What do you do when you're facing an impossible situation and all you can do is pray for a miracle?

Episode Summary

When Abbie Wentzel went into labor with her third child, she never imagined that what began as a long-awaited birth story would quickly become a desperate fight for her daughter's life. After a remarkably fast delivery, Lily was born without a detectable heart rate, was not breathing, and had suffered severe oxygen deprivation. She was later diagnosed with HIE, was fighting a serious infection and septic shock, and faced a long list of life-threatening complications.

But Abbie and her husband, Brandon, refused to stop praying.

As Lily's condition became critical, friends, family, churches, and even people around the world began praying for a miracle. Abbie shares what it was like to trust God while being told that her daughter might not survive, how she learned to hope even when she feared the worst, and what happened as Lily slowly began to overcome one impossible obstacle after another.

This conversation is for the woman who is exhausted from fighting, afraid to hope, or wondering where God is in the middle of an impossible situation. Abbie's story will encourage you to bring your honest pain to God, keep praying when you cannot see the outcome, and remember that you do not have to fight alone. Even in the darkest valley, God is present, faithful, and able to do more than we can imagine.

Meet Abbie Wentzel

Abbie Wentzel is a wife, mom, and storyteller who shares the powerful story of her daughter Lily's miraculous recovery after a life-threatening birth and devastating medical complications. Abbie studied English creative writing at Western Washington University and later earned a master's degree in business with an emphasis in social entrepreneurship. In this conversation, she opens up about one of the hardest experiences her family has ever faced—and the faith, prayer, community, and hope that carried them through it.

Her story offers an honest look at what it means to trust God when the future feels frightening and uncertain, while reminding us that God can meet us in the places where we feel most desperate and powerless.

Key Takeaways

• When you're afraid to hope because you could be disappointed: Learn how to bring your worst fears honestly to God while still believing that He is good.
• When you're facing an impossible situation: Remember that you don't have to see the whole path ahead to take the next step of faith.
• When prayer feels like the only thing you can do: Be encouraged by the power of unified prayer and the difference it can make when people come together to seek God.
• When you're exhausted from fighting: Discover what it means to trust that God can fight for you when you have nothing left.
• When you feel alone in your pain: Remember Abbie's encouragement that God is present with you in the "well," not waiting for you to climb out by yourself.

How This Episode Will Encourage You

If you're fighting a battle you never asked for, you don't have to figure out the future today. God is with you in this moment, and He will give you what you need for the next step. Keep bringing Him your honest pain, keep praying, and don't give up.

If this episode gives you hope, would you take a moment to subscribe to the Collide Podcast, leave a review, or share it with a woman who may need the reminder that she is not alone? Your support helps more women find conversations about faith, healing, and hope.

You can watch a video about Abbie and her family’s story at: facebook.com/whitewaterchurch/videos/2007332382892806/

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Welcome to the Collide podcast. We're a growing community of everyday chicks colliding with Jesus in our mess, our pain, our joy, and our stories.

We value showing up as we truly are.

So that's what you'll find here, walls and masks being torn down so that we can allow Jesus to meet us where we truly are and hear about other women doing the same. We can't wait to collide with you.

They were all praying and crying out to God and asking him for this miracle along with us. And there is such power in that, that unified prayer. And whether that's two or three or thousands, he listens.

Hey, welcome to the Collide Podcast. I'm Willow Weston, the founder and director of Clyde, and I'm so excited to have Abby Wenzel on the pod.

Abby and her husband, since they were, like, college students at Western Washington University many, many years ago, Abby got a degree in English creative writing, and a master's degree in business with an emphasis in social entrepreneurship. And she's now a wife and a mom. And I'm thrilled to have Abby on the podcast today because she's experienced an actual, real, live miracle.

And in a time when so, so many need to know that God is alive and well, powerful, loving, and good, I know that her story will impact ours. So, Abby, thank you for hopping on and sharing your story on the podcast today.

Oh, absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Oh, man, I've been looking forward to this.

I want to talk about the miracle you experienced, but before we get to that, tell us about your enthusiasm leading up to Lily's birth and what you were told when she was born.

Yeah, well, Lily is our third born. We have a son, Elliot, and then a daughter, Annie, and they were pretty close in age. And then we became pregnant with number three.

A bit of a surprise, but a welcome one. And we were super excited leading up to this birth.

Hers was a unique birth because I had had two cesarean sections with my first two, and with Lily, for some reason, I just really desired to have a VBAC or a vaginal birth after a cesarean.

To the world, that sounded really crazy, I think, and maybe some people thought unsafe, but there was just this desire in my heart to do that and a prompting to do that. So I was careful about who I shared that journey with, but I found a doctor who was willing to walk through that with me. And M.D.

She's wonderful, and she's, you know, walked people through many successful VBACs. But a VBAC or a vaginal. And birth after cesarean after two is like a little bit harder.

