A Prayer of Thankfulness

Ever feel like a 'thank you' just isn't quite enough?  That is the feeling Nicki and I have had since 8:08 a.m. on Saturday August 25th when Kennedy Grace Spicher met the world for the first time, weighing in at 6 lbs 4oz.

Without question, this week has been the most magical, special, unbelievable, and many other adjectives combined, week we've had in our lives.  I will let Nicki post the labor and delivery story, but over the past week there have been so many moments where we have said to ourselves how thankful we are for this blessing, and it seems appropriate to stop and say a prayer of thankfulness:

God,
We want to thank you.  That's it.  Just thank you.  An all encompassing thank you for the blessing of life, and the perfect miracle that surrounds it.  We thank you for your constant presence now and forever.

We thank you for entrusting us with the life of Kennedy Grace and providing us with the wisdom, patience, humility, and faith it will take to raise her in your image.

We thank you for allowing for Nicki's incredibly smooth labor, delivery, and recovery. We want to thank you for the nurse at the ER who refused to listen to the ER doctor who told us we were "definitely going home and not having this baby for another two weeks" about five hours before Kennedy was born.

Nicki arriving at the ER at almost 3 a.m. (Kennedy was born just 5 hours later) 

We thank you for the nurses at Willow Creek who stayed another hour beyond their 16 hour shift just to be able to deliver Kennedy.  We thank you for Dr. Hix and Dr. Partridge who have guided us through this pregnancy with such love and care.  We thank you for the nursery nurses who cared for Kennedy during the first days of her life like she was their own child.


We thank you for our grandparents.  We thank you for the safe 14 hour drive from Akron and flights from Cincinnati.  We thank you for their unending love and support.  We know without them we would have been lost.  We thank you for the model they have set before us, and thank you for their unselfish giving of their time to love their new granddaughter.

We thank you for our incredible friends.  You have surrounded us by a group of people both here and around the country who have showed us limitless love through hospital visits, home visits, meals, and simple phone calls.  These friends have also shown us what it means to rely on You in times of parenting trials.  We never would have imagined a day we would deliver our first child in Fayetteville, AR - and now we can't imagine it any differently.

We thank you for our wonderful work families.  You have blessed us with co-workers who go beyond just being co-workers and truly care for our well being and our lives.  We recognize this is not common practice and want to thank you for these friends.

I want to thank you for giving us a daughter who was born with more patience and understanding than I have.  You recognized my fear of very limited knowledge of how to raise a newborn and brought us a baby that seemingly has agreed to put up with my learning curve of how to change a diaper, bathe, swaddle, and change clothes with such grace.

I want to thank you for my incredible wife, who has made pregnancy, labor, and parenting look easy.  She has proven that all the reading, preparation, nesting, organizing, was actually worth it and has made for a smooth transition in to parenting.  You made her to be a mom and for that I am thankful!

We have so much for which to be thankful, and the words thank you seem to be so insignificant.  You have given us a magical experience.  And You know, that in the coming hours, days, weeks, months, and years we will come to You asking for many many things - patience, wisdom, grace, peace, comfort, understanding, amongst others.  But at this time, in this moment, we want to just stop asking for things and offer a thank you.  We thank you.

Amen