Mothers Day 2023

Hi, happy Mother's Day.

The first thing is I got my mic right and I turned it on.

Um, when Russ asked me to share my story a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to hesitate because you are real people with opinions.

I much like on the other side of these walls to hang out with your kids and to teach them about Jesus.

That's my jam.

That's what I love.

And so this morning is a little uncomfortable for me, and I'm probably gonna be a little nervous.

So I just need you to not fall asleep.

I need you if I say something funny and it's really not funny, will you just please laugh?

And we'll get through this morning.

But happy Mother's Day to all of my friends, to all of the ladies that are an example to me as I figure out this parenting gig.

I'm so grateful to have the coolest job here at Church of the Grove.

I get to hang out with the coolest kids and they tell me the best stories about you as a mom and a dad.

Kids tell everything.

And so um just a little bit about me.

If you don't know me very much, um, I have been married for, I guess this year is 16 years.

So my best friend Chris.

Yeah, um, maybe give him the round of applause, right?

Um, that he put up that he puts up with me.

We often joke that we don't know dating and we don't know our marriage without me being serving and on staff in the local church.

And so he is really the brains behind um what I get to do, and um I could not do ministry without him.

So we have two children, Anna, who is nine, and Brooks, who are six, and you will see them probably running around um at the end of the service.

But we've also been serving in the local church, as I said, for about 15 years, and um while we've seen a lot of highs, we've seen a lot of lows, and God has really used us in incredible ways, things that I never imagined possible.

And we thought about five years into our marriage that how fun would it be?

Like we're hanging out with all these kids, we don't have kids of our own.

How fun would it be to have a family?

They would get to grow up with some of our best friends, and and that would be that would be so incredible.

We're pouring into these people.

How about having kids in tow?

And our reality of that changed in the moment of one morning.

Early one morning, we received a phone call from a doctor that said these words there is no hope.

You will never be able to have a family of your own.

Don't waste your money.

You have no other options.

Now that's pretty heavy on a Mother's Day, right?

But that was our reality.

It wasn't that we we didn't know why we couldn't have a family, it was that we knew why we couldn't have a family, and everything on paper, everything scientifically on paper said that chromosomes and genetics weren't in our favor, and there was no way humanly possible that that would work for us.

As a minister to children, y'all, that hit me hard.

I had given up everything in obedience to follow Jesus, to do what he had told me to do by loving children.

And in some ways, I felt like it was a punishment.

I got to love on everybody else's kids, but I wasn't gonna get to have kids of my own.

We were broken, we were sad, we were devastated.

How do you bounce from something like that?

So, as we lived in that reality, we began to tell our church family at the time, this is what's happened.

I don't know my next steps, but I know I'm broken.

I feel like I was grieving something, not that I tangibly had, but I was grieving something that I never got to have, you know.

It was the dream of what my kids would look like.

It was the dream that they would act like their mother and their father, right?

It was the dream of what we would name them and where we would live and who they would grow up to be and how we, as one big happy family, would get to do ministry together.

That was part of the dream.

And it was taken from us in a moment with no hope.

And so as we began to pray, people came around us and y'all, the community of believers that would remind us of who God is and what he has done for us was amazing.

And I had a friend, and I'll never forget this, she looked me in the eye and she said, You cannot accept this.

You cannot give up.

You've got to do whatever you can do for your family.

What do you mean?

I've been told there's no hope, there's no way humanly possible.

But as Chris and I began to pray, God began to lead us.

It didn't make sense.

But we made some appointments with some specialists in Atlanta and we began to talk to them.

And I will never forget our first meeting was four hours long inside a doctor's office.

I think we were more confused when we left than we were when we came in.

But he drew pictures and he did all these scenarios.

But at the end of the day, there was still no guarantee, there was still no hope.

And you know what the worst part of it was?

They wanted all my money.

I don't know if you know this, but in 2012, insurance didn't touch infertility, not even a consultation.

So as we were going through this process, we were talking about here, take a couple of hundred dollars just to draw my blood.

It was crazy.

How would we be able to pay for this?

Maybe that was the Lord saying, you can't do it.

But as we began to pray, we begin to say, okay, you want to do something here, Lord.