And she even told me, you know, you have about a 20% success rate when she typed everything into the calculator. But I'm willing to support you in this. We can do a trial of labor, but just know that, you know, it will most likely end in another cesarean section.

And so I. I had this stirring in my heart and I desired that and I wanted that. I wanted that with the first two. And it didn't work out that way, but they were healthy, healthy bursts. And then just was really pressed this.

So I was careful all who I shared that with, but I did ask a few people, my mom and a few other close friends to just be praying with me. And I actually wrote out 12 specific prayers that I was praying for because it really felt like a marathon that just couldn't be completed.

Like my human mind just couldn't wrap itself around even being able to do that. And so. But I knew that with God I could and it was possible. So this was kind of the beginning even of how God started to prepare my heart to.

To pray for what felt like the impossible, but to know that I.

That I could trust him, that he was the God of the impossible and that he could do something that didn't seem that, you know, doctors had told me that my body could not do. And so I think the Lord used this to sort of develop my faith in prayer.

And so these women that I had asked for prayer, these that were close to me and my mom prayed these very specific prayers. And we kind of walked into Lily's birth with this prayer. I hired a doula. She was a believer in Jesus and loved him very much.

She was a big supporter of mine and believing that I could do that, that as well. And the miraculous thing was Lily was born vaginally. And so that was amazing.

If we looked back, even you could see those 12 specific prayer requests, I mean, they were silly things like, well, maybe not silly to the Lord, but they were little things like that the baby would be a certain size because my other babies were 10 pound babies. And I just couldn't wrap my mind around having a ten pounding and there.

And things like just for the specific, specific staff that would be there when she was born, that they would help support and just be the right team to be there to support me in that. And every single One of those 12 prayers were answered. God answered every single one of them.

And Lily, even being born in that way vaginally was so important, I believe, for her story, because she suffered oxygen deprivation at birth. She was. There was no heart rate. Even before she was born, they could detect no heart rate. And so the doctor kind of. I was already.

When I got to the hospital, I delivered her in the triage room. Everything happened very fast. The labor went so quickly, which was amazing in itself because my first two was like 36 hours and 20 something hours.

You know, failure to progress was the reason why I could not have my babies vaginally. And Lily was born from the first contraction to her coming out was two hours. So that in itself was a miracle. And she was born with ease as well.

And she needed to come that way, I believe, because when we got to the hospital, it was already very obvious that there were some critical things going on. They did not detect a heart rate. Her heart rate actually decelled as soon as we got there.

And it went from being in the 50s all the way down to just being gone.

And the doctor, basically the hospitalist that was on call, squeezed my hand and looked me, and she just said, you need to push this baby out now or you're going in for a C section. And I just. I chose. She gave me the choice, which was amazing.

And I just, you know, my instinct said to just keep pushing, even though I had never had a vaginal birth. And in two pushes, she came out, praise God.

But I think back, had she come via even an emergency C section, just the minutes that it would have taken to prep me for the cesarean could have been detrimental to her, because every moment without oxygen to a baby's brain is detrimental. And so we know when she was born that she suffered from a lack of oxygen. We know that she had no active heart rate.

So basically, she was fundamentally dead when she was born. She was not breathing, and there was no heart rate.

Her APGAR score, if you know what that is, it's like the score that the doctors take to see, kind of.

They base it on color of the baby, whether the baby's breathing, a number of things that give sort of a score between 1 and 10 on the health and wellness of the baby when it's born. And her APGAR score was at a zero when she was born. And they take it every five minutes. Five minutes later, she was still at a zero.

And another five minutes after that, they had resuscitated her and brought her essentially back to life. She was breathing again. They had intubated her, and they had put her on a breathing machine. But she was in critical, critical condition.

It was obvious. So things went from this very I'm so excited to have my baby. I believe I can have my birth story in the way I always planned to.

Then having that dream come true of having this vaginal birth. But then after having her, it's like that didn't even matter anymore. All of a sudden, everything changed in those moments of birthing her.

Went from excitement to just complete chaos in the birth room and being told that things were very critical. So that was one of many things that was going on. But at that time, that's all that we knew, is that she wasn't breathing well.

And I have a million questions. But before we keep moving in your story, it's so interesting, Abby, because I didn't know this piece of your story. I knew your story.

I prayed for you guys, and I. So many people were praying for you, and I didn't know that you.

It almost sounds like you were fixated, like there was, like, a force pressing in on you to choose to have your baby with a vbac, which kind of went against what everyone else would have told you to do. Now, you can see that that actually might have been the thing that. That. Not.

Not that saved her, because obviously God saved her, but that might have been the thing that kept it from being worse than it was, even though terribly dismal.

That's crazy. So there you were, you and Brandon. Basically. See her scores. She was getting zero.

Yeah.

