Jordan Phillips didn't have a traditional path to fatherhood. Married at nineteen, he joined the military four months later and spent three of his first five years of marriage overseas on two deployments. When he and his wife Amy finally started trying to have kids, the doors kept closing. Years of infertility. Consultations, surgeries, and procedures. A failed round of in vitro. And a growing question neither of them wanted to ask out loud: is this ever going to happen for us?

It wasn't until they stopped forcing it and opened themselves to adoption that everything changed. Doors that had been slamming shut for nearly a decade flew open almost overnight. They adopted their daughter Ella in the fall of 2012. And then, at Ella's first birthday party, Amy started acting completely unlike herself. The doctor's explanation stunned them both.

In this episode Jordan talks about what two military deployments taught him about marriage, what nearly ten years of infertility taught him about releasing control, and what his dad's habit of taking the road less traveled on family vacations taught him about the kind of father he wanted to become.

He also shares the mindset shift that changed everything: from asking why is this happening to me, to asking why is this happening for me.

None of it was the plan. All of it was the path.

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