I know what I want for my birthday every year now. Another year with my husband. I’m soooooooo thankful to God for sparing his life and can’t bless his name enough. I don’t take for granted that I get to cry happy tears tonight instead of grieving, anguished ones. Thank you, Jesus.

I have some time (Gabe’s resting and watching football, and my mama is with our girlies at home) so I’ll try to share a bit more of Gabe’s story.

We were at a Fall Festival that our church hosted for the community Saturday night. We had a chili cook-off, lots of goodies, games in the gym, a real-life firetruck w/firemen, and ended the night with trunk-or-treat.

I needed our van keys to open our trunk, so I walked over to the end of the gym where Gabe and 5 buddies were deep in a game of 3-on-3 basketball. I asked Gabe for the keys, took one look at him and said, “Did you get hit??” He said no. I knew something was wrong. He had an awful look on his face like, “I’m in pain, and I’m not happy about it, and don’t talk to me. “Are you okay?” He said no, but shooed me away. I tried not to be offended and went to pass out candy.

As I was throwing candy at little munchkins, he came outside and leaned his head up against the van. He looked awful. Pale, sweaty, and not just-played-basketball sweaty, but cold, clammy sweaty. “Are you okay?” Another no, and “I don’t want to talk.”

I suggested he get in the van and lay the seat back. He did. A minute later he was back. “I can’t catch my breath.” The kiddos were winding down the trunk-or-treat. “Do you need me to do something?” No. Then a minute later he said, “I need to go to the hospital.”

I freaked a little. How? Where? What do I do? Scanned the crowd for Pastor Rich, found him immediately. “Gabe can’t breathe very well. He says he needs to go to the hospital.”

“Let’s try to find a physician,” he said. He runs up to a couple people. I see him talking to our friend Chad. “I’m calling 9-1-1,” Chad says.

Well, that’s a little dramatic, don’t you think? (I don’t say this out loud.)

Gabe sits down beside me in the “trunk” of our mini-van. Our girls are there. A bunch of men somehow circle around us. Rich prays. I cry. The girls cry. I’m not sure at what point I start telling Jesus that I can’t do life without him (Gabe), but I told him that a lot over the next half hour.

The squad arrives, followed by the same firetruck the kids had climbed on 20 minutes earlier. They wouldn’t let me in with him. I stood outside and cried. One of my friend’s husbands rubbed my shoulders. Guys prayed. (all of the women were still “manning” the stations at the festival) The EMT told me I could ride up front or follow the ambulance. Our friend Harlan offered to drive me. I picked Harlan over the dude who wouldn’t let me in the ambulance with my husband.

The fire engine escorted us to the hospital. Harlan dropped me off and parked. I walked into the ER waiting room. So surreal. I felt really calm. Gabe wasn’t in the computer yet. I sat down. Twenty seconds later, they called me up. “He’s in room 52. Go left, right, left.”

I start walking. I turn left, right, left and see doctors and nurses running. Running. One of them says, “I need a something-something in 52. Stat! We’ve got a something-something…”

I can’t really describe that moment. It was awful.

I walked in the room. Gabe was on a gurney, shirtless, cords and wires and IV’s everywhere. Pale as a ghost, in obvious pain. People scurrying, shouting, pulling his clothes off.

Doctor: “It’s a probable heart attack. We’re taking him to the cath lab.”

They hand me his clothes and shoes. I dig in his jeans pockets for his phone. Mine is at home. Dumb. A receptionist takes me to a waiting room. Tells me that calling 9-1-1 was the smartest thing I ever did. I didn’t tell her that it wasn’t my idea. At all.

I sit and wait for Harlan. I need to call Gabe’s dad and brother. Gabe’s mom is in Africa. Gabe’s phone is dead. I don’t know their cell #s by heart. Harlan gets me water. He tells me I can call the operator and they’ll put me through. He’s going to find a charger for Gabe’s phone. I call my mom. No answer. Call my dad. Get “Carrie’s” voicemail. Somehow remember my dad’s real number. He answers.

“Dad, I’m in the hospital. They think Gabe had a heart attack.” I can’t really talk. Dad is in South Carolina with Mom. No one knows Tug or Rock’s number. The phone rings. It’s Tug. Harlan had found a charger and called Tug. Rock and Tug are headed to Columbus.

Harlan and I chat about life. I learn more about him and his amazing, beautiful wife Wendy. I hold back tears. Pastor Rich comes. Then our friends Will and Donna. The doc comes out. Gabe’s left anterior descending artery was 100% blocked. They unblocked it, put a stent in, he’s doing well.

Heart attack. Primary artery. Also known as the Widow Maker.

