His Ways are Best: Emily Harmon’s Story

Dannah Gresh: Emily Harmon felt like her infertility meant God was withholding blessings from her.

Emily Harmon: And then one day I was reading Psalm 119:71, and it says, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy [righteous] statutes” (KJV). 

And it was like the Lord said, “Emily, ‘good’ isn’t always happy, it isn’t always fun. Sometimes it’s sorrow and pain, and I don’t withhold that either, because it’s in that, that you get to know Me better; that you’re drawn closer to Me; that you have a more intimate walk with Me. So, no good thing will I withhold. And right now, I’m withholding children so I can accomplish something else good in your life.”

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Surrender: The Heart God Controls, for May 21, 2021. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy, it’s been an amazing week here on Revive Our Hearts! We’ve taken some deep dives into some difficult topics, but they’re all kind of loosely tied together, don’t you think?

Nancy: Yes, on Monday we heard from Katie Laitkep who told her story of dealing with chronic pain and how she learned to recognize some of the lies that she had been believing. And then on Tuesday and Wednesday we listened to John and Donna Avant along with Erin Davis talking about death. What a rich biblical perspective they gave us as they talked about the hope that we have, even when facing death, because of Jesus! And then yesterday, Laura Booz demonstrated that same kind of hope as she shared how she processed the death of her unborn baby.

I know so many moms who have experienced the pain of a miscarriage were listening and relating to what she shared. And then, today’s guest is going to share how she wrestled with trusting God’s plan in the midst of another kind of loss and grief: the pain of infertility.

Dannah: Yes, over and over this week we’ve been hearing the same thing, although from different angles. They’re average, normal individuals who bump up against the difficulties in their lives and they have a decision to make: “Am I going to shake my fist in anger at God? Or will I choose to trust that He knows more than I do and He knows what He’s doing?”

If you’ve missed any of this week’s programs, you can always revisit them on the Revive Our Hearts app or on our website ReviveOurHearts.com. This week’s programs have been truly deep and heartfelt. You don’t want to miss them!

Nancy: And if you know someone who might be encouraged by one of those programs, be sure and share it with them. Today, we’re in for a sweet glimpse into some of the struggles and pain and—yes—joy that Emily Harmon and her husband Zach have experienced. The Harmons live in southern Illinois. We’re going to just sit back and let them tell their own story in their words.

Emily: I grew up in a very godly home with a mom and dad who loved each other and loved the Lord. I have three sisters. Speaking of the things of the Lord, Scripture memory, listening to Gateway To Joy and Elisabeth Elliot every day was part of our Bible [time]. That was just my life growing up.

The Scripture was poured into us; my parents labored at teaching us the things of the Lord. I can’t thank God enough for the home I grew up in. I would say by age ten, I had my entire life planned out. I was going to marry young and have seven children. I had all my kids’ names picked out! And I dreamt about them all the time.

I always dreamed of not just having biological children, but of adopting several children . . . just kids that needed a home, needed to be loved, that we could take in and nurture and love. That was a dream I always had. I was not as a child or girl in my teens taking into account the Lord and His bigger plans and His greater plans.

So, yes, they were plans I made. In my foolishness, I thought they would actually transpire that way. I think as I graduated from high school (I had just turned nineteen), things were not unfolding as I had planned, and I had never thought about really what to do. My plan was I was just going to marry at nineteen. That was what I was going to do; that’s what I had always planned on.

All of the sudden I’m turning nineteen; I don’t have a Prince Charming in my life, so obviously I’m not marrying right now. I felt lost, unsure what to do, where to go. It rocked my world until I began to grow spiritually. At that point, the Lord started teaching me to trust.

A verse that became very dear to me was 2 Samuel 22:31, “As for God, his way is perfect.” I knew that God was working and this was not a mistake, and then I was able to seriously embrace singleness and see that He had purposes for me and was using me in ways I would never be used if I were married. 

I was seriously able to embrace it and enjoy it and see it as a gift from Him, not knowing how long the season would last. I supported myself through teaching piano. Music was a huge part of my life. Before I could play the piano, I would sit for hours and play the few chords I had figured out by ear. 

At the age of eleven or twelve, my parents started me in piano lessons, and I worked very, very hard. I was very driven to want to play. I always knew I wanted to teach. I thought if I could have maybe twenty students, I would consider that a nice sized little studio. Actually, my first student was my youngest sister.

