness, be it health, God has never and will never forsake us, and we pray that in whatever He gives, we will find contentment and joy.