Thrive: Growing Through Life's Greatest Challenges

By Jen Jones

Life can throw incredible challenges at us. Whether it’s pressure we choose, or a pressure that chooses us, challenges will come our way. It’s inevitable.

How do we do more than just go through life’s toughest stuff? How can we grow through it? This is the story of an everyday, ordinary wife and mom who was blindsided by the birth of a daughter with Down Syndrome. What came next was downright miraculous--extraordinary.

In Thrive: Growing Through Life’s Greatest Challenges, author and speaker, Jen Jones tackles the tough issues life can throw at us and brings a fresh perspective of hope and healing. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’re certain to be inspired by the story of how God can turn our greatest trials into His greatest triumphs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626757011

Book preview

© 2013 by Jennifer Jones. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without written permission from Jennifer Jones: www.jenjonesdirect.com

Edit and art direction by: Marcus Jones

Cover photo: Erin Kelly, Silent Stories Photography

Special editorial contributions: Summer Fialkowski, Michelle Spore

Some of the anecdotal illustrations in this book are true to life and are included with the permission of the persons involved. All other illustrations are composites of real situations, and any resemblance to people living or dead is coincidental.

Scripture quotations from THE MESSAGE. Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jones, Jen.

Thrive: growing through life’s greatest challenges / Jen Jones.

ISBN: 9781626757011

1. Faith and parenting. 2. Parenting children with special needs

Printed in the United States of America.

For Addison Grace

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

1| ADDISON GRACE

2| PLAN B

3| DO I CHANGE HER NAME?

4| THE WEDDING THAT NEVER WAS

5| LIFE’S BIGGEST BULLIES

6| THE RIDE OF YOUR LIFE

7| LISTENING FROM THE LIVING ROOM

8| CHERRY-PICKING

9| IT’S ALL GONNA BURN

10| A SWEATSHIRT, HI AND FROZEN YOGURT

11| MORE APPLE JUICE

12| SIMON SAYS

13| EIGHT IS GREAT

14| HOW DID I GET HERE?

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

More than anyone, I thank Marcus, my husband, for his tireless efforts in seeing this project through. He managed the kids so I could write, endlessly edited my run-on sentences and did whatever else was required to see this project through. I am fully aware that I’m a piece of work. Thanks for loving me, babe, and partnering with me to see a dream fulfilled.

So much love to my circle of trust. Thank you, girls, for doing life with me. Much of this book is the result of years of growth from our group, CFA, processing our lives together, lining it up to God’s word and being go-tos for one another. You make my life full.

And thank you to my parents, Gary and Deanna Nicks, who have faithfully walked with Jesus their entire lives. You lead by example, creating a heritage of faith that’s caused me to expect that God will speak to me, and that He is trustworthy to follow. Your never-ending support is not taken for granted.

FOREWORD

I have experienced, like so many, that life can deal us unexpected blows. Those blows have the potential to derail your life—your hopes and your future. Thrive is one of the best books I’ve read that deals with the practical implications of the fall out of broken dreams, and the journey to healing and wholeness.

Thrive will make you laugh, cry and dig deeply into your heart and God’s Word. Jen Jones brings a fresh voice of encouragement and Godly perspective to a generation that is desperate for hope.

Kimberly Scott

Speaker and Women’s Care Pastor

Grace Church, San Diego, CA

INTRODUCTION

I am faced with two choices: pick up the spoon or put it down. Maybe you’re like me.

Part of me wants to pick up that spoon and wallow in a carton of ice cream. Part of me wants to put the spoon down. Part of me loves to escape to my social network addiction. The other wants to log off Facebook, shut down Instagram and stop watching the status updates that merely confirm my not-so-hot feelings about my not-so-cool life. I mean, she only looks good in that picture because of filters and Photoshop, right?

In this thing called life, I find myself constantly having to choose between, do this or not. It’s my never-ending search for significance, my longing for purpose and meaning. I’m always seeking the promise of more than just survival. I’m always warring between spoon up or spoon down.

Maybe this is not your struggle. But for many of us, the thought of this monotony being all there is, and the threat that we could end up doing laundry, wiping noses, butts and countertops for the rest of our lives, is horrifying.

