Jadon is our firstborn, the one who made us a momma and
daddy for the first time twelve years ago.
His name tells of where his story begins—Jadon comes from a Hebrew word
meaning “God has heard”, and is mentioned in the Bible as one who helped Nehemiah
rebuild the wall of Jerusalem. (Nehemiah 3:7)
Our Jadon was born after an early struggle with infertility and
miscarriage. When we found out that we
were expecting him, we knew that God had heard our prayers for a child, and had
granted us our first little arrow. Just
as the Jadon who helped repair the broken wall of Jerusalem, our Jadon has been
hard at work repairing things since the very day he was born.
Hours after his birth, I began dangerously hemorrhaging
as I was being moved from the labor and delivery room, into a postpartum room. I can remember being wheeled down the
hallway, beginning to lose consciousness, and desperately asking God to save my
life so that I could live to be Jadon’s momma.
In the postpartum room, I was still drifting in and out of consciousness,
as the doctors pumped me full of blood transfusions and violently compressed my
abdomen to stop the bleeding. I was
slipping away quickly. I can remember
watching all of the commotion around the room, and not being able to do
anything to stop it. I heard a nurse
instruct David on how to feed Jadon a bottle of formula, because he needed
nourishment fast and I couldn’t nurse him.
I can remember hearing that my mother and her husband had been called
back to the hospital because things didn’t look good. I can remember the nurses trying to talk to
me, but I couldn’t answer. And then I
remember a nurse bringing Jadon, all wrapped up in his little swaddle, and
laying him next to my face. When I felt
his little cheek against mine, a tear fell from my left eye, and I came
back. God used Jadon, my tiny baby boy,
to repair the broken walls inside my body that needed to stop hemorrhaging.
From that day on, the wheels inside Jadon’s
mind have never stopped turning. He is
constantly devising ways to fix things that are broken (and quite often it’s
things that need to be repaired because he broke them to begin with! 😊),
make things out of whatever material is available to him at that moment (like
duct tape and cardboard), and create new ways of doing things (even when that
perfectly good wheel doesn’t need to be reinvented). He is a leader and an innovator. He takes charge to get the job done. He is intelligent and creative. He is sensitive to his surroundings, and a mirror
of all that is going on around him.
Whenever something is off with Jadon, it’s our first red flag that we
need to look at our own behaviors and attitudes, and at our own spiritual
environment. So often he is simply
mirroring what is going on around him.
Two of his recent building projects have been a picnic table large enough to accommodate our growing family, and a wooden hammock stand for his dad for Father’s Day.
As much and he loves building and creating, Jadon’s greatest
passion right now is fishing. I have
always wondered how guys end up being avid fishermen, spending every spare
moment on a boat with their fishing rods.
It just never made sense to me for some reason. But now I get it. The patient pursuit, the hard-fought catch,
the prize for all your efforts. He loves
it. His favorite place to be is down by
our pond, devising ways catch the fish, researching baits and rods and reels
and fishing techniques. He has recently
started tying flies, and has created some beautiful fly fishing flies.
Our greatest prayer
for Jadon is that God would shape his character into a selfless leader, a
humble creator, a modest innovator—so that he may use his strengths with the
understanding that he is a helper to our
Heavenly Leader, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Innovator of all that
exists. That he would grow to be a
strong man of God, with a humble heart to lead others in the way of the Lord, a
fisherman of men, a builder for the new Jerusalem.
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