Dispatch Faith: How We Named Our Daughter: A Story for Advent and Christmas, by John McCormack & Lauren McCormack:
On the morning of December 24, 2023, we were holding hands while attending Mass at John’s parents’ parish in Madison, Wisconsin. The gospel reading that morning, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, was the Annunciation—when the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would conceive a child by the Holy Spirit:
the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren; for nothing will be impossible for God.
For nothing will be impossible for God. At that moment, we squeezed each other’s hand, the way we’d squeezed each other’s hand many times before whenever the stories of Sarah and Abraham or Elizabeth and Zechariah—couples miraculously blessed with a child after many years of infertility—were read aloud in church.
The squeeze was meant to silently convey a sense of hope that God might still bless us with a miracle after a decade of infertility.
By that point, of course, we had little rational basis to think that wish would come true. Married in the spring of 2013, we’d always hoped for a large family, but God seemed to have other plans in mind.
After years of unexplained infertility, Lauren was diagnosed with endometriosis in 2017. We were told of the widely cited statistic that couples with that condition still have a 50 to 70 percent chance of having a child. Our Catholic doctors, who attempt to address the underlying causes of infertility through restorative medicine called Natural Procreative Technology, said the chances would be higher with treatment. By the fall of 2022, Lauren had undergone three laparoscopic surgeries for endometriosis, and she also endured years of taking hormonal supplements to increase the odds of pregnancy. By Christmas 2023, we thought we had run out of time. We had never had a positive pregnancy test, and the longer infertility persists, the less likely a couple is to ever have biological children. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that we were simply among the 30 to 50 percent who would never have a biological child. … [A]fter much prayer and discernment, we had decided that it was time for the honeymoon phase to end by trying to start a family through adoption. …
On January 20, a couple of days after John turned 39, we finished all the paperwork for our agency’s adoption profile webpage, where birth mothers who intend to place a child for adoption could read and watch a video about us and why we hoped to adopt.
The night we finished that paperwork, Lauren’s younger sister Hannah called her with some amazingly good news: She was pregnant for the first time after she and her husband had been hoping for a child for more than a year. Hannah had been waiting to share the news with Lauren since taking a positive pregnancy test on Christmas Eve.
One week later, the night of Saturday, January 27, we received the best news of our lives.
Lauren came home from a ladies’ book club and nonchalantly told John to come upstairs to open a belated birthday present. … At 11:50 p.m., we sat down together on our loveseat, and John opened a white box tied in a white satin bow. The gift was exactly what he’d wished for when he blew out his birthday candles nine days earlier.
“This can’t be true,” John said, as the positive pregnancy tests fell from his hands and he burst into tears. After several minutes of hugging and crying and silently praying, he said Lauren being pregnant at the same time as her sister was like the story of “Mary and the mother of John the Baptist—her cousin … ”
“Elizabeth,” Lauren said. …
Months later, we found out our baby was a girl. Within hours, we settled on the only name that seemed fitting: Mary Elizabeth.
For nothing will be impossible for God.
Every human life is a miracle from the moment of conception, but Mary Elizabeth’s arrival in the eleventh hour for us feels a little extra-miraculous—the answer to years of prayers from us, our family, and our friends on earth and in heaven. It would take many thousands of words to thank everyone we know has been praying for us and thousands more to thank those who have done so without our knowledge. But we would be remiss if we didn’t note we are particularly grateful for the intercessory prayers of St. John Paul II and Mary our Blessed Mother. [For more of their amazing story, see here.]
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