A photo of a mom cradling for her infant daughter while fielding a phone call at her office job has gone viral — and now the candid image is drumming up support for working mothers everywhere.

© Provided by Oath Inc. Melody Blackwell brings her baby to work once a week, and works from home the other four days. Her boss, who suggested the schedule, snapped this photo in December. (Photo: Dr. Elizabeth Baker via Facebook)

A photo of a mom cradling for her infant daughter while fielding a phone call at her office job has gone viral — and now the candid image is drumming up support for working mothers everywhere.

Dr. Elizabeth Baker, who owns Maryland Farms Chiropractic in Brentwood, Tenn., was walking past the desk of her employee, Melody Blackwell, when she spotted the new mom bringing new meaning to the term multitasking. Blackwell had recently returned from a 3-month maternity leave and was bringing her baby, Nora-Jo, into the office once a week while working from home the other four days. In an instant, Dr. Baker knew she had to capture the moment and share it on Maryland Chiropractic’s Facebook page.

“That was one of the first few days Melody brought the baby in the office,” Dr. Baker told Yahoo Lifestyle. “I honestly was taking it to post onto our office Facebook page for our patients who had been asking about how mom and baby were doing since she had been gone for three months. I wanted to share that with our little following for the office. I never thought it would get so many comments and shares!”

In the post, the chiropractor praised the “sweet and content” baby as well as Blackwell, who “makes it look easy.” She asked people to share the photo — and to share their own photos — to encourage “more small and large businesses to see this is doable and should be allowed more often.”

Dr. Baker said it was she who suggested that Blackwell work from home and bring the infant in once a week for a half or full day, mainly so she could attend the weekly staff meeting. In fact, the conversation started as soon as she learned her employee of more than four years was expecting.

“Once she got pregnant I knew we needed to figure out a way to make this work,” Dr. Baker said. “We had nine months to plan, at least!”

© Provided by Oath Inc. Dr. Elizabeth Baker gets some cuddle time with baby Nora-Jo at Maryland Chiropractic. (Photo: Courtesy of Elizabeth Baker)

While Blackwell was on maternity leave, Dr. Baker says she and her other two employees started shuffling the responsibilities and trying to pick up the slack.

“We did have to bug Melody sometimes,” the chiropractor admits, but she says they largely realized that a lot of what Blackwell does — insurance billing — could be done remotely. So when she revisited the conversation with Blackwell at the end of the 3-month leave, she officially extended the offer, and Blackwell accepted.

“I was excited when she said that was a possibility,” Blackwell told Yahoo Lifestyle. “I didn’t know if it would be.” She said her plan, if Dr. Baker hadn’t had such a flexible policy, was to work something out to have family watch her — but she assumed she’d still have to bring the baby in from time to time. “I knew it was going to be hard for me to leave her when she was so young,” she added.

Blackwell says she empathizes with moms who don’t have that option. “I know it’s hard to drop them off at daycare when they’re just 2 or 3 months old.”

Dr. Baker told Yahoo Lifestyle that as a chiropractor, she’s holistic-minded, so she’s inherently sensitive to the fact that baby Nora-Jo, who is now 5 months old, and her mom need to stick to a strict schedule of breastfeeding, napping and diaper-changing. The flexible work schedule seemed to strike a perfect balance between honoring the mother-infant bond and retaining a valuable worker.

© Provided by Oath Inc. Melody Blackwell still works full-time at Maryland Chiropractic while being a full-time mom. (Photo: Courtesy of Elizabeth Baker)

Blackwell says she’s grateful that she gets to care for her daughter and work full-time. She told NBC affiliate WPTV that she usually breastfeeds Nora-Jo as soon as they get to the office, and that the baby will then either nap in her mother’s lap or in a nearby carrier. “All the patients love to see her when they come in,” she told Yahoo Lifestyle. “But so far no one has asked to hold her, probably because she’s so young.”

Blackwell’s colleagues, on the other hand, love lending a hand. Dr. Baker says she and the whole staff takes turns tending to Nora-Jo when she gets fussy or if Blackwell is too busy. “We’re an all-female staff, so we all have that mothering instinct,” Dr. Baker said. “It really does take a village.”

Blackwell is also grateful for the help but says she certainly doesn’t expect it. “I know it’s not their responsibility, so I never ask them, but they want to.”

Dr. Baker said the hefty costs of daycare also inspired her decision. “It’s sometimes worse than not having a job at all,” she said. Blackwell added that she knows a couple of moms who decided the cost of daycare was outright prohibitive. “It made more financial sense for them to quit their jobs,” she said.