We go meet him in the hallway and go to his CICU (Cardiac Intensive Care Unit) room. Well, he went to the room, we went to the waiting room. Rock and Tug come. And our friends Pam and Britt. We get to go to his room.

Lots of hugs and tears and some powerful, powerful prayer. God is so good. It was an amazing moment.

I think I’ll stop there. This is all still so surreal. Gabe just said five seconds ago, “Did I really have a heart attack?” He’s doing so well. This is going to change our lives a lot, but we can do all things through Christ.

One of our biggest prayer requests right now is for wisdom about our trip to Cambodia. We’ve gotten some conflicting advice from different nurses. “You can still go.” “You really shouldn’t go.” “You could go, but it would be a huge, huge risk.” Please, God, give us your perfect peace and wisdom. We want to bring you glory, whether that means stay or go.

And friends, I can never thank you enough for all the love and support and encouragement you’ve been showering us with in the past 30 hours. It’s enough to make me bawl. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We love you all so much!

God, you are so, so, so, so, so, so, sooooooooooooooooooo good.

So, yeah, I don’t need anything else for my birthday. Unless you have an extra prayer or two. Thank you!!

Anybody else feeling a little wrecked by James?? Thankfully, God has been wrecking me (in the most amazing way) for quite awhile now, so it hasn’t been toooo terribly much of a shock. But still.

I listened to another David Platt sermon tonight (James 2:14-19). Oh for goodness. I totally recommend it (if you’re ready to get your block knocked off, that is).

I had a delightful opportunity to “count it all joy when you face trials of various kinds” today. I put Nina on the bus at 12:30, and Ava and I went grocery shopping. First to Aldi, where we got milk and ice cream among other perishables (blatant foreshadowing). On to Marc’s. More groceries. Used coupons (hooray, me!), brought my own bags (hooray, me!), CHECK CARD DENIED.

“Um, could you try it again please?”

DENIED.

I have $11 in cash. My groceries cost $58. “Um… okay… can I leave these here and run to the ATM?”

Ava and I dash to the car, drive to the bank, pull up to the ATM, punch in all the right stuff. DENIED.

Pull into the bank parking lot, head inside, wait in line, explain the problem to the teller, he checks my account. “Hmmm… it seems your card was revoked due to suspicious activity on September 9th.”

“Suspicious as in five expensive plane tickets to another country?”

“Why, yes.”

He made a call to a bigwig somewhere who made him ask me twice if it was really me who bought those tickets. All $8000 of them. I had half a notion of telling him how much they SHOULD have been and what a huge blessing from God it was that they were only $8000.

“Sorry about that. It should all be fixed in about 60 seconds.”

“Could I have $60 in cash JUST IN CASE?”

Back to the grocery store, where some poor soul had just been commissioned to restock my goods. Whew. Paid, headed home, Ava and I had a discussion about joy in the midst of trials, ice cream a little soggy but hey.

All good. EDIT (8:48am): There’s an additional mysterious $3500 charge on our check card (on top of the $8000) + overdraft fees and we can’t use our card. Please pray for quick resolution and continuous joy.

Up tomorrow: James chapter 2. Who’s ready??

This’ll be short and sweet. Promise.

One of the things (and there are many) that God has taught me over the past few days is that I am guilty of the same judgmental attitude that I’ve been hurt by. In my zeal for “living radically,” I often jump to conclusions about people’s hearts based on their standard of living, their possessions, and who they look to for financial wisdom.

Please forgive me. I was (am) wrong. That’s between them and God. And like I know firsthand, you can’t ever really know someone’s heart until you take the time to develop a deep relationship with them over time (and of course I can’t do that with everyone).

And while I will never (can never) stop talking about something I’m so passionate about, I’m going to think and pray for a good while about how Jesus would want me to approach the subject and treat his beloved children.

I’ll see you Monday with a completely and totally unrelated post. Thank you, friends.

This is the happy ending, folks. I promise. The only part I’ll leave untold is the part that hasn’t happened yet. Speaking of parts, read Part 1 and Part 2 here.

So, the happy threesome was about to become an adorable foursome. God was answering Nichole’s prayers one after the other with no signs of stopping.

Until.

A routine blood test showed that Nichole had an antibody that might or might not cause some trouble for her baby. “We didn’t really grasp the magnitude of what my particular antibody meant,” Nichole says, “so we were naive but had enough info to be scared for quite a while.”

Her doctor in Alaska referred them to a perinatologist in Seattle, and they scheduled an appointment for when Nichole was 18 weeks pregnant. She had to get an amnio and was “completely freaked out by the potential of a miscarriage.” She wanted to refuse to have it done and take her chances, but the risk of something happening to her baby was greater without it. “Little did I know that the amnio would be the least of my worries in the weeks to come,” Nichole says.