Basically describing that she was born not alive since they resuscitated her. I mean, invite us into the emotions that you felt when you heard that news.

Yeah, you know, I. I think we had an inkling that something was wrong, even at my home. The doula met me at my home, and she got there rapidly, fast.

She's, you know, she's accounted the story in her own words and just said it was a miracle that I felt that pressure to get to you so quickly, because I don't usually feel that. Usually when a mom calls and she's just started contracting, I kind of take my time. But she said, I just felt this urgency to get to you.

And when she arrived, my water had broken, and it was stained like a dark brown, which showed that there was meconium in my waters. And so that was kind of yet another problem, but with the one that we knew about. And so she was the one that just said, get in the car.

We're going to the hospital now. You know, not knowing that that baby was going to be born so fast, but thank God for her, too. So there were kind of a few Things that were.

I mentioned the oxygen, but also, also Lily had aspirated meconium. And when the doctor actually took a look at the placenta after the fact, it was very stained, almost to the point that it was black.

And he remarked that he really believes that Lily had been sick, maybe even for days in utero, because of the discoloration of the placenta. And the umbilical cord was also quite shriveled. And so this was a baby that was already fighting before she was born.

As they've kind of deduced what they think might have happened, they believe that she contracted group B strep in utero.

And so just to kind of explain a little bit about that, for those of you that have had babies, you know, you get this test around 35 weeks where they say whether you are group B strep positive or negative. And basically, group B strep is just a bacteria that colonizes around the vaginal rectal area.

And why is important is because if you are group B strep positive, you need to receive antibiotics before you have that baby so that the baby is protected, because babies are so. Their immune systems are so underdeveloped, and they don't exist. You know, they only exist inside of their mother.

And so when they're born, they're very susceptible to any sort of bacterial infection. And this is one that can be very deadly, is usually very deadly, almost always to babies. And so. But what's interesting with Lily is she.

They believe that she contracted it in utero. Like, it made its way into. Through an amniotic fluid sac leak. So she was sick potentially for. For days.

And then that may have been what led to labor, my labor kicking in so quickly and things happening so fast, but she. She came quickly. She came out very sick. And not only was. Was she. She not breathing, she had aspirated meconium.

And that alone, you know, that can take a baby's life. And then her umbilical cord was pinched, which was what was depriving her of oxygen.

And so she was diagnosed with something called hie, or hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, which is the, like, swelling of the brain, because when your brain doesn't receive oxygen and the blood that it needs to support it, it swells.

And children that are diagnosed with HIE often go on to have just very complex futures, whether it's cerebral palsy that they end up with or just a lifetime of learning disabilities. A lot of them end up not, you know, their brain, depending on what Part of their brain is impacted. They may not speak. They may not walk.

They may not even swallow. And so these were all things that we were told just because of that hie that Lily may not do. And we were told that from the beginning.

But then to add a layer of complication, they found out that she had tested for group B stroke, and she was positive. And she was going into septic shock. So all of her major internal organs were in failure. Her liver, her kidneys, her heart. She was dying.

And, you know, you ask where. Where my headspace was at the time. And right after giving birth to her, you know, I really was highly unaware of all of this.

They said that she kind of tricked them, because it appeared in the beginning that it was just breathing issues. So she was kind of whisked away with Brandon. Brandon was just praying over her. He said he could. You know, he could barely stand up.

He was in shock, but he just had his arms outstretched over her, praying for her that the intubation would be successful and they could get her to breathe again.

And then I was back in the hospital room, and I had actually hemorrhaged really badly, and I'd lost, like, four times the amount of blood that most women lose in labor. And so I was, like, pretty much passed out on the bed. So I. I was largely unaware of what was going on in that moment.

But then they were able to kind of get me to a stable place.

And that's something that the doula said everybody had rushed off with a baby, and my doula said I was in critical condition, and everyone's eyes were on the baby. And so then a doctor was screaming, I need help. I need help to help get me to stabilize to a place where I wouldn't continue to lose blood.

And so they did successfully do that, thank God. But it took me some time to recover, recover before I was even able to really wrap my head around what was going on. So hours later, I'm in recovery.

Lily's intubated, and they are finding out that they need to transfer her to Seattle children's hospital because she is in septic shock and she's dying. And the nurse practitioner comes in to my room and just sits real close to the end of my bed. I remember his.

He just looked so pale when he walked in that room, and his eyes started to wall with tears. And I thought, oh, my gosh, he's gonna tell me. He's gonna tell Brandon and I that she's already died.

And I just remember my heart just, like, crying out to the Lord in that split second, like, God, I trust you. I trust you. You know, no matter what happens, I trust you. And then he. That's when he basically told us her being.

Needing to go to Seattle Children's right away, and that the outlook was grim and that she was very, very, very sick. They kept saying, she's very, very, very sick, and that we may not have more than 12 to 24 hours with her.

