Dayna Mager met her husband, Matt, when the two of them were in high school.
The high school sweethearts from Ann Arbor, Michigan, welcomed their first child, Luella, into the world in October of 2015.
Not long after Luella’s birth, Dayna posted a picture to Facebook. It was a photo of her sleeping with her daughter – but the last thing she expected was that it would go viral.
Alongside the photo, Dayna posted a message.
In the photo caption, Dayna explained that there was a perfectly good reason why she climbed into her daughter’s crib when she screamed.
It’s because Dayna “remembered a promise [she] made to her.”
Dayna described a story she had heard while attending a worship conference with Matt.
The two were sitting in the audience when a missionary shared a story with the crowd. On a recent trip to Uganda, the missionary had visited an orphanage but was shocked by what he heard and saw. There were hundreds of cribs filled with babies but not a single child was making a sound.
That’s when the missionary said something that will forever be engrained in Dayna’s mind.
Read her post in its entirety below.
“This [photo] was from several weeks back, yes, I climbed in the crib in hopes to soothe my screaming, teething, blushed-faced, and tear-soaked little girl. My husband came home to this, and I am re-posting because this captures the essence of my heart, and my “why…” There I was in the heat of this exhausting, beautiful thing we call parenthood, and I remembered a promise I made to her.”
One of the first times Matt and I left Luella was to a worship concert. At that conference, a missionary shared his story, and it shook me to the core. A moment that would forever be burned in my fragile, hormone-raging, new mommy heart that had already become 100xs more fragile after meeting her.
That missionary was in an orphanage in Uganda, and he has been in many before, but this one was different. He walked into a nursery with over 100 filled cribs with babies. He listened in amazement and wondered why the only sound he could hear was silence. A sound that is beyond rare in ANY nursery, let alone a nursery where over 100 new babies are laid. He turned to his host and asked her why the nursery was silent. Then, her response to him is something I will never, ever forget. EVER. This was my “why” moment.”
“She looked at him and said, ‘After about a week of them being here and crying out for countless hours, they eventually stop when they realize no one is coming for them…’
…They stop crying when they realize no one is coming for them. Not in 10 minutes, not in 4 hours, and maybe, perhaps, not ever…
Broke.
I broke. I literally could have picked up pieces of my heart scattered about the auditorium floor. But instead, it stirred in me a longing, a hunger. A promise in my spirit.
We came home, and that night as Luella rested her tiny little 10lb body against mine and we rocked, I made a promise to her. A promise that I would always come to her.
Always.
At 2:00 am when pitiful desperate squeals come through a baby monitor, I will come to her.
Her first hurt, her first heartbreak, we will come to her. We will be there to hold her, to let her feel, to make decisions on her own, and we will be there. We will show her through our tears and frustrations at times, that it is okay to cry, and it’s ok to feel. That we will always be a safe place, and we will always come to her.”
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