That was the beginning of June 2010. A few looooooong weeks later they got the results–and they were everything they had been praying against. The baby’s blood had the antigen that Nichole had the antibody to. I’m no scientist, but that pretty much means that Nichole’s body was going to treat the baby as an unwelcome intruder and do everything in its power to get rid of him/her. Can you even imagine?

When Nichole got the dreaded call, her mom, Sandy, was visiting from Ohio, and they were hanging out at the McDonald’s Play Land. “I lost it,” Nichole says. “Right there in front of the ball pit.”

Darby and Nichole left Kylie with Sandy and headed to Seattle to get the baby checked out. They stayed with a woman named Barb whom they’d never met. She turned out to be nothing less than an angel–she’s Auntie Barb to Nichole and her family these days.

The doctor in Seattle did an ultrasound where they were specifically looking at the baby’s blood vessels in its brain. The technician spent a really long time looking at things, then they waited to meet with the doctor. Nichole remembers sitting in the tiny exam room and waiting for an eternity. Darby started to get a little uneasy. “Something must be wrong,” he said. “It’s taking too long.” Nichole tried to brush it off.

Then the doctor came back in with a look on her face that no patient ever wants to see. “She sat there and very gently told us that our baby was already very sick,” Nichole remembers. The antibody was attacking the baby’s red blood cells with a vengeance until there were hardly enough left to survive. “That’s really all I heard before I completely broke down. Darby held me very tight as I sobbed, trying to take in everything the doctor said. One of those things being, “We have to do something. Today.”

The doctor left the room. Nichole started freaking out. Darby started crying. Nichole began pacing back and forth, Darby trying to hold her up because she was about to fall over. “I was hyperventilating from sobbing so hard,” she says, “and it felt like the world was crumbling down around me.”

Nichole was 22 weeks pregnant and kept saying over and over again, “It’s too soon. She can’t live outside of me yet. This can’t be happening. It’s too soon.”

Did you catch the “she?” Because they had found out the baby was a she. A girl. A precious little girl fighting for her tiny little life.

Later that day they had their first “poke”–a procedure called FUBS (fetal umbilical blood sampling). The doctor gave Nichole valium to help her relax and a steroid shot to help mature the baby’s lungs. “I got nice and loopy,” she says (and embarrassed poor Darby half to death). The test would determine the baby’s hematocrit, which would let them know if she needed a transfusion. The procedure was rough. Nichole started contracting from the needle poke and was in an incredible amount of pain. The baby did fine though. They were sent home and found out baby didn’t need a transfusion… yet.

Two weeks later, they repeated the entire process and baby did need a transfusion. Their doctor was straightforward with them. “There’s a one percent chance of stillbirth from doing this procedure,” she said, “but if we do nothing, your baby is GOING to die.” They were told over and over that without medical technology, their baby girl would’ve been stillborn with absolutely no warning.

In the event of complications, the doctor recommended no intervention since babies at 24 weeks gestation don’t fare well outside the womb. Nichole interrupted her mid-sentence. “No. I know she would have a rough road if she were born today, but if something goes wrong I want you to get her out. We are fighting for her and I want you to fight for her too.” They signed their first of many c-section consent forms. That day baby got a whole tablespoon of new blood.

And a name. Audrey Hope. They hadn’t planned on revealing her name until she was born, but they wanted–needed–people to pray for Audrey Hope, not just “Darby and Nichole’s baby.”

The next nine weeks, they clung to hope–their hope in God, the Creator and Sustainer of this baby girl they loved with all their hearts. They moved to Seattle for four months and stayed with an amazing Christian family (Auntie Barb!). Nichole went to the doctor every few days for the last 10 weeks of her pregnancy. Barb found a babysitter for Kylie on procedure days (Audrey got a total of five blood transfusions in utero), picked up Nichole’s mom at the airport, and basically served as Christ’s hands and feet to a young family in desperate need. She also prayed. And prayed and prayed and prayed. And got everyone she knew to pray.

Then on September 25, 2010, seven weeks before her due date, weighing in at a healthy 5 pounds, 13 ounces, Audrey Hope Mattingly entered the world. She spent about a month in the NICU, got an additional blood transfusion, and spent some time growing while doctors kept a close eye on her. And then she got to go home, sweet home.

And today? Audrey Hope is a happy, healthy, beautiful little seven-month-old–a delight to everyone she meets. You would never, ever know she had endured such an ordeal unless someone told you.

And on Monday, April 25, 2011, Darby’s adoption of sweet, beautiful, big sister Kylie (5) became official. Nichole’s heart is so full she could burst.

And I know I promised this was the end. And it is. Except that it’s not. God has been whispering some exciting plans in Darby and Nichole’s ears lately, and they’re deeply committed to following him no matter what the cost.