So I said, brandon, you need to go be with the baby. So he left, and I stayed in that hospital room, and I just prayed for a miracle because they were not ready to release me because of my blood loss.

And so they wanted to give me a blood transfusion. And I just started crying out, lord, I need to get to my baby. Which another reason why having that vaginal birth was such a miracle.

Had I had a cesarean section, they would not have released me until the next day. So the Lord, even in that it was like a ticket out of there quickly to be with the baby.

But that's kind of when the first awesome miracle happened was the nurse came in, she had to take my blood levels before we started the transfusion. And she came in and she just said, you know, I. I can't believe it. Your blood levels are back to normal. We don't need to give you the transfusion.

I can discharge you right away. She said, I thought I took the wrong mom's blood sample because I just couldn't believe it. So that in itself was like, thank you, Jesus.

Such an answer to prayer. It was. I was not feeling great, but I was good enough to go. And so I left with my mom up to Seattle Children's. And I just remember that morning, I.

The day that Lily was born was this, like, bright, sunny day. It had been so sunny and so hot in the Northwest.

And then that day that we were driving, that morning, we were driving up to the hospital, all of a sudden, these thunderclouds came out of nowhere. It was just, like, very dark and dreary day. It was like the earth was groaning, you know, it was. It was just.

Everything changed for me and my life in a second. I was just encountered with this news that my daughter is not going to make it. And then I'm driving up to.

To say goodbye to my baby, and everything was just dark and the sky was dark, and. And I just remember my mom and I literally screaming in the car, our prayers out loud, crying out to God.

Like, I've never cried out to God before, just pleading with him to save this baby's life. And a friend of mine had sent a song. She just said, I just want you to listen to this. And we put it on in the car.

And it was this song by Jen Johnson that just says, the mention of your name, everything will change. And I just was like, lord, I believe that. I believe that if I cry out in the name of Jesus, you can change the situation.

And it's hard for me to believe. And I was so honest with him. It's hard for me to believe, but I have to believe you can do this. So we had.

Everything just shifted in my world, and I've never felt so desperate.

You know, I'm listening. And your faith is astounding. I know you're.

You're not saying that so that I'll compliment you, but I. I feel like so many people who maybe would be in your shoes would almost protect themselves from hoping in the miracle because what if the miracle doesn't come and then they're disappointed and angry with God? I mean, did you ever feel afraid to hope in the miracle and call out in disparity for the miracle?

Did you ever start assuming the worst in, in that span of time?

Oh, I definitely think that I assumed the worst because, of course, you know, we are human. You're right. We have this layer of, of the desire to protect our hearts from pain.

So it was easy for me to think of the worst, but at the same time, it's like I just didn't have anywhere else to run but to the arms of God. I mean, really, I didn't know where else to go. There wasn't anywhere else to go.

And in that moment, I was crushed in spirit. I was brokenhearted and I had to believe. And I felt it, you know, I felt his closeness.

Even if I was thinking the worst case scenario, I was hearing from him, you are not alone. I am here. And. And so I knew in that moment, you know, she may not make it. I mean, my mind was, she's not going to make it at that point. And.

But, but my mind was also telling me, but God is good. And that sounds crazy and it is crazy, but, you know, I just think that prior to that moment, he had only ever shown himself to be faithful to me.

Even in that I. Hard times that really hurt the losses that we experienced.

Brandon, my husband's dad, had lost, he had lost his dad suddenly to a heart attack just a year before all of this. And in a moment, you know, his dad is taken away from him, my father in law is taken away from me.

But we saw God show up even in that, even when that's not the way we wanted it to turn out. And yet he was near, he was so close to us. And I think until you experience like a really painful trial in life, that just sounds so scary.

And I think up until that point of my life there was nothing I could have conceived that could have been scarier than something really bad happening to one of my children. I mean, I think as a mom that is our greatest fear.

That something really bad would happen to our children, that they would be taken from us or that we will lose them to death or even that they would be badly injured. I mean that's just our greatest fear. We love them more than anything.

But then when you walk through that and you encounter that and you see firsthand that God means it when he says I am close to the brokenhearted. I mean I.

It sounds strange, but I've never been so sad and desperate and yet I've never felt God's nearness closer to me than I did then that time in the hospital. And there was this blessing in his closeness, there was this sweetness in the bitter.

And I've heard people talk about it, I had heard before, but I had never experienced it for myself. And then I encountered it and it was like I was tasting heaven, which sounds so weird at the same time of experiencing pain.

And, and in a way I wanted more of God's closeness because I had never felt him that close. But of course I also wanted the best case scenario to come out of it. And we did not see that with Brandon's dad's death.

But I had to just trust and pray and believe that God would show up and that he stood by his word and that he could do anything and that he was able to. Ephesians says he's able to do immeasurably more than all we ask for or imagine.

