Today marks 17 weeks. Almost halfway through this PAL. Honestly, it hasn’t been nearly as hard as I was expecting for it to be, but it has definitely not been without its challenges. With each passing week we grow more attached to the tiny, pomegranate-sized, human in my womb. We plan a little further into the future. We imagine life with 2 kiddos at home. Yet, we also grow more weary of all the things that might be wrong in there… When people ask how I’m feeling or how baby is doing, I have no choice but to answer something like this: “we have no reason to believe anything is wrong, but we also had no reason to worry about George either…. so, there’s a lot of desire, and honest need, to get to that anatomy scan. Simply so we can know. Something”
Most often, the response is along the lines of “don’t worry about it, everything is going to be fine” and while I don’t take that to be offensive, its not very helpful. I can’t just tell my nervous mind to stop being nervous. I can’t rewrite our history. Our son was perfectly fine until he wasn’t. And in one 45 minute sonogram, our baby went from healthy and happy to dying. I can’t erase that experience. I can’t void that transaction and just forget that our baby was healthy until he wasn’t. So for now, the two or so weeks that we have left before we take a good look at the baby growing inside me, seems like forever away. Because at this point, this baby is both healthy and not. There are so many things that can be going right. There are also so many things that can be going wrong. The difference this time, is that no matter what news we get on November 7th (and I truly pray that its all good news), we KNOW that we can and will survive. Because no matter what happens in that ultrasound room on that day, God is with us and we have already lived through the worst and survived.
All of that being said, this baby is so very likely healthy. And we are hoping and praying and believing that this baby is healthy. When Audrey expresses her desire for this baby to come live us, we agree with her. Because we have loved and lost. And now we are cautious in our assumptions. Not because we don’t trust our great Father, but simply because trauma has touched our lives and it cannot be forgotten as we experience this new pregnancy. We are acutely aware of the brokenness of this earth since Adam and Even took those bites of that fruit. We are also intimately aware of the presence of our God in this brokenness. That is the hope we can carry with us each day. That is the source of our optimism when we find ourselves in those fleeting moments; moments where we briefly forget that the worst is always possible, and just cling to that hope that comes only from our Father in heaven.
I love that worship song, “Reckless Love” and how it talks about all the places that God will go to fight for us and show us His infinite love.
There's no shadow You won't light up
Mountain You won't climb up
Coming after me
There's no wall You won't kick down
Lie You won't tear down
Coming after me
It reminds me that even when I don’t trust perfectly, God still loves me. He still wants me. It points me to those moments when I’ve been so so broken and felt that totally reckless love that comes completely over me and fills those cracks and soothes those scars, because He is so GOOD and so good to me. I try to be very diligent and intentional about bringing all of these fears and worries to His feet. I can say without question that I’m pretty good at laying them there for Him to take up. Its the next step that gets me: leaving them there and not trying to pick them back up. Often it feels like telling Audrey to pick up her shoes and then picking them up for her because I’m tired of waiting for them to get put away. Its so easy to fall into the routine of just trying to do it myself, because that seems so much easier than resting in His timing. So I’m going to keep reminding myself that His timing is actually perfect, whether it makes sense to me or not. And in those times when I have to remind myself of that, I’m going to give that lack of trust right back to God and tell myself that no Jillian, you don’t NEED to pick those things back up, you simply WANT to. But who actually wants to carry all those burdens on their own? Not me. So why do I try over and over?? Because I’m not perfect. But I am deeply loved and fought for. And that’s all I need. Every day He is my portion.
Two weeks…
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.” Lamentations 3:24
