My devotion to St. Jude

It wasn't until my husband and I were dating that I had much of a connection to St. Jude. He's one of my husband's favorite saints and his confirmation patron. He is known as the patron saint of impossible, desperate or lost causes( depending on who you ask), and I didn't really get how that played a role in my life until more recently. Going through infertility definitely felt like a desperate, lost or impossible cause at various times. Going through our miscarriages felt the same. In my heart, St. Jude was who you prayed to when someone was really sick, but through my own journey, sickness became much more broad than physical illness.

St. Jude has been a great healer in my life as I needed healing from the desperation to have children and trying everything possible to achieve that outcome. He's been a great healer for me when I've lost hope on this journey as well. He's been a great healer when I thought carrying a baby to term was impossible. Yet here I am, almost 12 weeks postpartum with my little boy, whose middle name is Jude. I don't know that my physical issues that led to infertility and loss are healed, but I do believe that St. Jude walked closely with me as I carried these crosses.

Even now, he's been so present in our lives. We lost our home this summer before our son was even two months old. We had dangerous levels of toxic mold in the house and instead of working something out with us, our landlords gave us a 30-day notice to vacate. Our son Dominic Jude was only three weeks old when we got this notice and I was still incredibly weak, hormonal and exhausted from having had him. I had spent years fixing up our home and more recently had spent weeks nesting and cleaning everything, only to pack up the nursery I had barely gotten to use. My heart was breaking after years of waiting to bring a baby home and soak up those early days and weeks with him, only to be thrown into house-hunting and packing boxes instead of getting to savor all those moments. I kept thinking "I may never get to experience this again with another baby and I definitely won't have this time back with THIS baby." I can't express to you the depth of anger and sadness I felt having that time essentially stolen from us. The stress and the sleep deprivation caused a lot of marital distress and mental health struggles, too. We couldn't find a house in this IMPOSSIBLE market. We felt DESPERATE to find a home and it's all we talked about for weeks. We felt utterly LOST about where we were to go with our baby. Talk about a time to call up St. Jude.

A relic of a bone from St. Jude’s arm was traveling through our area in the middle of all this. We made the trek about an hour and a half from my mother-in-law's (where we've been living temporarily) to see it. It was really beautiful being there with my husband and son, as St. Jude is a patron for both of them. We've been praying a special prayer to him for our housing situation and finally found something today, just hours before writing this.

St. Jude has brought a lot of healing to our relationship with the Lord through all of this housing drama as well as our infertility journey because he reminds us to hope when it would normally feel pointless. He's shown me that nothing is truly lost or impossible for God, He's just got a unique plan for each of us that, while incredibly difficult, will bring about great healing and faithfulness.