Jennifer Saake

It has been just over 14 years since I had to begin re-learning how to communicate, after multiple catastrophic strokes. For the first few years, my memory was so bad that I could not complete a sentence without forgetting what i was trying to say.  “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”  - John 3:16 Next week will mark 5 years since I first watched Susan Heck's  A Call To Scripture Memory  video and started trying long-passage Scripture memory as “brain training” for ongoing stroke recovery. (I clearly know that the date was Dec. 10, because this date marks a landmark related to our first daughter, Noel Alexis, who was born directly from my womb into Heaven back in 1994.) Brain training was only the start. After a decade of infertility with recurrent losses (multiple miscarriage and adoption losses), the failure of the business where we had hoped to raise our children (...

I absolutely love Sign Language. I fell in love with the language at age 8, seeing a beauty padgent contestant Sign a song as her tallent.  I learned ASL (American Sign Language, an actual language with unique sentance structures) in high school, bartering with a public school deaf educator for an hour of private toutoring each week in exchange for an hour of babysitting her kids!  I then took SEE (Signing Exact English, basically using ASL signs in educational settings, as applied to teaching English language mechanics like parts of speech, prefixes, and suffixes) in college. My second semester I was moved into the elite, invitation-only class, spending 3-6 hours per week in a 5-to-1 ratio with our professor who interpreted for a large church. My kids learned their ABCs manually, via fingerspelling, before they learned to read. They each had 20-50 word Sign vocabularies before they could say a single word verbally. We memorized Bible verses and sang songs with Sign. (I've pr...

I was 39 (13, 3 times over). That was 13 years ago.  I don't understand God's grace in allowing me to survive that day , or each of the days since. I was sure angry then that I was stuck in such a broken mind and body. But now I am so thankful. I'm thankful for these years to get right with God . I'm thankful for my husband who, after 19 years of marriage and 3 living children together, had to instantly become the "single father of 4, with his physically biggest and emotionally most immature, requiring exceeding high special needs care" for many years. Now 32 in, Rick is still fighting for us and our marriage. I'm thankful that Rick encourages my dreams and joys, while knowing me well enough to see when I've taken on more than I can actually handle, keeping me grounded by challenging me to realistically accept the goals that remain beyond my reach. I'm thankful to have been allowed to walk each of our babies into adulthood. If I even start unpackin...

Tomorrow will be the anniversary, my "re-birthday" when life stated over from square one. Thirteen years ago I heard the word "hypermobile" for the first time. I was 39 years old and a chiropractor had just rotated my neck and commented on my extreme flexibility. That first side of my neck adjusted upon first attempt, but the other side just wouldn't realign. After multiple attempts , my vertebral artery was ruptured in the back of my neck and I instantly experience two catastrophic (either should have been fatal) brain bleeds (strokes) there on the treatment table, initially triggering a seizure, blindness, slurred speech, and a rapid progression to loss of consciousness. I was in the hospital for nearly 2 months, shocking doctors that I even survived the first night. I had to relearn how to breathe without a machine, swallow, see, hear (we eventually discovered I had lost 70-90% of my hearing), sit up without two adults holding me, bladder control, and everyt...

I, Jennifer Saake , stumbled into the online world in my mid-early 20s, around 1995 or '96. As you may have noticed, I've been fairly quiet this past couple of years. Here's why. After processing my own journey online for so long, last year I sort of ran out of words and went into public hibernation. As I prepare to once again start fresh in an attempt to plunge back into the blogosphere, here's my backstory, divided into about 10 sub-headings so than you can skim topics. (Many of the headings are linked to more detailed pages.): Infertility, Miscarriages, Adoption Losses Three years in, our infertility and loss journeys became lived out in the public eye, as God allowed me the incredible privilege of interacting with tens of thousands of other grieving women, both through  Hannah's Prayer Ministries  and then, a decade later, with the publication of  my first book , Hannah's Hope: Seeking God's Heart in the Midst of Infertility, Miscarriage, & Adoptio...