Moments of Grace: In the Fullness of TIme

I remember when we lost our second baby, Tristan, to miscarriage. It was hard to understand or accept why God would allow such a thing to happen. Yet, when Tristan's due date came and I was already pregnant with Judah, it made sense to me. Holding sweet Judah in my arms as a tiny one and whispering his name to him which means, "to praise",  I knew that in the fullness of time God had allowed such a suffering as a pregnancy loss for such a glory as Judah's beautiful life.

The moment of Judah's accident last week keeps me awake at night. The juxtaposition of the happy and delightful moments before is hard for my soul to digest. It had been an intense week, and I'd been caught up in the to-dos before we departed for Texas. On that day, with the sun shining and my children laughing and playing so delightedly, I made a conscious decision to just BE and PLAY for as long as we could.

I sat there gazing at our darlings playing and in a moment everything changed, as his little leg was broken in front of my eyes, and my whole being unable to stop it from happening. Delighted laughs to pain in an instant.

I have had to work to make peace with the fact that God allowed it to happen. Such a suffering, body and soul, for our son....and then I realized something beautiful!

Our Ezekiel is big...huge as a matter of fact. He is 100th percentile for height, 96th for weight, and wearing clothing that Judah was wearing last summer. It has been comical trying to understand 2 brothers built so differently, or even comprehend why I was given this particular challenge of an absolutely enormous baby to tote around in a season of life where the demands on me were already intense enough. My arms, legs, and back are strong by necessity because of going through the daily rigours of motherhood with a ginormous hunk of love on my hips. 

And then, a few days ago, as I was carrying Judah from one place to another and he felt like an absolute feather, I realized that in the fullness of time this beautiful grace was allowed....that I would have the strength and stamina to tend to a child who was rendered immobile by an accident. While it is a slight inconvenience to carry him everywhere, it is not in any way too difficult for me physically. This gives sweet Judah a sense of being safe, secure, held, supported, and in no way a burden for us in his brokenness.

Outside of time, and in His eternal perspective, God the Father saw fit to give me this consolation....knowing the sadness of a child with a broken limb, and knowing that it would take extra strength to help him navigate this challenge without discouraging him, I was blessed with a super huge chunky baby to build my muscles up.

Truly it may seem far fetched, but I know for a fact, with deep Faith, that this gift has been given us. I revel in this small inkling of the workings of God's grace in the midst of our human freedom,  and I say, "thank you."

"Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might He increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint."                

Isaiah 40: 28-31

Grade 1 for Our Little Lamb

I always hope this year has a special place in the recesses of my heart, the first year that I had the privilege and the challenge of educating our daughter at home.

When she was just tiny, I always called Liliana my little lamb...tender, intuitive, slightly clumsy, daring, introverted....happy to be held close by mama always. 

My little Liliana Lamb 

Kindergarten at our nearby school was not a bad experience, but our Liliana suffered from the anxiety of an education system very much oriented to the outgoing and the extroverted. Lots of group work and a structure that is necessarily conducive to the good of the majority meant that she was very much lost in the crowd. She started biting her nails and struggled to fall asleep at night. Her sense of wonder and delight seemed to fade. She had lovely friends and an amazing teacher, but she was not thriving and our hearts were troubled!

Over the summer we saw our girl emerge again in confidence, playfulness, and peace. The thought of sending her to school for 8 hour days, when Judah would miss her terribly AS WOULD I, gently guided my heart towards another possibility. I felt so sad that the only time we would have with her would be a few precious hours at night....  I started reading, and researching, and considering the possibility of teaching her at home - which, by the way, is something I never would have imagined in my most WILD dreams! So of course we also prayed hard for wisdom and discernment. 

Ann Voskamp

Of course, this year was not without its challenges, and I had a few moments of feeling woeful for the reality of being surrounded by small children all.the.time. I had a few pity parties for "all the things I could get done" if I was not teaching Liliana. 

That being said I did have moments of respite, because she spent 2 days per week learning at a little cottage school, so beautifully devoted to instilling in children a sense of wonder and delight....and, get this, her age group was called "The Little Lambs!"

And, when I really took it to prayer, is there anything more important, more pressing, or more eternally relevant than forming our sweet one - intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually - in the heart of our home?

No, because it was obvious to me as her mama that this unique little soul needed to be learning close to home, at least for now, and so that is what we did. 

A few lessons for me from the year...

 - we are our children's advocates, voices, ambassadors - we do not have to be swayed by convention or "the way it is always done." We can decide with boldness and confidence the best for them, without apologizing or justifying - for me, as a pleaser, this was a very important lessons. One I always knew but got to live this year

- Never say never! Gosh am I learning this humbling lesson over and over again in motherhood

- the delight of seeing the world of reading books unfold before a child is really a privilege to witness, and what an honour for me, as her mama, to be primarily instrumental in facilitating this!

