Joy Comes in the Morning

- Terri Markus -

When I look back on our journey through delayed fertility, miscarriage, and infant loss, this verse just describes the whole journey perfectly. There were so many nights of weeping, crying out, up and down emotions, but God was faithful and finally JOY came in the morning.

We went through a miscarriage before we got pregnant with our son, Carson. We only needed Clomid to get pregnant, but it took a year and a half. I had a relatively healthy pregnancy with him, but when I went into labor his heart rate declined and he was delivered via emergency c-section. He was without oxygen for too long, and after two days on a ventilator, several seizures and brain bleeds, we made the difficult decision to let him go to Jesus. This was such a dark season in our lives with a lot of weeping, and crying out, but we knew we wanted to have children, so we had faith that God would redeem our loss and bless us with more children.

Through a miracle, we conceived our daughter, Carlie Joy, who was born exactly a year and eleven days after the birth of Carson. As we debated about her name, we knew we liked the name Carlie as an honor to her brother, but with the middle name we wanted to honor our journey of infertility leading up to her birth. For a long time we were thinking her middle name would be Patience; however, we decided on Joy because we didn’t want to look back on our journey, but we wanted to celebrate God’s goodness to us and this verse in Psalm 30:5 seemed like a perfect reason to use Joy as her middle name.

Our fertility story doesn’t end here. We had more problems with secondary infertility, and more miscarriages. More emotions, more weeping. I went into a depression and had difficulty dealing with other people in my life getting pregnant. Difficulty dealing with things other people would say. It was just a dark season once again. I still had emotions from losing my son, and still do. I don’t think that will ever go away.

However, we learned faith and reliance on God in a way we never would have if we hadn’t gone through the things we had. I used to think that if God would just give me one more baby my life would be perfect and my journey through infertility would be done. He did give us another baby, but I was wrong when I thought my journey would be done. Little Elliana Faith came into our family about seven years after her sister. Our family is complete, but the lessons learned through our fertility journey we will carry with us through this life.

Carlie Joy

Lauren, here! I'm so blessed by this story. This is the same verse we named our adult coloring book after (Joy Comes in the Morning: Coloring Through Infant Loss & Miscarriage). We experienced this same scripture in our own lives. I hard season of weeping, tears, and sadness turned into a beautiful season of laughter, reception, and joy. And do you know that we don't share these stories to remind you of yet another person who's received their miracle. We share these because we believe there is immense power in testimony!

“The word testimony, in Hebrew, comes from a root word that means ‘do again.’ So every time a testimony is spoken, it comes with it, God’s covenant to repeat the miracle. 

So the reason we share the testimony is because we want to create the atmosphere for the miracle to be duplicated.”

— Bill Johnson

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