Eventually I got brave enough to hang up a little sign at the library: “Piano Lessons—Accepting New Students.” I had students right away after high school, just like four or five. But within a few years I went from the four or five to I think at least twenty. Then a couple years after that I was running a total of between forty-five and fifty students all the time, and I always had a waiting list.

I met Zach at a mutual friends church’.

Zach Harmon: My friend’s church put John and Romans together for other countries, and as we were talking, we knew of some other people in the Gibson City area. They had a basement, and they were wanting to put some Scriptures together. So we went over there, and they told us that there would be some godly girls, and they had one that they had in mind for me to meet.

Emily: They had actually called and said, “Hey, there are going to be several single guys there who are looking to meet godly young women. Would your family be willing to come? We’re not trying to matchmake, but just giving God opportunity to work.”

And what they did not tell me was that they had told one guy in particular about one girl in particular, and that one guy was Zach, and I was that girl. 

Zach: I was excited about that, but I had been somewhat set up before to meet girls, and they didn’t go anywhere. So I was hopeful but not expecting. But whenever we first got started, there were a lot of families running late, and so we didn’t have a whole lot of people to start out with. But whenever I knew people were coming down, I just immediately got up and went over to the next table.

My friend ushered that family over to meet me, and it just happened to be that it was Emily and her two sisters that would come to the table to work with me. I was intrigued, but . . . “We’ll see where this leads.”

Emily: I thought Zach was a great guy and would make a wonderful husband for one of my sisters! By that time I had fully embraced singleness and was really at a good place. I wasn’t grieving singleness anymore. The next Saturday I saw Zach again for the second time, and the next day he called my dad and said . . .

Zach: “I’m really interested in getting to know your daughter a little bit more. I didn’t know if she’d be open to that possibility.”

Emily: And my response was, “He just messed everything up! I don’t want my emotions played with; I don’t even want to think about marriage.” (laughter)

Zach: What I liked best about Emily was, she was a go-getter. She was confident; she’s easy to talk to. I liked seeing that her heart was for the Lord and the things of the Lord. That was definitely, “Hey, this girl is serious about the Lord. I want to get to know her.” 

Emily: My sister said to me, “I’ve been praying ever since last month, because I think you two go together!” 

I looked at her and said, “Thanks a lot!” and went upstairs in a huff, sat down on my bedroom floor and burst into tears and said, “God, what are you doing!?” And so, honestly, I came very close to saying no.

But, as only God can work, I had already taken the next week off of work and was going to be at Founder’s Week at Moody Bible Institute for several days. I had quiet time already planned. So I just prayed a lot; I don’t think I heard a lot of the messages. I was sitting there in that service and my mind was just spinning!

But also, I wasn’t busy teaching, so I could really think and pray. By that next Saturday night, I told my parents, “Okay, I am not courting him; I’m not dating him; I’m not committing to anything. But he may come to the house one time and we will visit, and we will see what happens.” A couple weeks later he came over for dinner on a Saturday, and we were both scared to death! We were so stiff in trying to visit! (laughter)

Zach: I was expecting the whole family to greet me, and instead it was just her, and so that kind of threw me off my rocker. That just kind of made me like, “Whoa!” I wasn’t sure exactly where to go with this. I thought I was meeting the whole family.

For the first probably hour, hour-and-a-half, it was just me and her in the living room talking, and the rest of the family was scattered throughout the house. It turned out okay.

Emily: Around ten o’clock he said he should go, and I realized that I didn’t want him to go. I had a feeling this was going to go somewhere.

Zach: On the way home that evening, after being at her house, I called my mom because they were interested in knowing what happened. I told my mom, “Yeah, I think I met my wife.” 

Emily: We courted/dated for a grand total of seven weeks, and Zach proposed on my twenty-eighth birthday—which was in April—and we married that August. As I had already learned in my life, life doesn’t go as planned, and God has a lot more thorns along the road than you ever would plan for.

When I met Zach, I was saddened to learn pretty quickly that his mom was dying of cancer. She was just fifty-five years old, and she had been battling cancer for four years.

Zach: I knew she was always wanting to know that I was taken care of by being married before she died. That was one of her goals and one of her prayers in life. It was important to me, but both of us knew that I shouldn’t marry just to be married for that sake.