- the flexibility of learning at home is unmatched! We only ever spent 3 hours maximum at school, and even then took some days or even weeks off because we were getting too far ahead!

- friendship between siblings is a precious, beautiful thing to witness. This seems so random for this blog, but my goodness am I happy that the friendship between Liliana and Judah only grew deeper this year!

I could go on and on about the gifts and challenges of this year! I am grateful to be wrapping it up, I am grateful for the break, I am grateful for a little girl who is thriving and blossoming. She is joyfilled, bouncy, messy, determined, delightful, innocent, and loves her family, Jesus, and her neighbour with sweet devotion. What a year it has been for our Little Lamb!

My sweet Liliana, I loved teaching you this year. Thank you, my darling, for the most heart-stretching time learning together on this new journey!

To the Neighbour With the Dilapidated House

There is a certain route we always take on foot, because it leads us to several important places.....the swimming pool, the library, the mall, the grocery store, and Nanny's house for Sunday dinner. For years there has been a house we walk by, and it is utterly dilapidated. The paint has peeled off, the shutters are falling off, the fence has boards missing, and through the windows you can see shabby curtains hanging by a thread. To make it worse, there are 2 cars in the back driveway, without licence plates, and sitting on flat tires. 

I never felt disgusted or appalled by the people that owned that home, but I did wonder what was wrong that so much was going wrong, and it was more out of a sick curiosity than a sense of sympathy...certainly not empathy.

We have come through a hard winter. Our children have been sick lots, we are piecing together income, and things (actual physical things) in our life sort of seem to be falling apart! The faux leather chairs are peeling, there is a dent in the side of our van from someones runaway Costco cart, that silly patch of lawn that keeps dying no matter how much we love it is even more dead, the paint is peeling on the outside of our home, tea towels are stained and shabby looking. I truly could go on, it has felt like a perfect storm, and the reality is that we don't have the resources now to replace or fix things! We are not hard off by any stretch, but the extra that it takes to replace and repair isn't there for now. And nothing is necessarily wrong with us that things are going slightly sideways, it is just how it is for now, despite our efforts for otherwise and because of certain things we've prioritized.

And as my sweet skipping son and I were strolling past the dilapidated house a few days ago I felt such love for those people and their story. They have a story...a sacred story, maybe a tragic story, possibly a story with many triumphs also. Perhaps they are trying hard, perhaps they have given up and sit drinking their morning coffee looking out the shabby blinds and not even noticing them anymore. Then I think of us....I cringe over our peeling chairs if we have invited someone over, but during our family dinners when our little loves are sitting on them, we notice our little loves and not the silly peeling chairs. And we delight in them, and we smile. 

And so I know that everything happens for a reason and truly to every thing there is a season. Maybe some have seasons of suffering or hardship that last many years, our season has been short so far, but I see the Divine Refiner working His fire on my soul, softening it, reshaping it, even allowing it to be tired and weary. Because out of that tired and weary comes a heart more able to see others and their story, truly see with the eyes of the soul and a tender glance. 

Maybe we will have a chance to run in to these people on one our walks, and maybe we can offer them a friendly and even empathetic greeting of hello and how are you. May it be so!

Moments of Grace: It's OK Daddy Can Fix It

We have a spot on our kitchen counter, by the telephone and the (dirty) windows, where there is typically a line up of broken toys waiting for Daddy's magic touch.

Saying goodbye to their hero as he heads off to  "bring home the bacon"!

It doesn't matter if the toys are worth 10 cents, or whether their injury is tiny (like when tiny figurine Ariel lost her nose!), or whether the toy has been broken 8 times before. ...it's always OK because Daddy can fix it. The part of me that hates junk and clutter always wants to get rid of broken toys. However, the children have the most staunch and everlasting conviction that their daddy will attempt to fix anything.  And so, I always tell them to put it up there and Daddy will take care of it when he has a chance.

We will finally get the children settled in bed and I'll come out to see him standing with tweezers in his hand and the handy gorilla glue meticulously restoring Ariel's nose or Thor's hammer tip. He always tries. He then has to set up some sort of crazy scenario to hold the repair in place while the glue dries. 

Most often the repair leaves the toy looking a little different than it was brand new. Sometimes, he has to tell them that he did his best but it might not last too long, and other times he has to tell them that there is really no way for him to restore life to the beloved toy.