And I couldn't imagine the outcome that happened and her being healed. But I, I trusted his word. But I have to say that it took me some more time than it took Brandon.

Brandon kind of had this, I guess what you would call blind faith where it was just like, I know she's going to be okay. Which sounds so insane.

And it was insane, but it was like that insane faith that I believe God wants us to have, just, I know God's going to take care of this. So he. He really inspired me to have that same faith.

But I think it took until the second full day that we were in the hospital for me to kind of get there, of saying, okay, God, I believe you're going to do a miracle here, even though I can't see it.

Walk us into the hospital.

So you're in your car and you're crying out to God with your mom in prayer, and you get to the hospital where you're basically have been made to think that you might be saying goodbye to your baby. Walk us in there. What happened next?

Well, I just remember showing up to the hospital doors. I was in a wheelchair because you give birth and hard.

And a dear friend of ours, Lisa, who worked at Seattle Children's Hospital, greeted me at the door, and she was just crying and just hugged me. And she kept saying, I'm so sorry. And she was the one. She just kind of.

Her arms, you know, just someone wrapping their arms around you and being there for you means so much, much even in the midst of it all. And she just took us up, my mom and I, up to where Lily was. And we actually couldn't go in to see Lily right away.

There were just too many people working on her. There were too many machines. There was too much critical life stuff going on. Countless blood transfusions.

They kept giving her blood platelets, and then her. The platelets would just disappear, and they needed to give her more blood and more blood, and her blood was exiting her body too fast.

She was bleeding out. They were trying so hard to find a central line.

They basically needed to get a line into her so that they could deliver blood and so that they could deliver TPN or total parental nutrition, you know, nutritional support. It's not. It's basically the minerals and vitamins she needed just for survival.

All of the.

The things she needed, all of her medications, they had to go through the central line, and they were struggling to get it. And every time they'd poke her, she was bleeding more, bleeding out more. And so they were afraid that she was just going to.

She was in this active state of bleeding that she would just bleed out. That's when Brandon sent out a message on Facebook that just crying out, saying, you know, will you stand with us in prayer for a miracle?

We are praying that our daughter would. Would be okay. But, like, right now, we just desperately need to get this line in. And the Lord answered that Prayer. He did.

And people just began to spread that message of prayer and were praying for her in that very critical time. But I just remember just being in a fog, really, just thinking, what is going on?

We went from kind of, you know, having the baby, having this victorious moment where I had her vaginally, then things went crazy. Then. Then we're told that she's, you know, intubated, but it looks like she's going to be okay. Then we're told, oh, actually, she's. She's dying.

She's in septic shock, and now you're here to say goodbye. And it was just a lot. It was just a lot. And I just wanted to see her. And then I remember just seeing her, and it was just not.

When a new mom wants to see, you know, their baby's table covered in blood and their baby completely out, she had to receive what's called. I can't remember the name of it. It's basically a cooling therapy. It's where they bring the baby's body down to a temperature of 92 degrees.

And the idea is that they're sort of putting. Putting the brain in this hibernative state so that the damage that's happened to the brain can't spread any further.

It's kind of a miraculous and amazing treatment. But she had to be in that treatment, that cooling therapy for three days, 72 hours.

So, you know, here I'm seeing my baby for the first time, and she's very cool to the touch, and she's not moving and she's bleeding out. And I just heard. Even know what to do. I just felt like, I want to touch you, but I can't because you're too covered in wires.

You know, she had wires on her brain measuring her, you know, ekg, just taking note of her brain and what was happening in her brain then. She had so many external lines and just so much. I'd never seen anything like that before.

And so I could kind of get like a finger in there to touch her, but that was about it. And, yeah, just feeling so. I think I said it before, just so desperate for the Lord to move and so out of control and. And just really hard to.

You know, when you're in a.

In the ICU and you're in a critical moment like that, the doctors, the nurses, they're not going to give you words of hope, because when you're in a hopeless situation, there really, it would be wrong to do so. So really, everything we were hearing was, it's not that it was negative. It was just reality.

It was just that, you know, this is the sickest baby in the hospital, and we just have to see how these next few hours go. But it was like my. My soul, my heart was just like yearning for someone to just give some element of hope.

But there was just no hope spoken over it because there's just couldn't be at that time. And so truly to believe that God could do anything just felt like. I felt like I was crazy. But I also, you know, I think Brandon has said it before.

It was like, well, Lord, we're going to trust you that you can do this. And even if you don't, we're still going to trust you, because that's all that we have. And so thankful we were united in that.

And I'm thankful that the Lord also kind of drove him to put the prayer word out there, because prayer changes things.

And with that many people praying, I think that, you know, that calling on heaven just for God's mercy and power to show up, that is what saved this baby's life.

When you say you had some people praying, invite us into what that looked like, because it wasn't five people, and five people's amazing. But there was kind of like a social media sort of movement that started. What did that end up looking like?