I have come to realize that these fears are quite normal. They may very well be the same ones currently facing you. As I type away on this little laptop, I have cute, little kids sleeping down the hall. I know that they are precious gifts and that they grow up fast. I’ve heard it a thousand times from every sweet, white-haired lady in the grocery checkout line. While true and real, the search for something more does not escape me. Neither does my desire to do more than just make it through the challenges life throws my way. Am I weird to want to grow? I don’t merely want to go through difficult things, I want to grow through them? Do you? I’ll unpack it more in the chapters to come.

I spent some time in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) with my first-born. It’s not a place any of us dream to be. It’s a scary place, filled with families going through the worst life has to offer. It was during those days that I heard the term failure to thrive. It wasn’t thrown around a lot, but it was well understood by everyone on the NICU floor. If you had a child whom was labeled, failure to thrive, you wouldn’t be going home anytime soon. In pediatric medicine it happens for various reasons, but essentially it is when a child is unable to grow.

I’ve never heard that term applied to an adult. If it were, I can imagine hearing phrases like, she’s not doing well, or he’s barely making it. It’s the, things aren’t looking good diagnosis we’re all afraid of. Failure to thrive can wear different hats, but it’s the same dreaded reality underneath.

In the chapters to come, I hope you find courage to not only go through the unwanted and unexpected obstacles life often throws at us, but to grow through them. My desire is to help you find the nerve to do more than just survive but to thrive in this life, even when you’re head is just barely above water. My wish is that none of our hearts be saddled with a label that says, failure to thrive.

There’s more to life than just breathing in and breathing out. You were made for more than survival. You were designed for overcoming. You were made to grow. You have a God-promise waiting for you, right in the midst of the difficulty of life.

Wherever you find yourself today, I hope you’ll join me on a courageous journey. Let’s walk together for a bit. The first step is a pretty straightforward choice: either to survive or to thrive.

CHAPTER 1

ADDISON GRACE

I’ll never forget March 1, 2004.

Morgan, my best friend, was in from out of town. We had invited her and other friends over for dinner. I was cooking and my husband was entertaining everyone, Sony PlayStation® style. I was a week late carrying our first child, but I had this dinner planned and didn’t want to cancel.

It was right about the time I was tossing the salad that the cramps introduced themselves. They were very painful and I knew something different was happening. I kept giving my husband a wide-eyed look and crouching in the pantry in pain. We had this clever little contraction counter and the time between each grimace kept getting shorter and shorter. Soon, I couldn’t take it anymore.

I told Morgan to take the meat out of the oven and butter up some rolls, but we were going to the hospital.

This baby is coming! I exclaimed.

Sure enough, I was dilated to five. After a nice epidural, three hours of pushing (who does that?), and a little tug with the vacuum contraption, out she came. At 4:40 AM, March 2, 2004, Addison Grace Jones was born.

For most, the birth of one’s first child is miraculous, beautiful, the best day of one’s life. For me, in hindsight it was that. But at the time, it was more like frantic, overwhelming, painful and heartbreaking.

When Addie was born there was something obviously wrong. Her tummy was full of air, her mouth and nose were full of mucus, and she had difficulty breathing.

We were bombarded with a crack team of specialists from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Doctors and nurses took her from me and began to examine her, talking in medical terms I didn’t understand or even want to know. They quickly rushed her to another room.

Minutes seemed like hours. Then my doctor came in to tell us what was happening. He started drawing pictures on a piece of paper, what the inside of her little anatomy looked like, as opposed to how it should be. I vaguely recall these chicken scratch drawings, but I distinctly remember just wanting him to get to the point.

Bottom line, Addison had a rare birth defect called Tracheoesophageal Fistula (TEF), in which the esophagus, which connects the mouth to the stomach, is shortened and closed off (dead-ended) at some point along its length. In Addie’s case, the esophagus also improperly attached to the trachea, the windpipe that carries air into the lungs. In order for her to survive, it would have to be surgically repaired.

In a flash, she was being rushed to Children’s Hospital in Orange County (CHOC) where doctors would perform surgery to disconnect her esophagus from the trachea and connect it to the stomach.

But for me, that wasn’t the worst part of it. The next sentence out of the doctor’s mouth is what shattered my dreams and turned my life upside down. He said,