The chiropractor realizes that remote work situations — and allowing babies in the office — are not always possible everywhere, but she encourages employers and employees to at least open up a dialogue about it. “If it’s an environment where baby crying is okay,” she said, “I think more small and large businesses should look more toward allowing that.”

Passion 2019: God's heart is to be Father to anxious generation hurt by divorce, iPhones and suicide

Louie Giglio speaks at Passion 2019 in Dallas, Texas, on Jan. 2, 2019. | (Photo: Sterling Graves)

God is revealing himself as the "perfect Father" to a generation plagued by the heartache from fatherlessness, rampant divorce, and anxiety brought about by iPhone addiction, said Louie Giglio at the Passion Conference 2019.

Speaking before thousands on the first night of the conference in Dallas, Texas, Giglio recalled two events that have shaped Generation Z more than anything else: the 2007 launch of the iPhone and fatherlessness, something that has escalated with no-fault divorce. Giglio noted that in 2010 all 50 states had adopted a no-fault divorce law, enabling families to easily dissolve.

"There is a father issue in the world and a phone issue in the world. And you had nothing to do with either one of these things," he said.

"But yet both of these things have a lot to do with you."

While iPhones have put the world at the fingertips of people, showing both the good and bad things happening, the amount of time people spend in front of screens is unhealthy, he asserted. And the fatherlessness that has transpired in the United States over the past several decades has made it far more normal that a father is not present in every home.

"The result of all of this is that we're all living in an uber-anxiety driven world. Depression is off the charts," and something worsened with drug use, he added. This is so much of an issue that the life expectancy in America has dropped for the first time in 60 years due to the increasing number of suicides, he noted.

Giglio said he, too, knew what it was like to be "incapacitated" for months, weighed down by terrible depression and anxiety.

"But I also know this: God is still alive. And God has a plan."

He recalled a time where God prompted him with the knowledge that a young girl was contemplating suicide while at a youth conference where thousands of high schoolers attended. Giglio had a visual impression from the Holy Spirit that someone in the room had devised a plan to commit suicide, and had written a letter in the journal to her family and the details of how she would end her life.

Wanting to be attentive to the Lord in that moment, he interrupted the conference at an opportune time and asked everyone to bow their heads, close their eyes, and began to encourage the crowd, noting that God sees the letter and that she is not alone. He briefly explained what God had shown him without giving details, and asked that if anyone had made suicide plans for them to raise their hand for prayer.

In a room full of approximately 4,000, somewhere between 100 to 200 young people raised their hands that they had made plans to kill themselves. Giglio was later told that where he was ministering that night took place in the ZIP code with the highest teen suicide rate in the nation.

The next day he received a message on social media telling him that she had scrapped her suicide plan, that God had moved in her heart, and that she was going to live for Him. When Giglio clicked on the profile picture, he realized that it was the girl he had seen in the vision. That event set the trajectory for the Passion Conference and his wanting to speak life into a generation riddled with anxiety, and teach them to reject the cultural premise that anxiety and depression is a part of life.

The goal of Passion 2019 is to be "sent out" but before that happens, it's important to know your identity, Giglio stressed.

"God isn't interested in getting you to do something. He wants you to understand that He sees you just like you are, right where you are, and He loves you. And His prayer for you is that you'd let Him set you free in these days."

Being free means knowing deep down in the depths of one's being that one is a beloved son or beloved daughter and that God is the perfect Father, he explained.

"For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear. But you received the Spirit of sonship. And by Him, by this Spirit, we cry, Abba, Father," he said, reading from Romans 8:15.

The primary relationship with God is not as students of the Bible, workers in the Kingdom, but father and child, he went onto say. And thus, he added, the enemy's goal has been to shatter fatherhood.

"If the enemy succeeded in smashing up your view of Father then it's possible that you're going to have difficulty with that primary relationship that God wants to have with you," Giglio said.

Bad earthly fathers, be they abusive, absent, uninterested, or passive compound this problem, he said.

He finished his talk by inviting the crowd to receive the love of the Father, as Abba and for anxiety and depression to break, and for people who were planning to commit suicide.

Passion 2019 is the first year the conference has been held in four different venues — two in Atlanta, Georgia, one in Dallas, Texas, and one in Washington, D.C. — simultaneously. As a result, there has been around 8,000 more attendees this year than in previous years. The Passion Conference began Wednesday and will conclude on Friday.