Dear Abigail | On Your First Birthday

Dear Abigail,

Oh my sweet girl. I can’t believe you are one year old today. It feels like just days ago I was in the hospital with you still tucked in my belly. It feels like just days ago I met you for the first time, your wiggly self placed on my chest, tears streaming down my face with the pure ecstasy of that moment with you. It feels like just days ago we brought you home, stepping inside our quiet little house that has never felt the same since because now it is the house we brought you home to. It’s unreal to me how those moments feel so close in my memory and yet they were a whole year ago. 

You are growing so fast. You toddle around some now, but when you really want to get somewhere fast, you crawl. You’re a lightning-fast crawler, a girl on a mission. You love stuffed animals - some favorites being your Steffy bear, Nemo, Winnie the Pooh, and your meerkat. You also love to play with your Little People barn, putting the animals inside the barn and shutting the little white doors. Recently you’ve created your own little hidey-nook behind the chair in your room, and you take toys and books with you to play in your own little spot. A few days ago you took a small pillow with you and reclined against it after you set it down against the wall just the way you wanted. I can’t help but marvel at who you are. 

Tonight, after you drifted off, I sat next to you and watched you sleep. I prayed over you, that you would grow in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Your daddy tells you every day that we love you and Jesus loves you. I don’t know how much I’m doing right with you, if I’m mothering you well, caring for you well, but as you sleep I try to memorize the length of your eyelashes, the gentle pattern of your breath, the curve of your ear. I try to memorize these things about you and I pray and it feels a bit like faithfulness. 

I love you dearly, my sweet girl. I can’t believe you’re one year old. I can’t believe I’ve been loving you and mothering you for a full year. You are a gift to me beyond words and I am thankful for you. I love you and Jesus loves you. 

Happy birthday Abigail. 

Love,

Mom 

Photo by the amazing Jenna L Richman Photography.

The Keeping & The Kept

I’m not very good at resting. Which is something that can sound like a #humblebrag except that so much of scripture talks about rest and to not do it well shows my lack of faith in a pretty blatant way. 

On Fridays, my husband keeps the Sabbath. (For most people, a Sabbath day makes more sense on a Saturday or Sunday, but in a pastor’s house those days are busy workdays. So we are thankful for quiet Fridays here.) Yesterday morning I asked my husband to help me learn to rest better, and he - in typical wise Josiah style - said he thought my problem was all internal. “Why do you feel like you can’t rest, love?”

To be honest I’m not entirely sure. There are probably cultural expectations I could blame, or the mental weight of not contributing financially to our family like I did when I was working full-time, or the practical things like laundry and dirty dishes and diaper genies that need emptied. What feels truer (and more sweeping, less romantic, and wholly embarrassing) is that I functionally think of myself as the little-g god of my life. I feel responsible for our successes and failures. I feel as though I can stave off the bad and invite only the good if I just work hard enough at this mother-and-wife-hood thing. 

While I cognitively know this isn’t true, while I know all the hard work in the world doesn’t guarantee any sort of favorable outcome for anyone in my life, it’s hard to stop doing the mental math of faithfulness. I know good works don’t equal blessings from God and yet this is the place I find myself on Friday mornings when I’m feeling especially guilty about sitting on the couch doing nothing. 

I said approximately none of this to my husband though. Instead I resolved (as one often does in January of a new year) to try it. Instead of running ragged trying to keep everything afloat, I will rest. I will submit to my limitations of time and effort and energy, the limitations of my body to be constantly moving, the limitations of my mind to try to work out what everyone needs and when. This practice is good and holy, I think. Even if it feels maddening and itchy to begin with. I don’t think there’s any magic in keeping the sabbath, but I do think there is wisdom in it. 

And so yesterday I kept the sabbath for the first time in a long time. I read a book and watched West Wing and took a nap. I accepted the generosity of the language around sabbath in the Bible - “keep the sabbath” - because it has already been given to me as a child of God and I need only to keep it, enjoy it, enter into it. And while I did that, while I rested and embraced the limits God has wisely placed on me as a human being, the world kept turning. In fact I’m quite sure we are all better off for it because I’m entering this week with fresh, newfound energy and joy. In this keeping of the sabbath, as in all things, my Father in heaven is keeping me. Thanks be to God. 

I'm Feeling 22

Today I turn 22. 21 was a hard year. It didn’t pull any punches. 22 has me walking in with my fists covering my eyes, trying not to make my flinching seem so obvious.

Unlike other birthdays, this one feels especially weighty. I used to cringe when people would ask me on my birthday, “So, how does it feel to be __ years old?” because it always felt exactly the same as being the age I was the day before. Nothing felt changed. This year though, I feel changed, different, older, in some good ways and some bad ways.

21 stands behind me with death and loss and pain and sadness, and this new year stands in front of me with newness and life and heartache and probably more pain because pain is constant, isn’t it? I wish I knew how to walk into the year confidently, but I’m finding myself wanting to curl up into a tiny ball and stay right where I am.

I feel older, yes. I feel more equipped to love others well and to stand in hard places where I wouldn’t have been comfortable standing a year ago. I feel too old to settle for easy answers and trite platitudes as a response to pain, though I am too young still to hear those trite platitudes and automatically respond with grace instead of anger. I feel old enough to know how much is not black-and-white, how much our intentions matter and how many different ways our words can be twisted and misunderstood. I feel weariness in my soul that seems like an older kind of weariness, the kind that starts to settle into a heart as a person experiences more of the world’s pain and more of the comfort that can only come from the Lord.

At the same time, I feel too young to do much of what 22 will require of me. I feel much too young to nurture and care for another human being. I feel much too young to faithfully care for my home and my husband. I feel much too young to respond to questions quickly and gracefully, pointing the person to Christ instead of trying to point them to myself.

I feel too old and too young to be 22, and if we’re being really honest, that angst probably adds another reason why I’m too young, too insecure, too unprepared.

And yet I am known, at 21 and 22, by the God who knows when I sit down and when I rise up, knows when I am feeling too young and too old, knows when I am unprepared and scared, knows when I am too sure of myself and not leaning in closely enough to him.

The Psalmist writes,

“You hem me in, behind and before,

   and lay your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me…”

This is where I find myself, somehow both unsure and sure at the same time, and hemmed in, behind and before, by a Father who knows and cares for me deeply and who has laid his hand upon me and this year of being 22.

Photo Credit: The incredibly talented Jenna Richman.