We don't know what it is, and we don't know what the end of this is going to be, but we know we need to walk in obedience.

And y'all, I've never had my faith strengthened so much in 2012 as I did walking through infertility and walking through um trying to allow the Lord to move and work.

And so if you're in the room and you have been through some of that process, you know it's super lonely.

It's not something that everyone talks about, hey, I can't have kids.

Nobody does that.

And what makes it worse is you get invited to every baby shower, right?

And I'm pouring into kids, and I love them, and I'm going to their games, and I'm being there when they have their birth, and I inside and breaking.

It's lonely.

Our doctor's appointments were highs and lows of a roller coaster.

We would go in one week and they would say, Okay, let's try this, and we would go in two weeks later, well, that didn't work.

And then the next butt, let's let's try this, more medication, let's try this therapy, more medication.

That didn't work.

And finally, by the end of 2012, we said, Okay, Lord, we've walked, we've been obedient, we've given you, you know, everything we have.

We've allowed people to pray over us.

What more, what more can we do?

I need to be done.

I need to move on.

I need answers.

And the specialist said, We have one more option.

We can do a diagnostic option in November.

We went in, we did, didn't expect much from it, and we received a phone call.

We had a little hope.

We didn't have a guarantee, but we had a little hope.

Now, I don't know if it was because they still wanted all of our money, or they really did see that there was something possible that they could do.

So in 2013, we began of what the process is called in vitro fertilization.

Now, I don't encourage people to do this.

And when I talk to ladies who are going through infertility, I don't say you should do this because I don't think everyone should do that.

I believe you walk in the steps that God has for you and you walk in obedience and you allow God to do what only I can do.

And that's where we were.

We didn't have a guarantee that this was going to work, but we knew that we were following and doing what God was calling us to do.

And through the process, I will never forget another friend telling me, Katie, they're watching you.

What do you mean?

They're watching your faith, they're watching how you're handling this.

And my perspective began to change that not only was I crushed and just we were just sad.

There was no other way to describe it.

But my perspective changed to Lord, I want you to receive all the glory.

Whatever happens, may people say, they followed me.

So as we begin IVF and as we begin lots of medication, y'all, the Lord has a humor, and I'm gonna ask him about this one day.

I'm terrified of needles.

Terrified.

I've given, I've given speeches in college about why you should give blood, and I'm too scared to give it.

Okay?

And here I was in the middle of having to do injections and shots every single day, multiple times a day.

And as we went in March to finish up our IVF process, what we found is that we had 11 embryos that took, praise God, 11 embryos.

That's a lot of kids.

But what in our case is what you don't realize is that ours had to grow for a week because of the genetic and the chromosome issues.

We knew that was what we were up against.

So after they grew in a peach tree ditch, that's a whole nother story.

We received a phone call after that week that said they've all died but four.

Four.

Sounds great, right?

But not in our case.

They said, Miss Landris, you need six at minimum to go through the next process, which would be genetic testing.

Genetic testing to see because of the genetic issues, because of the chromosomes, you will not have a viable pregnancy if we don't make sure that everything is lined up.

Now, this sounds so wacky telling it on stage.

But I'll say that as wacky as it sounds, we were in the middle of just walking by faith and doing what God told us to do.

And any minute I was ready to throw in the towel and give up, honestly, because it cost us everything.

So as we genetic tested and we waited, we received a phone call.

I will never forget early one Sunday morning that said, you got two.

The week before they told us if we didn't have six, we probably wouldn't even have one.

The odds aren't in our favor.

And now you're telling me I have two embryos.

I have two embryos that are strong, that are healthy, that will be viable for pregnancy.

And guess what?

That's not all of it.

One's a curl and one's a boy.

You get to have the best of both worlds.

And immediately we texted out our prayer warriors and we told people, hey, God is alive, God is good, God is faithful.

Look what God did.

Nine years ago, today, I've heard the heartbeat for the first time of the glory of God.

It was the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard.

Sorry, this is where you laughed.

In fact, my husband and I were laughing.

The sonogram tech told us you cannot take videos.

Well, they don't know my husband and how sneaky he is with cameras.

And we had the most beautiful video of our baby girl and her strong, healthy heartbeat.

