Our Son Was Born!

It’s been a really big month for the Cleveland’s! For reasons that will be made apparent this blog will be on the shorter side, but I wanted to make sure you got an update on everything that’s been going on!

On October 12th Elias Oliver Cleveland was born! Darby and I went in for her to be induced because of her having high blood pressure. That whole process took a long time, but she finally went into labor and really once things started moving, they really got going. He was born at 9:03pm, and other than a bit of jaundice he has been doing great! Darby had some complications come up after she had given birth to him, and long story short she lost a lot of blood, and we were close to her having a hysterectomy or something worse. But God is good and that didn’t happen, and Darby is doing great now after having to recover in the hospital for a couple days. It was definitely not the birth that we were wanting, but through the whole process it was so evident how God was working. So many prayers were answered distinctly and promptly. We both felt God's presence through the whole experience. We’ve been reminded once again that we can be pitiful, or we can be powerful. Basically, every health care professional we’ve seen talks about how traumatic everything was for us and expects us to have a bad attitude about the whole thing. But I think we have the choice to either focus on all the negatives and what could have been, or we can focus on Gods faithfulness and the fact that we have an adorable son now. That is easier said than done, but we’re doing our best to stay positive and thankful for all the Lord has given us.

Darby is on maternity leave, and I’ve been on paternity leave for the last couple weeks but have started working part time and will ramp up as we get our feet under us more. To say all of this has been an adjustment is an understatement. But I am so grateful for all of the love and support we have had through this whole process and in these beginning stages of figuring out how to be parents. Thank you so much for your prayers and support, it really means the world to us and we can see so evidently how God works through that.

On the FOCUS side of stuff, while we were in the hospital they had our yearly fall retreat. While it was a bummer that we couldn’t be there for it, God still seemed to work powerfully through it. We had so many students say how impactful the weekend was and we’ve already seen some of the change their trajectory towards Jesus more because of how they encountered God that weekend. It’s weird to have not been able to be there to witness that, but it’s encouraging to see how much God is working!

They competed in games with their small groups, thus the color coordination. 

Thank you again for all your love and support, we couldn’t do any of this without you, and we’re so excited to be able to do ministry and also now raise a family with such an amazing team of people behind us!