she was in our backyard

We didn't know her name. We didn't know we'd ever see her again.

Three weeks later, she was standing over Naomi's hospital bed, drawing her blood.

This is the hardest season we've walked through this year. We want to tell you about it honestly, because we believe God was in the middle of it in ways we're still trying to understand.

Back in the spring, we found out we were pregnant with our fourth. There was joy in it, and there was also a quiet kind of fear. We were already stretching to plant a church, work full-time, homeschool three kids, and adjust to a new city. Adding a baby into that mix felt daunting. But we trusted it was from God, and we moved forward.

A few weeks later, on a Monday morning, Naomi started spotting blood.

We didn't have health insurance. We spent that whole day just trying to find somewhere that would see her. We finally found a clinic willing to work with our situation. They confirmed the pregnancy, but they couldn't tell us what the bleeding meant. They sent us to the ER.

On the way, we stopped for coffee. It sounds strange, but we needed one ordinary moment before whatever was coming next.

We picked a hospital near our house, mostly because we knew the parking. We checked in, they took Naomi back, and a nurse named Lexi came in to take her vitals. She was warm and easy to talk to. We chatted about her life, her boyfriend, her job, grateful for the distraction.

About fifteen minutes in, she stopped mid-sentence and looked at us.

"Have I met you before?"

We told her no, we didn't think so. She kept pressing, certain she knew us from somewhere. Then she asked if we lived across the street from a family named the Hills.

We do.

"I was in your backyard last week," she said.

She'd been watching the Hills' kids while they were out of town, and they'd brought her along to JenaFest, the party we told you about last month. Sixty-seven people had come through our yard that day. She was one of them. We never got her name that night. And now she was the nurse assigned to Naomi's emergency room visit, in a hospital we'd chosen almost at random.

Every bit of fear we'd been carrying that morning, the anxiousness, the questions about whether we were going to be okay, it didn't disappear exactly. But something shifted. It felt like God leaning in to say, I'm here. I've been here the whole time.

Not long after, an admin nurse came in to take Naomi's information. Somewhere in the routine questions, she asked what religion to put on the form. Naomi said Christian, then turned the question back around, half-joking. The nurse got quiet, then admitted she hadn't been to church in twenty years. She still believed in God. She still believed in the Holy Spirit. She just couldn't stomach the version of church she'd known, the posturing, the performance.

She said she wanted something real. Even if it was just five people in a living room, as long as the Holy Spirit was there.

We told her that's exactly what we have. Church in our living room, every week.

She wrote down her number before she left the room. She came back on her lunch break, off the clock, to tell us she and her partner wanted to be part of what we're building. We stood together in the emergency room and prayed, and she wept through the whole thing.

A few minutes later, the doctor came in and told us we'd lost the baby.

We want to be honest with you here. Part of us had let ourselves believe, because of everything that had just happened, that this story was going to end differently. That the coincidences meant a good report was coming. That wasn't the case.

We went home to let things pass naturally, and for a day it seemed manageable. Then that evening, the pain came back harder than anything we'd expected, and we ended up back in the same ER, this time in the middle of the night. Naomi's parents had already booked a same-day flight the moment they heard, without waiting to be asked, and they were watching our kids while we drove back.

The second visit was different. No small talk this time, just a nurse named Sterling, quiet and focused, working to get Naomi out of pain. Hours later, as he was finishing her discharge paperwork, he paused before walking out and told her, out of nowhere, that there was something special us.

That opened a conversation. We found out he'd followed the church we came from (Elevation Church) years ago, back before we ever moved to New Orleans. He asked if he could come to what we're building here. He lives forty-five minutes away. He said he'd make the drive.

Then, as he was finally leaving, close to three in the morning, he turned around one more time and asked if we remembered the story of Jesus preaching from a boat because the crowd on the shore had grown too large to hold.

"That's what's coming for you," he said, and walked out.

We've thought about that line a hundred times since.

We're about two months out from all of this now. Writing it down again has been harder than we expected, and also more healing than we expected. We think part of us wanted to move past it quickly, to stay positive, to not let it slow us down. But grief doesn't really work on a schedule. Somewhere in the middle of relaying this story again, we realized we'd been carrying a limp we hadn't fully named.

What we keep coming back to is this. In both of those emergency rooms, we didn't feel like we had anything to offer anyone. We were scared, exhausted, grieving. And God used us anyway, not because of what we brought into the room, but because of what he brought with us.

We don't fully understand why this happened. We're not going to pretend we do. But we've seen his kindness show up in the middle of our worst hours, in a nurse who happened to be in our backyard, in a stranger who wouldn't leave without telling us something true. And we're choosing to trust that the same faithfulness carries into whatever comes next.

Would you pray with us?

Pray for continued healing for Naomi, for our family as we carry this loss forward, and for Lexi and Sterling and every seed that got planted in those two ER visits. We don't know where those relationships go from here, but we believe they matter.

If you feel led to support what God is building in New Orleans, we're grateful for it. But mostly, we’re grateful for your prayers right now.