And then December 27th, when we had Anna Elizabeth and they put her on my chest, I believed in miracles.

I believed in the goodness of God.

I believe God can do anything because I had witnessed it.

And all these people that had come around me, they too had witnessed it.

Now we also have a boy, and we decide to keep him frozen.

That's a whole nother story.

For two years, y'all, I had to pay a freezer fee.

I'm not even joking.

And on August 10th, 2016, we had our second um healthy baby boy, John Brooks, and we often joke, he is full of joy.

He loves to run and he loves just to be active.

And I said, of course he does, because he was frozen for two years.

Right.

But here's the cool part of our story.

After a year, the the specialist would check on us and they would they want to know how their patients were doing.

And Chris got a phone call, and the doctor asked our permission to sign off on using our case, using our uh all the things that they had done in their case study, in their research.

Sure.

Whatever you can do to help other people is is great.

And the doctor said, Well, I'll tell you now, this has never been successful.

Of course it didn't.

Because he didn't know my God, but it wasn't medicine that made it successful, it was Jesus breathing life into a child.

And had we not walked the craziest story, had we not stepped out in faith, we never would have got to experience the goodness and the bigness of God working in our lives.

It changed my perspective on so many different levels.

It changed my perspective even on money.

Y'all, in my journals, I I prayed for thousands of dollars.

I'll never forget one week.

I was praying for$4,000.

Lord, we need$4,000 if we're gonna pay for this medicine.

That Sunday, someone came up and handed me an envelope and they said, we don't know who this is from, but here's an envelope.

Y'all,$3,000 was sitting in that envelope.

I've never held so much cash in my life.

But somebody heard about our story.

They were obedient and had the means, and they received, I know, the blessing from God because they were obedient and how they were gonna bless me and how they were gonna see God work.

Our story is beautiful, and there's lots and lots of details that I'm not sure I'm able to share on a platform.

And we have been blessed to be parents, and it's been a wonderful experience.

But let me tell you this no one ever prepared me for the month of May.

If you are walking in that, whether you have a child that's graduating, whether you have two little ones, that's a whole nother ball game of survival.

If the school calls and asks for one more donation, I will gladly give.

But I can't keep up with it all.

And this world that we're raising our children in keeps getting faster and faster and faster.

And y'all, I'm exhausted.

I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted.

And as I began to think about some things that I wanted to leave you with, not just about how God is so good, He's faithful, and He still works miracles because He does all of that.

But as I have been doing life with a lot of you, here are some things that have constantly been on my mind.

I'm also in a community group of ladies, and we've been together for a couple of years, and this past semester, we went through the book of Ruth, and I'm just gonna give you a quick high-level synopsis of what's going on with Ruth.

There's a famine.

It's in the Old Testament, there's a famine in Bethlehem, and people just thought, hey, they knew what was best.

We're gonna pick whatever and we're gonna do whatever.

And so a lady named Naomi and her family, her husband and her two sons, decide to go to another country called Moab.

The sons get married, and guess what happens?

Things don't get better, does it, if you know the story?

The husband dies, the two sons die, and Naomi within an instant, she's in despair, she's saddened, she's lost it all.

We read in Ruth 1 that says this, 16.

But Ruth replied, Don't urge me to leave you or turn back from you.

Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay.

Your people will be my people and your God my God.

Naomi was like, Hey, let's go back.

I'm going back to Blehem.

Well, she had two daughter-in-laws.

Now, some of you I know your mother-in-laws.

Would you be Ruth?

Hey, wherever you go, I'll go.

Probably not.

So Orphar said, Peace, I'm going back to my family.

But Ruth said, Hey, I'll stay with you.

We say this all the time at Church of the Grove.

You can't do life alone.

I couldn't do life alone when we were going through our infertility.

At the beginning of Ruth, in this quick story I'm going to give you, Naomi and Ruth realized that they can't do life alone.

Ruth went back with her mom to the town of Bethlehem.

And when Naomi got there, the town was stirring out of excitement because she was home.

Motherhood, ladies, it can be lonely.

It can be lonely in the middle of the night when you're taking care of sick kids.

It can be lonely when you're changing diapers.