Yeah, so Brandon had put something on Facebook and it just spread really quickly. I think there's power in a baby. Something about a baby.

They're just so innocent and they're so, you know, it's not as if you're praying for someone who's, you know, I don't know, in their 40s or 50s, and you've already.

You already know them and, you know, whether you like this person or not and that it doesn't, you know, it doesn't influence your way of thinking of how you're going to pray for this person. It's like this base baby, this baby who just entered the earth and had no say in it, but they're just. They are so fragile and so small.

And I think there's something about that that just causes people to. To desire to cry out to God. And so there was just power in the way that that story spread. I. I don't even know how.

It was just people sharing and then sharing again.

And before long, you know, we were hearing people from all over the world were writing to us and saying that they were praying from, you know, even Jewish churches, Catholic churches, every denomination was lifting up prayers to the same God that we all have. That's what we have in common. And everyone was crying out, even people that didn't know God.

You know, there's probably many of you that are listening, too, that wouldn't say that you have a personal relationship with Jesus yet. But there were people that we talked to afterward that said that. They just said, you know, I.

Or they had had an experience with the Lord, and then they had kind of walked away from that. And. And then this just kind of drew them in, and they just wanted to hear what happened, you know, and.

And God hears your prayers, you know, whether you have given your life to him or not. He list to anyone who will call on his name. And so people were praying whether they had a relationship with God or not.

They were all praying and crying out to God and asking him for this miracle along with us. And there is such power in that, that unified prayer. And whether that's two or three or thousands, he listens. And I've heard it say.

I don't remember who said it, but someone said. And it always stuck with me. Prayer is the slender nerve that moves the omnipotence of God. And it's something about prayer. It's a mystery to me.

I don't understand all of how it works and the way that it works. But I know that there is something that when we call upon the name of the Lord and we ask him to do something, that he listens to us.

And he has the power to change a situation from going one direction to completely turn, turning it around for the good and for his glory. And there's a story in John, I think it's chapter nine, where this man. And he was blind. And he was blind since the day he was born.

And the Pharisees, which were some, like, religious leaders of the time, were just asking, why did this happen to this man? Why was he blind? Was he blind because of his own sin? Or was he blind because his parents sin? And Jesus just kind of answers to them.

He says, you know, no, this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. And that's how I feel with Lily's story, that it would have been easy to be like God, why did you do this? Is this something that I did?

Why did this happen to me? We love you. Why are you taking away our daughter? We could have gone that route.

But I feel like I heard from the beginning from God that he was doing this so that he might be glorified. I still didn't know how he would be glorified. My small human mind thought, you know, maybe she survives this, but we have a disabled child.

But we love her and we would just love to have time with her and get to know her no matter what happens. But my human mind at the time could not perceive that she would be fully healed.

But I believe that this happened so that God would be glorified, so that people could see that he is a God, that that still performs miracles, and that he can change the trajectory of story, and that he is willing to do so, and that he is so powerful.

I love that you, you were in this hospital and you're surrounded by this amazing team of medical care workers. You've said that, but they can't pour hope into you because they could be misleading you to a dangerous place.

And you almost, you said you almost wanted, like, someone to give you reasons to hope.

And here, in fact, I saw a video of you where you and your husband Brandon were speaking over Lily as she's like, hooked up to, like you said, a jillion cords and she's not doing well. And you kept telling her to keep fighting and you were speaking strength into her.

And it is so very cool that God just raised up all these people who are fighting for you guys on your behalf. It was just incredible and so beautiful. You were able to hold her when she was 8 days old. Tell us what that was like for you.

Yeah, I, I think, I think it was either eight or nine. I think it may have been nine days, I can't remember, but it was several days.

I mean, you know, when you're a mom, you're just so eager to hold that baby. And I so feel for moms who are in the intensive care unit and have to wait to hold their babies. It was powerful.

The reason I couldn't hold her was because she had been hooked up to ecmo. It was basically a heart and lung life support. And it's not, not even life support in the sense we were told.

You know, this is, this is not a life saving technique. This is just a bridge to buy her more time. So it was like the, it's called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.

It's like the, this machine that acts as her heart and lungs for her just to bide her some time to see if her body can fight off the sepsis with the antibiotics with everything going on. And so we couldn't touch her or hold her while she was hooked up to this very delicate machine that went right into her, her carotid artery.

And so it went right through her neck. And she, she couldn't be touched during that time. It was actually quite a miracle that she was able to get off that machine in just seven days.

A lot of babies have to stay in that machine a lot longer. But when she was. The moment she was unattached from that machine, the nurse just kind of came around the corner and said, do you want to hold your.

Your baby? And I just didn't even think that was going to happen, maybe for days more. I was so excited. I've never had such a powerful moment.