Throughout the time of her having cancer, I had desired and prayed that my mom could see my wife, so she would know I was taken care of and know that I was married.

Emily: I asked, “So how bad is she?” I remembered him saying, “Well, honestly, I don’t think she’ll be here a year from now.” When we got engaged, we had a prayer that God would allow Zach’s mom to be at our wedding, that she could live that long and be healthy enough to get there.

As the time drew near, just a few weeks before the wedding, she started going downhill pretty quickly and was in the hospital. Then within about ten days before the wedding it became evident she probably wasn’t going to make it to the wedding at all.

She ended up passing away on Sunday, August 5. We had her funeral that Wednesday . . . and we were married on Saturday.

Zach: The week of our wedding was very much a roller coaster with emotions. We definitely experienced a low, burying my Mom on Wednesday, wedding on Saturday. Saying the vows, we knew what those vows were. I watched as my dad cared for my mom.

Emily: I’ll never forget, within probably an hour of Zach’s mom passing away, Zach looked at me and said, “God is good, and I can trust Him.” I knew how deeply he had prayed and longed for his mom to be there.

My respect for the man I was about to marry increased so much in that moment, because I saw that his trust in God was not just because life was good. He knew his God, and he trusted his God. My admiration for this man grew at that moment incredibly, and I just couldn’t thank God enough that He was giving me such a godly man!

We married older. I was twenty-eight, Zach turned twenty-six on our honeymoon. He knew my great desire for children, and so holding off children was not something we did for very long at all. I experienced a lot of early pregnancy symptoms due to Lyme disease, that we did not realize I had at the time.

There were many months, actually, that we got our hopes up, that possibly this was the month, and God was blessing us with a child . . . but every time to just be disappointed. I got to the point where I hated to take a pregnancy test, because it was just like a knife. I really didn’t want to take them anymore, because it just hurt too much.

I remember well the day that my doctor wrote at the top of my medical notes: infertility. I just went out to the car and cried, because I said, “God, this word was not in my plans!” I didn’t want that word attached to me, because that was something I didn’t want to face.”

Zach: It was sobering. I was not expecting these issues.

Emily: Infertility was the most painful thing I think I’ve ever been through. I was not prepared for the pain of infertility. I always thought, Oh, that must be really hard to not be able to have kids! And then we were in that position, and I was unprepared.

Infertility is grieving the loss of someone who never was. Infertility, for me, was way harder than singleness; it was much more difficult. Sadly, at many points I saw myself actually pulling away. I knew I was hurting; I knew God was the Author of life; I knew He said that children were a good thing. I was having trouble with reconciling it all in my heart and my mind.

In the disappointment and the anger, God would meet me in His Word, remind me Who He was, that He is good. Something He gave me that was so precious to me was I’ve wrestled with the verse, “No good thing will he withhold [from those who love the Lord] from them that walk uprightly” (Psalm 84:11). As far as I know, children are a good thing. He says they’re good.

And so this didn’t make sense. And then one day I was reading Psalm 119:17, and it says,“It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy [righteous] statutes” (KJV). It was like the Lord said, “Emily, ‘good’ isn’t always happy, it isn’t always fun.Sometimes it’s sorrow and pain, and I don’t withhold that either, because it’s in that, that you get to know Me better; that you’re drawn closer to Me; that you have a more intimate walk with Me. So, no good thing will I withhold . . . and right now I’m withholding children so I can accomplish something else good in your life.”

That was a pivotal turning point, I think, for me of understanding God’s goodness at a new level. Infertility was death to a dream that I was not ready to have die. I was not ready to see that dream go. So my first thought was, Plan B. I’ve always wanted to adopt anyway. We’ll just start adopting kids.

But in one of our very first conversations when Zach and I were getting to know each other, I asked him, “What do you think about adoption?” 

And he said, “Probably not. I’ve only seen it once, and it didn’t go well. I just wouldn’t want to do that.”

And so I thought, Well, now that we can’t have children, certainly his heart will be tender to this, and I’ll bring it up. 

And he said, “I’m not even ready to talk about it. I am just not there.” And that’s what made infertility for me extremely devastating because I knew that if I was facing infertility and couldn’t adopt, the children were not going to be part of my life at all, and that for me was incredibly devastating.