It can be lonely when you log into social media and see what everybody else is doing and what everyone else got invited to but you.

It can be lonely when your own personal children are going through hard times and you can't tell anybody.

Naomi needed to go back to her community, and Ruth knew that, and Ruth went with her.

The second thing I think I learned is that God is always with us.

I know that seems so elementary.

Remember, I work with kids.

It's just that childlike faith.

Ladies, moms, I want you to hear this.

Jesus loves you.

Jesus loves you.

And I want us to wash over you that God is with you.

He's with you in the valleys.

He's with you in the mountaintops.

You are a child of the king, ladies.

He loves you.

Not because of what you've done or where you're going.

He loves you.

God's with us.

He sees you.

He sees the pressures that you put on yourself.

He sees the month of May when I'm driving in the school line one more time because I forgot the lunch.

Oh, it's Phil Day this week.

We got Phil Day twice this week.

Gotta make sure it's on the calendar.

He sees us.

Oh, mama, and he loves you.

He loves you for all that you are and all that you mess up on.

You are worthy in his sight.

And then sometimes we need to be reminded of that.

We need to be reminded that God loves us, that we're doing a good job, that God sees us.

I love the first chapter of Ruth, how it ends, because it says this.

So Naomi returned from Moab, accompanied by Ruth and Moabis, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.

Catch that.

They left Bethlehem because there was a famine.

They returned and there is a harvest of blessings.

God was with them, God was in control, and he was going to take care of it all care of it all.

He was in the details of it all.

Sometimes our greatest work is often done in the bleakest of situations.

God's with you, God sees you, God hears you.

Your mama's heart.

I think one of the things that God has really been teaching me is my third point is being faithful in the small things.

That's really hard.

In chapter two and Ruth, we see that they need food and there's a harvest.

So Naomi sends Ruth to a field of a man in Boaz.

And y'all, she's gleaning.

Now she's not getting like the best of the best.

She's getting the leftover junk that nobody wants.

And she's taking it home, and that's what she's feeding it.

Boaz comes back into town and he says, Whose woman is this?

And the foreman replied, She is the Mobis who came from Moab with Naomi.

She said, Please let me glean.

And gathering one of the sheefs behind the harvesters, she went to the field and has worked steadily from morning till now, except for a short rest in the shelter.

Y'all, Ruth was faithful in getting the leftovers to feed her family.

And because she was faithful in the little things, God blessed her.

Boaz noticed, and you know what she got?

She got the good stuff.

He even told the workers hey, pull out the good harvest and let Ruth pick it up.

Ladies, God, God sees that you're faithful in those small things.

He sees when you try to get up.

This happens to me all the time.

I try to wake up early to be spend time with the Lord.

And as soon as I get my coffee good and hot, and I say, dear Jesus, down the stairs.

Well, there it went nothing.

But I believe God honors my faith of trying to wake up with him every morning and to sit at his feet.

I believe he honors the times that we make for him, the quiet times that we make for him.

He honors our prayer life when we pray with our kids on the way to the school, when we make time to have dinner with them around the table.

God honors that when we make time for that.

Be faithful in the small things.

You can't do it all, but you can be faithful in what God has called you to do.

This hits hard with me because every person, every lady I have talked to this week, every single one of y'all, how are you doing?

I am exhausted.

And I said, me too.

We can't do it all.

I asked my mom a few months ago, I was like, Mama, you made you made parenting me look so easy.

You must be Superwoman, which I she is, but how was it so easy?

And she said, Katie, the demands that the world has on moms right now is unreal.

And I believe the enemy is here more today than he was then, and he is ready to kill, steal, and destroy our kids and our students, and he's doing it with making us super busy.

And we've lost all the focus.

God honors is honored with you being faithful and bringing your kids to church.

A lot of us were trying to do all the things and everything, everything, everything.

And by Saturday, we're so tired we're gonna sleep in and rest.

Watch church online.

No, that's not what God's called us to do.

God's called us to be in community with each other.

As I wrap up, I want you to hear that no matter where you are in your parenting, wherever you are in life, whether you are going through infertility, whether you're about to go through graduation with your child, there is hope in Jesus.

