It is late. A. is sleeping
next to me and I’m pressing the keys on my keyboard down as lightly as I can in
the hope that I won’t disturb him. It
doesn’t seem to make my typing any quieter.
Our door is open and I can hear the sound of the noisemakers from the
girls’ and Logan’s room coming from their open doorways. I like being awake at night when all the
doors are open and I know my kids are asleep.
I feel close to them even though I can’t see them. Someday (soon) they’ll be teenagers and sleep
with their doors closed. I won’t have to
wonder if Reagan will wake me up at 11:00 p.m. or 4:00 a.m. or anywhere in
between, because she won’t be six anymore, and will no longer climb into bed
with us. I’ll hold onto their being
little while I can.
The baby is moving in my belly as I write this. I wonder if this little person is a girl or a
boy? I almost can’t believe we didn’t
find out. I think part of me really
wondered if we’d cave and go ahead and ask the technician what we’re
having. I’m glad we didn’t. I think I would have been really
disappointed, even though it is going to be soooo hard to wait another twenty
weeks to find out.
It was such a relief to me when
the doctor at the imaging department told me that everything looked okay. There are so, so, so many things that can go
wrong. I actually felt a little sick with relief as we were leaving the
ultrasound. And then I cried because so many of my friends have lost
sweet babies. It breaks my heart. All my happiest moments seem to
be tinged with sadness.
Our sermon at church today was
about suffering and why it is something that we have to deal with, dating back
to Adam and Eve and their choice to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and
evil, allowing sin and sickness to enter the world. I was reminded of the time when Avery was
four-and-a-half and I had briefly explained that concept to her. A few days later we were talking about
something else and she said, “Mom, why did God start with just two
people?” Before I could answer she said,
“Adam and Eve were kind of naughty.
They ate that bad tree. And that
makes me angry with Adam and Eve. And
kind of sad. And a little bit scared.” Me too, kiddo.
A thought I took with me from today’s sermon was that
sometimes, we want to look at God and say that if He is all loving and all
powerful and bad things still happen, then He must not exist. But taking God away doesn’t remove our
problems or our suffering, it just removes any possible solution to them. Knowing that God has an ultimate plan for us
that is bigger than our troubles on earth helps give meaning to our lives. The pastor reminded us that we are not alone
in our sorrows, and that God enters into our suffering with us. Jesus suffered for us. He quoted the writer John Stott as saying, “I
could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross…. In the real world of pain, how could one
worship a God who was immune to it?”
I’ve been reading Bonhoeffer
for part of a reading challenge I am doing with my sister. (Next week I’ll tell you all the details of
the challenge and how you can participate if you want.) The book hasn’t even begun to scratch the
surface of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis yet, but Bonhoeffer’s mother
just lost one of her sons in the First World War and was almost undone by her
grief, in spite of her deep faith. I
thought again of my friends, and of my mom who lost my brother five years ago.
We are
not guaranteed comfort and safety in this life.
We are living in uncertain times, in a lot of ways,
and even if there were nothing to fear from terrorism or mass shootings, there
would still be cancer, car accidents, and stillbirths. I am thankful that everything looked good on
the ultrasound, but I know that there is still so much that could go wrong. It’s comforting to me to listen to the quiet
of my family sleeping, to feel my baby moving in my belly, and know that right
now, we are okay. I don’t know what will
happen tomorrow, but I do know that God is with us in our joy and in our
suffering, and He is not immune to pain.