Zach: It was through several different processes that God just kept on softening my heart to adoption. Infertility made me think about adoption a lot more, because I realized, “The only way I’m going to become a dad is through adoption,” but I thought that was probably not the best reason to go out and pursue adoption.

But God kept on working on my heart, and whenever I realized that you can have an adopted child and love him as your own, and in your mind that solidified that that’s your child, well, maybe we could do this adopting thing.

Emily: And one day out of the blue he came up to me and said, “If we’re not pregnant by January, I think we should start pursuing adoption.” I cried—that time happy tears—and said, “Are you serious!?” And my burden began to lift, because adoption wasn’t Plan B for me either, like, it was something I already had hoped to do anyway.

So this was like a dream come true, so it was a very exciting day and a big answer to prayer! I remember early on in our adoption journey, once we had decided to start moving forward with that, hearing on Revive Our Hearts a message by Russell Moore on adoption and the gospel. 

For both of us, I think that was one of the turning points that took it from something we’re doing because of infertility to, “This is something God is calling us to, to take in orphans and give them a home.” The adoption journey is not an easy one. There are lots of ups and downs, highs and lows. There are many emotions in the world of adoption.

We used a Christian referral service, which meant that we had the opportunity to present our profile to many, many birth moms. Within six months we had heard no I believe twenty-two times. And it hurt!

I remember getting on my knees and crying and saying, “God, I don’t think I can do this anymore! I’m tired; I hurt; this is painful. I’m just done!” A couple hours later our phone rang, and it was our adoption consultant saying, “Do you remember the baby you presented your book to, the little preemie? If you will take him, he’s your son!”

God met us right at that moment, when I was at the end of my rope and felt like I couldn’t have gone on any more, and He gave us our son. That was a moment it was a little hard to work through. We knew he was a micro-preemie; he had a brain bleed. 

This little boy, his future was very uncertain. No one knew exactly how he was going to heal and how he would do. So we took about twenty-four hours and prayed.

Zach: I looked at my wife and I said, “Honey, could you love this boy as your own and take care of him regardless of whether he has special needs or not?” And she looked at me with a smile and a tear in her eye and said, “Yes.” And I said, “Call them up and say his name is Levi Zachary Harmon!”

As soon as I took Levi in my arms, I knew that this was my son. Adopted, yes . . . but that was a very small picture. This was my son, and I was excited to see my son! I remember whispering in his ear, “Levi, this is your daddy. I love you!”

Emily: I will never forget the day when the doctor said, “I just want you to come look at his ultrasound before you sign the final paperwork.” 

We said, “Oh, we’ve already made up our mind.” 

He said, “No, no, I think you should see the ultrasound.” And he showed me an ultrasound of a healthy brain, and he showed us the ultrasound of Levi’s.

It didn’t take a medical expert to know that Levi’s was very different, and that shouldn’t have been. So he had both hydrocephalus and a grade 3 bilateral intraventricular hemorrhage. That meant that could have cerebral palsy, he could have many learning disabilities, he could be crippled--no one knew exactly--he could be perfectly fine. 

His future was very uncertain, and the doctor said, “There is no way we can tell you what his future holds.” And we looked the doctor in the face and said, “We said yes to this boy. He is our son, and no medical diagnosis is turning us back.” 

We knew that this was the boy God had for us. But did I have fear, did I struggle with, “God, what if he is crippled, what if he does have cerebral palsy, what does that look like?” But I knew the same God who had led me all this way was the same God who would walk with us every step of the journey ahead.

Levi was in the NICU for a total of ten weeks before we got to bring him home. I was with him for the last six of those ten weeks. We knew that what this boy needed was loving. He had laid waiting for thirty days for a family, and he desperately needed to bond with someone.

Literally, I would arrive at the hospital around seven, and I would stay until ten or eleven o’clock at night. I would just hold him and sing to him. Every night Zach would call and we would put it on speaker phone, and he would pray with Zach over the phone. We heard Daddy’s voice every day.

I would never, ever trade those six weeks of bonding with him in the NICU. They are some of my most precious memories of my Levi. And then the day they came and said, “We’re going to do an MRI before you’re released from the hospital, just to see the exact damage from the brain plane now that he’s ten weeks old. We can get a better idea of what lies ahead.”