Yet it struck me the other day that he is never ever bothered by the sweet line up of toys, or the requests for him to fix something. He stands taller knowing his children believe that he will always try, and no matter how many bigger or more important things he has on the go he will make time for their petitions.

Judah had a dream to play dress-up a kilt like Braveheart....so of course Daddy made time to cut up one of his old work shirts and even sewed a button on so it stayed up!

Wasting time with our children, such an important thing to do!

It struck me further that this must be how our Father in Heaven sees our prayers of petition. He doesn't mind, He isn't bothered, He rejoices in our hearts turned to him with our requests. I stop myself from bringing mundane or simple prayers to Him.....telling myself that there are bigger and more important things for Him to deal with. But when I think how Joe would be heartbroken if the children refrained from bringing their toys to him in their sweet clenched little hands, I can understand how our Father in Heaven desires for us to bring everything to Him and never believe that something is too mundane to bring to His throne. For He rejoices mostly in the unburdening of our hearts, the expressions of our worries, our fears, and even our requests of "Daddy will you fix this?"

Can He always fix it to make it like new? No. He knows when something is better left unfixed or slightly different than what it was before. But will He ever refuse to receive us? No. Will He ever scoff at our little needs? No. He loves our little line of broken things waiting for His magic touch.

I am so grateful for my little ones! May I treasure these days of little broken toys and sweet innocent hearts that believe a kiss can fix a bump or bruise. May my love show them the love of their Father in heaven. 

When You Realize Your Greatest Dream Has Already Come True

Several afternoons ago I sat the baby on the carpet and took my sweet husband by the hands. As the children played around us I looked into his eyes and said, "I need you to know that in this beautiful life of ours, everything good and hard that has happened....our children, our adventures, our life, YOU are my greatest dream come true. I don't know what is going to happen or where we will end up but it doesn't matter, because the deepest dream of my heart is already a reality."

He needed to hear it, I needed to say it....

He is my greatest dream come true.

The night he proposed to me, what joy!

It came to me in my early morning prayer time. I was reflecting on Hannah and her prayer of grief and torment as she begged to be blessed with a son. The writer of the reflection commented that hope transforms prayer from pleading to worship. It brought me back to my broken anxious prayers for someone who would see me, love me, and want me as I am with all my quirks. Broken and fragile from a previous relationship with a man who didn't care enough to be faithful, and who liked to use words like "pathetic" to describe me, I wondered if my heart's shape had become too disfigured to fit another's.

Then this boy came along, not really a man yet, and he wore his nobility of heart on his sleeve. He truly was so captivated by me, my mind, my face, my heart, my dreams that he sometimes was lost for words. I brought him to his knees, and he brought me to mine, and together we prayed a prayer of praise for this love that seemed like a fairy tale. I was so captivated by his eager search for truth and his determined virtue, and his big dreams! We were going to conquer the world together.

Fast forward all of these years in our love story and we are tired. We have three beautiful exhausting children, and to top it all of he has been without steady income for a half a year. Most days it feels like we are just keeping our heads above water, and we fall asleep holding pinkies or touching feet with a nursing baby hogging the space in between us.

Our little Ezekiel's baptism day

I became disillusioned because with his previous steady income came a flood of exciting possibilities. Perhaps we could buy a home, take a warm vacation, start putting some money away for retirement, renew our wedding vows in Italy, buy Joe the truck of his dreams, educate our children how and where we want, etc etc etc. It sort of went away overnight when the company he was working for had to be put on the shelf in the midst of our struggling economy.

And so it feels like we have been in the trenches, and as I am keeping the home and educating our children, he is doing battle to bring in enough to live off of. He feels like he is letting us down, and he feels responsible for any struggles we might have, even though he is not! And we both are tempted to feel like our dreams are becoming farther away. 

Until I realized my dream is standing right beside me each day, through thick and thin. Those other "dreams" would be nice, but they are fluff and he is the real deal.

...in the midst of the grief, the cross, or the exhaustion, he is patient, devoted, determined, hard working, tender, and funny. He loves our children magnificently and witnesses to them what it looks like when a husband loves his wife with all his heart and will. Who knows if he will change the world as a career man, but he is absolutely changing the world through how he loves his family. 

All is grace. "When all is grace we can wait out our pain and longing in hope. When all is grace, we can give God back our answered prayers in faith. When all is grace, we can see salvation coming in glimpses and flashes, and take up our place in its story. When all is grace, we can be drunk with grief and bold with hope all at once. Because this is just what salvation is: the cradle and the cross, the grace and the stone rolled away, the dark days before a savior and the lit up skies of 'Hosanna in the highest.'"

All glory to God! How fortunate I am.