I think is holding her for the first time and getting to feel her body against mine and just having this hope. There was a turning point, like, she's going to make it. I don't know what's going to happen, but I know she's going to be alive.

She.

We're gonna get to know this girl that powerful. It was so. It was just sweet and wonderful, and I just didn't want to let go. And they said, you can hold her as long as you want to.

So it was hours and hours and hours that I was holding her, and then I started to nod off. And there was a hospital policy that you can't fall asleep with your baby, so that had to be the end of it.

But I would have held her for days if I could have stayed awake. It was so good.

She had to climb. What you guys describe would be like climbing Mount Rainier when you. She hasn't yet found her shoes.

Yeah, yeah, that's what the doctor told us.

He basically used that analogy just saying after she came off ecmo, he basically said, okay, this girl has a mountain to climb in front of her, and she hasn't even found her shoes yet. And that was humbling to hear. I was like, okay, well, she. We know she's going to live, but the journey is not over.

At that time, she was still on complete kidney dialysis, and she was on a number of machines. She had her bilirubin, if you've heard of that before, was her. Her liver was failing. And so her bilirubin levels, they're not real.

It's very dangerous to the brain, especially if they get over a level of 10. And hers were up in the 50s. Her whole body was yellow and then turned green, Even the sclera of her eyes. I mean, she was so.

She.

She. The fight was not over, you know, and so like you said before, there were people fighting along with her and along with us.

It was like this team of prayer warriors, and we were all fighting for her and encouraging her to fight and Praying for the Lord to help her fight to climb that mountain. That became kind of a theme.

And there's some scripture in the Bible, I can't remember where it's found, where it talks about God, like, removing mountains. So I remember one day I was just thinking, like, she's got to climb to the top of Mount Rainier.

But God has the power to just move that mountain out of the way. He can just basically put her in a chairlift and zoom her right up to the top if he wants. And, you know, now to see this little girl today, he has.

If you. If you would have written out the list of all of the things that she had to overcome.

You know, her kidneys had to be healed, her heart had to be healed, her lungs had to be healed. She had to be extubated successfully so that she can breathe on her own.

And then it took so many days of going from a CPAP machine down to different levels of oxygenation that they had to support her oxygenation. The fact that she could even breathe what they call room air was a miracle. They were sure that she was going to go home on an oxygen tank.

The fact that she came off of her kidney dialysis machine, that was a miracle. The fact that she came off of ecmo, that was a miracle. And then there was this like, all. Like, kind of the pinnacle of it all was the mri.

We were waiting to find out when a baby's in an active state of bleeding and they're bleeding out like that, there's total risk for their being bleeding to the brain. When a baby's bilirubin levels are that high, there's this risk for. Major risk for the brain damage as well.

And then when a baby hasn't had oxygen and wasn't breathing for minutes, there's the risk of that as well. And so we didn't get to see these MRI results until days into our journey.

I think it was like 20 something days, three weeks or so into the journey because they couldn't remove her from that hospital room until she was off of all of the machines that she had to be hooked up to, the blood, transfusions, et cetera. And so that day was sort of like the day of, like, holding our breath.

And it was so interesting because I remember asking everyone to pray that day for the mri, but just having, again, so much peace that only the Lord can give you that it's not. I couldn't have ushered that in myself. But the Lord just gave his blanket of peace. And we weren't even Worried. It was so strange. It was like that.

Like that indescribable peace. I remember just sitting with Brandon and we're eating our dinner and just laughing, waiting for the MRI results because only God can do that.

That was that prayer protection too. I think so many people just pray that we would stay in that peace.

She climbed. She climbed this mountain, Abby. And how long did that take before you realized she did it?

Well, so that the MRI is probably was the most telling piece of all.

And I just remember the neurodevelopmental team coming in and the neurologist just standing there and the way she started just saying, you know, my heart was palpitating when I saw this girl's report. Basically her history, what's happened. But this girl's. Her MRI is beautiful. Her. It looks perfect. There was no damage that had occurred to this brain.

And. And of course you can have a perfect mri.

And I learned later from the neurodevelopmental team, you know, you still have to wait and watch with a baby who suffered hie. You have to wait and watch, see them grow up. Are they going to meet their milestones, are they going to walk?

Are they going to have, you know, verbal delays or etc. And so that first year was still quite rocky.

In fact, where I think I said before, I felt like the Lord was lifting me up in that time in the hospital and so many people were covering in prayer. It was when I got home that, like, the real work of my faith had to begin because I had to trust every day. Just wait and watch.

Is this girl gonna be okay? And we, you know, we had a break home.

Nasogastric tube for her to be fed by and all of these, you know, medical equipment that I wasn't planning on and just having to trust the Lord every day. But now we see, you know, this little girl going to turn two on July 9th. It's almost her birthday. And. And God has truly filled every void.

I mean, she is walking and running and jumping. She's the wildest of our three kids. She jumps off the couch all the time or jumps off the coffee table onto the couch.