They came back and said, “His brain MRI is perfectly normal. There is no damage. It’s just a miracle!” All I know is we had literally a couple hundred people praying faithfully for our Levi, and God answered above and beyond anything we could ever ask or think!

Levi is now four years old, and we look at each other all the time and say, “Can you imagine life without him!?” He is the happy little boy who has absolutely no cerebral palsy, no seizures. He’s an incredibly bright little boy; God has given him a very, very brilliant mind. 

He started teaching himself how to read and write at the age of three. One day he came in and he was like, “Two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve . . .” He counted by twos all the way into the fifties. We’re trying to figure out how on earth did this four-year-old teach himself to count by twos?!

And then we realized, he loves to take my devotional from Revive Our Hearts and flip through it. And when you flip through every other page, just on the right hand side, you get 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. . .so Revive Our Hearts taught our son to count by twos!

God has ministered so much grace in that little boy’s life. He is a ball of energy; he is a cuddlebug. He tells me multiple times—probably every hour—“I love you, Mommy!” I cannot imagine life without him!

In mid-2018, the desire to adopt another child was definitely there. We were ready to do this again, and we began doing our research, looking at different options, different agencies, the cost.

I sat down with my husband on the couch and said, “Okay, here are all the details, here are all the different agencies. What do you think?” We desperately wanted to do this, and yet we both looked at each other and said, “God’s saying no.”

It was around that same time that I began taking a group of friends through the new Lies Women Believe that had just been updated and re-released from Revive Our Hearts. I had already been through the study once with another group of ladies. 

I was shocked when I began working on lies we believe about God. It said that, “God doesn’t love me,” is a lie we can believe. And God began to peel back the layers of my heart, and I realized I did not believe God loved me. I was living a life of “perform, perform” and not resting in God’s love for me at all.

It was affecting my marriage; I didn’t even realize, but I couldn’t rest in Zach’s love for me either. I was constantly trying to earn his favor. I was doing it with God; I was doing it with Zach. I didn’t even realize what a position I was in, because of that, it affected my prayer life.

Things like asking for a child, a private adoption, which would be much less expensive than adopting through an agency like we did with Levi, or praying for a biological child, I just didn’t do it. I didn’t feel worthy. God really opened my eyes to that.

One night I was struggling with the desire for a second child, and Zach looked at me and said, “Do you think God is able to give us a biological child?” And immediately the answer that came to my mind was, “Oh, He’s able, but He wouldn’t do that for us. He’d do it for someone else.” And that opened my eyes to some heart attitudes that were so wrong! I was totally in a wrong place.

And so as I began to work through this thing, that God really does love me, I don’t have to perform for Him . . . I was in that process when I attended True Woman ’18 with a group of friends. At that conference Nancy got up and said, “Hey, we have these prayer cards; we have a team of men here praying. Turn one in with your prayer requests; they’re going to pray for those requests.”

And she said, “In fact, I just met a woman, she was here last year, and she wrote on her card, ‘Would you pray that God would bless us with a child?’ And today, she’s pushing a baby stroller!” Instantaneously my eyes filled with tears! That was my desire, and yet to boldly pray . . . to ask someone else to pray . . .

I was still struggling with feeling unworthy. It took a couple days of wrestling, but near the end of the conference I turned in a prayer card that said, “Praying that God would give us a biological child or a private adoption.” 

And so my prayer was, “Lord, would you put me in a position where I know I need you just to get through the day, where I realize my weakness and my inability to handle the day—to handle things without You. I can’t keep being the superwoman. I need to depend on You!” That was my prayer at True Woman. In January of 2019. . .

Zach: All of a sudden, we got a phone call from some friends of ours and heard about this adoption possibility, and so we were very intrigued. We prayed about it, and we realized this was why the Lord had us not move forward with any of the other options that we thought we could. “This is the situation the Lord wants us in.”

Emily: Our friend said, “We know the situation of a woman who is expecting a baby in July, and it would be a private adoption. She’s looking for a family; she has asked us to find her a family and said whoever we pick is who she wants. And we wanted to know if you all would pray about this.”

We both were taken back and, “Oh my word! Look at God and what He is doing!” We were pretty certain we knew the answer, but we wanted to pray about it for a week, because we knew this was not an easy situation. We knew the baby was in danger. We knew her birth mom was in desperate need of Jesus and was in a very hard place. 