As soon as they’re ready to share more of their God story with their adoring fans, we’ll be here waiting with open ears.

Read Part 1 here.

So we met Nichole and Kylie at the Cleveland Zoo in August 2008. In February 2009, Nichole met a guy named Darby through an internet dating site (match.com). He’s no dummy, that Darby, and took a liking to Nichole right away. A big liking. Nichole on the other hand? Not impressed.

“I gave him the major brush off,” she told me. “Major. He emailed at least twice for every one response I gave the poor guy. I thought, Alaska? Right!”

Alaska. The state Mr. Darby called home. A state that’s pretty much as far away from Ohio (and Nichole’s loving family/support team) as you can get. And the kind of work Darby did in That Great Big State Far, Far Away wasn’t something he could do in Ohio. Relocating wasn’t an option for him.

The dude was persistent (and apparently a little bit irresistible) and started growing on Nichole a little. And then a little more. And a little more.

But here’s the thing. In the months prior to “meeting” Darby, God had done some big things in Nichole’s heart. “I had surrendered completely,” she told me, “and finally decided that it was going to be okay to be single forever. That if nothing more came of my story, that I would be Kylie’s mama and love Jesus and that would be that. And I would be content.”

I know God is anything but predictable, but doesn’t it seem like he does this very thing an awful lot? Waiting until we’re content with where we are before he gives us what we’ve always longed for?

After a few months of e-mails, they started talking on the phone in June. And something was happening inside of Nichole. “One of the coolest parts (I think) is the way that God changed my heart towards this guy in Alaska,” she says.

The next logical step? “He decided he needed to come meet me.” And Nichole didn’t put up a fight. Darby flew from Alaska to Ohio, and they met at the Cleveland Airport for the first time.

He had planned on staying for an entire week, but at the end of their time together, “he couldn’t leave me, so that trip turned into three weeks,” Nichole says.

I have to insert something here that isn’t really of any consequence except that every time I use the word BIG to describe Nichole’s story, I think of Darby and have to smile. You see, my friend Nichole is a tall girl. I think I’m tall at barely 5′ 10′, but Nichole? Is at least six feet tall, maybe more. I remember being in 8th grade and desperately wishing that I wasn’t six inches taller than my boyfriend. A tall girl’s choices are narrowed down considerably if she wants to marry someone taller than her.

Mr. Darby? Six feet, nine inches. NINE. I love it. Nichole could wear six-inch spike heels if she had a notion to.

So, after two more months of being thousands of miles apart, Nichole and Kylie flew to Alaska to scope out Darby’s turf. Turns out Mr. Darby had a little something up his sleeve. This boy don’t mess around.

On August 19, 2009, he drove Nichole to a beautiful spot (I’ve seen pictures–it was perfect), got down on one knee, and asked her and Kylie to marry him.

Nichole still can’t get over it. She had just told God she was good with their little threesome–her, God, and Kylie. “Then this incredible, and I mean incredible, man began pursuing me. Sort of out of nowhere. And he wanted to love my girlie and be her daddy. And didn’t hesitate about any of it. God had been preparing his heart a long time for this, and I can’t imagine anyone else filling the role that he does.”

Darby and his girls didn’t waste any time. On October 9, 2009, they became a family of three. The wedding was beautiful. I was thrilled to get to witness all the excitement and emotion and intense gratitude for what God has clearly orchestrated all by himself. You know how there are weddings that are like yada, yada, yada, they’re married, great, now where’s the cake?

Well, Nichole and Darby’s wedding was the total opposite of that. It was small and intimate, yet full of people who had had a front row seat to the amazing play God was directing for these two (three!) wonderful people. Eyes full of tears, praises to God, heads shaking in awe. Like, in a million years, we never could’ve dreamed up something this incredible for these two awesome “kiddos.” It’s been a long wait, but wow. Beautiful.

Darby had big plans for a week-long cruise in the Bahamas. Doesn’t that sound dreamy? They hustled and bustled and got to the ship just in time… to watch it sail away without them! Can you even imagine?? It’s almost like God said, “Okay, you two have had enough perfect for awhile. It’s time to toss in a little reality and see how you do.” They did just fine. Darby was able to get their cruise rescheduled for a week later, and the two lovebirds got their honeymoon after all.

At the end of October (a little later than they’d planned), they loaded up and headed west. It took them two whole weeks to get to Alaska, but get there they did. And thus began their new life together as a sweet little threesome.

A few months later, Nichole decided she might want to take a little test. So she did. And it was positive. Even more of her dreams were about to come true.

And then they got some awful, horrible, very, very scary news.

Part 3 tomorrow.