She jumps on the trampoline like crazy. And she talks like crazy now, too. She is meeting all of her milestones and she just got. She. She was.

Just graduated last week from neurodevelopmental department at Seattle Children's. And they said, you don't need to come back anymore. He's done here. And she just. The neurodevelopmental doctor even teared Up.

Just saying in my practice, I don't get to see success stories like this. Success just being. I don't get to see these kind of outcomes. This is not normal. It is truly, you know, a miracle that this girl is thriving.

The only remnant of her sickness is that she has very green teeth, which is so funny. But it's from her bilirubin levels getting so high that it dyed her teeth green. Basically, the calcium of her teeth are green.

But it's a great story to tell. Between her scar and her green teeth, we get to share. She's doing amazing. It's.

I saw in her hospital room that there were some pink boxing gloves with her name on.

Yeah.

And I just wonder, how do you now think that this fight shaped who she will become and who your family has?

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, she. She is quite the fighter. It's obvious that this, this is the way that God wired her from the beginning, was to be a fighter.

I don't believe that she would have survived if she didn't have that fight that he put in into her personality. But I think it's also just taught our whole family to fight and not give up.

When you are told bewildering news or even just walking honestly through day to day life in this society that we're living in right now, in this world world and the tumultuous times that we're encountering, oh, it can be so easily just to, you know, become insular and to shut down and to give up. But God puts a fight in all of us. I believe in that.

He does the fighting for us, which is the miracle of it all, that even when our fight is out, even when we have nothing to. To give, nothing left, he says that he will fight for us.

And so he's really just shown me that in Lily's story, that he is always available, he is always accessible, he is always within our reach. If we call upon his name, he is the all sufficient one. And He. He fights for us even when we cannot fight.

And he desires that we would not give up up, that we would fight the good fight, that we would fight in prayer, that we would continue to ask for what we cannot yet see. You know, that definition of faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you cannot yet see.

And there are a lot of times where we just cannot see 10 steps in front of us and there's no way that we could. But we just have to trust that God is up there, he's ahead of us.

That he is good, that he is the God of the impossible, that he can turn our story around even when it looks so grim and when it looks so like he's being harsh or like, you know, like he doesn't care. That is not the truth. The truth is that he cares very much. And he is with you. And he will never leave you in your trial.

And even if you're walking through the valley of the shadow of death, he is with you and he's comforting you. He is such a good God.

Abby, you have such a beautiful story and such a peaceful way of just speaking God's love over us. I. I am blown away by what he's done in your family's life, by the faith that he gave you and the hope that.

That you held on to, by the way that you spoke a fight into your daughter in that hospital room, by the amount of people that God rose up to fight for you guys. And now you get to celebrate your daughter's birthday. And I just.

I just wonder, as we come to a close, when you think about those listening who are fighting a fight they never wanted to have to fight. What's your. What are your closing words for them today?

It's so hard. I know that for those of you who are fighting a fight that you didn't ask for, it doesn't make sense.

Like I said earlier, in light of this world and the earth that we live in, it doesn't make sense. Why me? Why is this happening? But I just encourage you that, like I said, you are not alone, and it's okay that you're.

If you're in that fight and you're just in, like, the bottom of a well, and you feel like, I don't even know how to get up, even if I could. God is not, you know, waiting for you to just climb your way out. He's in that well with you. He's in the bottom with you.

He has his arms around you, and he is present with you. And he is there to encourage you and to give you the faith that you need just for that next step forward.

You don't have to look too far into the future. You just have to trust.

His voice is ready to speak to you today, to give you exactly what you need for today, and then he'll do the same thing again tomorrow. Don't give up. Don't give up. We live in a world where there's a real spiritual battle going on and the enemy just wants you to give up.

He comes so that he can kill, steal, and destroy. But God comes that he may give life to you and life to the fullest. And life to the fullest doesn't always mean that everything is perfect.

But it means that in the midst of what you're going through right now, that you are not alone and that greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world. That's what the Bible says. And so you are so loved and he is so with you right now. And don't get too far ahead of yourself.

Don't let yourself in your mind, reel with all of the what ifs and how can I do this? And just be honest with your pain, God is ready to hear your honesty. With your pain, God's ready to hear you say, I'm done.

This is hard, but don't give up. Just keep trusting him one moment at a time. He's going to give you everything you need. He will never leave you. He's with you.

Abby, thank you so much for sharing your story, for reminding us that God is alive and well and he hears us and he's with us. We hear your story and it gives us hope.

And truly, when you speak to those listening about not giving up, I'm sure that your story has inspired them not to. So thank you for hanging out with us today.

You bet. Thank you, Willow yeah, For those of.

You listening, keep colliding, keep trusting that God has got you, that he walks with you, that he's alive and well and still doing miracles, and we'll catch you next week.

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