That's one thing I've learned through my journey as a believer in Christ, walking through infertility, seeing God work his miracles.

There's hope in Jesus.

We see it in Ruth because here's the cool thing about Ruth.

After Ruth goes through the harvest, Boaz, they call it a redeemer.

He comes and he marries Ruth.

It says in chapter 4, verse 15, so Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife.

Then he went to her, and the Lord enabled her to conceive, and she gave birth to a son.

He redeemed their family, he took over the expenses of their land.

He he married her so their namesake would continue throughout all generations.

And here's the cool thing, Ruth, because there is hope.

Is that we see in Matthew when we skip over all the genealogy stuff, you know what I'm talking about when you're reading through the Bible and you're like, well, that's this is boring.

Let's get to the good stuff.

Here's the good stuff.

It says in verse 5, chapter 1 of Matthew, it says, Salmon the father of Boaz, who was the mother whose mother was Rahab.

Rahab was a prostitute, a prostitute.

God used to be the mother of Boaz.

Boaz was the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.

Ruth was great-grandma to King David.

There's hope in Jesus, no matter where you've come from or what you're going through.

But here's the coolest part of the genealogy.

If you go to the end of that chapter, it said, and Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, whom was born Jesus, who is Christ.

Ruth is connected to Jesus.

There is hope because of Jesus.

If you don't hear anything else today, ladies, what I want you to hear is that you have value in the kingdom of God.

No matter your age, no matter if you're married, no matter if you have children or if you don't have children, you have a value in the kingdom of God.

Maybe that value is to teach your kids about Jesus and bring them to church.

Maybe you're an empty nester and you're like, there's no way I'm ever serving in kids' ministry again.

I did my time.

Guess what?

I need you.

Literally.

But us young moms, we need you to teach us about Jesus.

To give us your wisdom.

We need you to come alongside us and cheer us on because we're messing up and this world is hard, and Satan is after our kids.

And it's not gonna stop.

Grandmamas, you have a role in the kingdom.

Teach your babies about Jesus.

Some of you are grandmothers, and you're the ones bringing your kids to church.

Thank you.

You get your role in the kingdom.

God of creation, the king of kings and lord of lords, could have chosen any way to send a savior for the world.

What do you do?

He sent it through a young girl named Mary.

She had value in the kingdom.

When Jesus rose from the dead, he could have written it in the clouds.

What do you do?

He went and told a woman, maybe because we talk a lot.

But he trusted her because she had value in the kingdom.

We all need each other.

So what's God saying to you?

Are you the Naomi who's probably made a mistake, or maybe you're just really bitter about where life has you?

Are you the Ruth that this whole church thing is very new to you, but where whatever you do and whatever you go, I'm I'm going with you and I'm going all out.

Do you just need to be reminded of God's power and who he's his, and may that be washed over you as you sit in his presence day after day?

Do you need to be reminded that man, God's good?

But I got my priorities all out of sync.

I took my kids to five different places yesterday, not me personally, hypothetically.

I'm tired.

We've been in the middle of baseball season.

My little boy, we wanted him to win.

Hallelujah that he lost.

Hallelujah that he won.

You feel me?

Because I because I felt our family getting weary.

And our priorities were about to shift.

And I needed to pull the rein back.

And then that's where we need you to stand in the gaps when we're going too fast.

But we also need you, men, to speak truth and to speak life and also point us to Jesus.

And if you don't know Jesus, men, make it the best Mother's Day ever for us.

What's God saying?

What are you gonna do about it?

How are you gonna let Him change your life to follow hard after Him?

Let's pray.

God, we love you.

We thank you for loving us.

We thank you for all the moms in the rooms.

We thank you for all the ladies in the room.

Use us to teach our kids about Jesus.

May we not go from this place this morning.

Without a better understanding of who you are and whose we are.

God, there's been so many times, even over the last few months, parents have come to me and I have no idea what to tell them.

This world is hard sometimes.

But here's what I know that you are good and there's power and there's victory in your name.

God, we pray for the prodigal.

We pray for the mom that's burdened.

We pray for the family that can't have children.

Lord, you know so many needs, and I pray that you'll just meet us where we're at as we cry out to you because we know there's power and there's grace in your name.