And we knew the situation was not a good one and that it would probably be very traumatic, very stressful, very emotional to walk through this adoption journey. But after a week of just confirming that this was not an emotional decision, we happily said, “Yes, Lord!” We called and said, “We will be this child’s family forever!” 

I was actually very connected to this birth mom; I would take her to appointments. But it was also very stressful, because the mom was in a very bad situation, and our daughter was definitely in danger. We began praying that God would miraculously save and transform this precious woman, or that He would have her incarcerated to protect her and our daughter.

We knew it was safest for both of them. And within a couple weeks we got a phone call and our attorney said, “I just got word that your birth mom is on her way to the county prison.” At that moment, my heart completely broke over this woman whose life was in such a place where being incarcerated was the best thing for her.

Her time in prison enabled us to minister to her. I wrote her letters every week, and she would write back. We went and visited her a couple times and just loved on her. During this time, I began not feeling well, and I thought my Lyme’s disease was flaring up . . . again . . . which was very common.

But I did have this nagging question in the back of my mind; some of my symptoms were different than I had experienced before. I thought, Should I take a pregnancy test? But I really didn’t want to because I was in a good spot.

When God gave us this private adoption, I felt like that was Him saying, “I’m growing your family through adoption.” I had very willingly embraced it and said, “Yes, Lord! I take this with joy, and I’m okay if you choose to keep my womb closed forever. I will be an adoptive mom to as many children as You want to give us. I am totally fine with that!”

I knew to take a pregnancy test and have it be negative would still stir up emotions I really didn’t want to stir up in my heart. I didn’t want to hear God say no again. But I finally realized before I went and told my doctor I needed Lyme treatments again, I probably should do it just to be responsible.

So I took the test, and usually I would sit and stare at it. But this time I decided, “I’m just going to leave the bathroom and set my timer for three minutes and come back and look.” As I walked out of that bathroom, I verbally said out loud, “God, if I am pregnant, I’m going to need You more than I have ever needed You before in my life!” because I had a two-year-old, and I was in the middle of an adoption.

And God didn’t say it audibly, but it’s like to my heart He said, “That’s exactly where I want you to be!” And at that moment I thought, It’s going to be positive! And three minutes later I walked back in, and two pink lines were staring me in the face!

We had already picked the name for our little girl who was going to be born through adoption; it was Havilah Joy. As Havilah’s birth became closer at hand, we began to be very concerned, because we learned that our birth mom was to be released from prison thirty days before our daughter’s due date which was very concerning. 

We knew that was going to put both the birth mom and our daughter in great harm’s way, and it could be life-threatening danger that they were going to be in. So we began to pray again, and we said, “Lord, would You please either change the birth mom’s release date—extend it by another at least thirty days—or have our daughter born prematurely.”

And on June 10 I got a call from a nurse at 3:18 in the morning telling me that, “Your daughter was just born six-and-a-half weeks early”—ten days before birth mom was to be released from prison! 

My pregnancy was going well. My doctors had told me that they had no concerns for preterm labor. There are certain things they look for, and I had none of those symptoms or signs whatsoever.

So I was in complete shock when on August 23, I went into preterm labor nine weeks before our daughter’s due date! I was like, “This is not happening!” I had a ten-week old; I had a two-year-old; we had just moved; I was trying to get settled. I was like, “This is not happening!”

But the doctors told me I was going into labor, and it didn’t look like they were going to be able to stop it. We were going to have a NICU baby for about another month. But thankfully, I was airlifted and taken to another hospital, because they said the NICU where I was at was not able to handle a preemie as young as our daughter was going to be.

But a lot of people were praying. I got to that other hospital and they were like, “We’re not even sure why you’re here!” Within a couple of days they sent me home. I was on bed rest for the next six weeks, but God ministered to us so much to us through the help of people of our church, and a family who sacrificed so much for our family.

He met every need when it was a very difficult season.On September 30 we went to court and finalized Havilah’s adoption. On a Wednesday, October 2nd, our little Elizabeth Grace was born! As a mom of three little ones, I was burnt out! I was tired; I was spiritually depleted.

