Jennifer Saake

I am in awe of all that God has done in my heart over the past half decade. I could not have fathomed 5 years ago that I would still be here today. Here I raise my "Ebenezer stone" of remembrance.  This post is not a brag, it is in hopes of giving encouragement to those who are just where I was five years ago today, on day two of a journey I was doubtfully and trepidationsly dipping my toes into , asking God if any memorization could actually even be feasible for me with my brain injuries and decimated memory. To God be ALL the glory! Then Samuel took a stone and set it between Mizpah and Shen, and he named it Ebenezer. And he said, “Thus far Yahweh has helped us.” - 1 Samuel 7:12 This is NOT a race! As I was reminded this morning when i was lamenting over how I'm not managing to get verses to stick well this month, we all go through ups and downs in the journey, but keep at it and your overall trajectory will grow!  After watching Susan Heck's video, A Call to Script...

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, 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...

As I looked up dates for this week, I realized that it was EXACTLY two years ago this coming Saturday, on December 10, 2020, when I watched Susan Heck's " A Call to Scripture Memory " - https://youtu.be/WVvPtTCni1E - and asked God if it would be possible for me to commit ONE short book of the Bible to memory by January 1, 2022? I was intrigued by the "brain training" aspect of the concept, deeply convicted of the spiritual benefits of this idea, and incredibly sincere in my desire to hide God's Word in my heart. I was also cynical and skeptical that it would be remotely possible for me, with such extensive memory incapability after strokes had wiped out so much of my brain, hitting memory centers hard!  I flipped through my Bible and felt satisfied that I should try the book of Jude since I figured it must be the shortest book, at only a single chapter comprised on just 25 verses. I didn't  know my Bible  well enough to realize that there are four books ...