One day I got a call from Rebecca Ellerman from Revive Our Hearts to thank us for a donation we had sent in. We talked for over an hour. What I found out was that Rebecca Ellerman had had four children in—I believe—three years and nine months.

She said, “Emily, when I was in your season of life a friend said, ‘Every week I take two hours, and I clock out. That is my time to refresh myself spiritually.’ So I’d really encourage you to do that!” 

And so we began, every Monday night for two hours, I would just clock out and head to my basement. And for two hours I read the Word. I’d do an in-depth Bible study, I read books that are going to strengthen my walk with the Lord, I journal, I pray. God has used that two hours every week to encourage me!

In the fall of 2020, my husband and I began to pray again about if God would have us adopt another child. I wasn’t pregnant again. We didn’t know if God would ever open my womb again or not, and we were very much ready to open our hearts and our home to another child.

We had plans to begin that process; we were in the very beginning stages of researching again and deciding exactly what route we were going to go. I was doing a detox for my Lyme disease, and just to be responsible—it’s not healthy to detox when you’re pregnant—so I thought, I should take a pregnancy test, just to make sure I wasn’t pregnant. I didn’t ever want to do any harm to a child.

I was shocked to have a positive pregnancy test! So we are actually expecting another child this September, and we are absolutely thrilled at this very unexpected blessing again! I count it such a blessing to have experienced adoption and biological children. And now God is saying, “I’m going to do this for you again.” We are thrilled!

Looking at my life now, it looks nothing like my childhood dreams . . . nothing at all! But I wouldn’t change anything! The fruit that has come from the trials, the pain—the children He has brought into our home—I wouldn’t rewrite anything!

I thank God for the way He’s written our story. I feel privileged that this is a story He has written, and I know I can trust Him to write the following chapters of our story. My life, the dreams I had . . . I do have my family. I have my Prince Charming. I have biological and children who came through adoption . . . all of which I dreamed about. 

The path to get here has been far different than I ever imagined. I wouldn’t trade the heartaches and the hard times for the smooth dream I had, because, “As for God, His way is perfect!”

Nancy: You know, a lifetime of trusting God really comes down to a matter of making daily, moment-by-moment choices to trust God when we cannot see or understand what He is doing. We’ve been listening to the story of Emily Harmon, along with her husband Zach. 

You can watch this moving story in a short film that has been produced by the Revive Our Hearts team. You’ll find it on our website at ReviveOurHearts.com. And what a privilege it is for Revive Our Hearts to be a part of this story! There are links in the transcript to today’s program to the various Revive Our Hearts resources that Emily mentioned.

Day after day we’re able to minister to women like Emily around the world through the faithful and generous support of listeners just like you. We just have a little bit more than a week left in the month of May. (Where has this month gone?) 

During this time, we’re trusting the Lord to provide the balance of $750,000 needed this month to end our budget year and help us start a new one. So, would you ask the Lord what He would have you to give today to help support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts, and then contact us to make your donation?

We don’t want to do anything to take away from your regular giving to your local church, but perhaps God is laying it on your heart to give something above and beyond that to this ministry. If you’re unable to give right now, listen, that’s just fine. We need your prayers! That may be the greatest gift that you could give.

If the Lord prompts you to give financially, you can visit us at ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1–800–569–5959. When you make that gift, you can know that the Lord is using your generosity to help women like Emily experience greater freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ!

Dannah: I hope you’ll be with us on Monday. Nancy will be teaching again. She’s going to take us into Luke chapter 7, one of my favorite stories in the Scripture.

Nancy: And, Dannah, I want to make a suggestion here, if I could jump in. I want to encourage you [listeners] to pick up your Bible over the weekend and turn to Luke chapter 7, and then beginning at verse 36 through the end of the chapter (vv. 36–50), I want to encourage you to read that passage maybe two or three times. 

As you do, just make some observations: What does this passage tell you about Jesus? What does it tell you about the gospel? What does it tell you about ourselves? And then ask yourself this question: “Do I identify more with the sinner woman or with Simon the Pharisee . . . and why?” We’ll talk about that on Monday.

Dannah: We hope you’ll have a wonderful weekend and that you can worship together with other believers this weekend. We’ll see you next week for Revive Our Hearts. Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants you to remember: God’s ways are best! It’s an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

All Scripture is taken from the KJV.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.