Dear Anna June,
You are one today my sweet girl. Your first year has been a full one - you spent hours and hours snuggled against me in your solly wrap; tasted your first bites of food; found your singing voice; rode in planes, trains, and automobiles; and have been loved by more people than I can count.
You’re our little wildflower, our fearless girl with a tender heart. The most beautiful blend of sweet and sassy.
Before you were born I took a walk along the lake and prayed over you, over your birth day. For 9 months I asked God for impossible things, and that day they felt even more impossible.
I wanted you to be born when you were ready and on your own time, and I was talking to Jesus about that when I spotted a doe with her fawn a few yards away.
I told Jesus I wanted you to be healthy and to take you home with me to meet your sister as soon as possible and then a rabbit and her bunnies hopped out of the grass where I was walking.
I wanted to hold you in my arms right away when you were born, and I whispered my fears to the Lord and he called to mind Luke 12:22: “Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds!” And right on the water in front of me a duck swam by with her ducklings trailing behind her.
Three animals and their babies all in a row and that verse of scripture in my mind and I felt my whole body exhale as I thought about God’s love for you far exceeding even my own.
A few weeks later I held you for the first time - a full term baby girl, all 9 pounds of you shouting to me of the Lord’s faithfulness.
My sweet girl, God has been answering prayers for you since before you were born.
This last year I’ve prayed for the Lord to bless you and keep you, to shine his face upon you, to be gracious to you, to give you peace. It is my joy and honor to be your momma, to pray these things over you, to watch you grow and explore and become who you were made to be.
Here’s to year two with you Anna June. What a gift you are.
With love,
Mom
Praying the Psalms
This piece was originally published at HorizonsResources.net
I find it hard to pray. This is an uncomfortable confession because, by all external standards, prayer should be easy for me by now. I grew up in a Christian home surrounded by family members who prayed and encouraged me to pray. I have been part of a church since my earliest memories, listening and learning from pastors and teachers who prayed confidently. I have read books about prayer, attended conferences, taken college courses focused on studying the Bible, and listened to countless sermons. I have all the credentials of someone who should be, at the very least, adequate at prayer. And yet it is the single most difficult and frustrating aspect of my relationship with God.
It hasn't always been this way. There have been seasons of my life, sweet and wonderful seasons, where prayer felt like an easy discipline. I would sit down to pray and find a few minutes had turned into a few hours and my notebook pages were full of my communication with God. There were times when prayer felt more urgent, but the discipline still felt natural, such as when a family member was battling cancer or my dad was in a serious car accident.
These seasons are not the norm for me, so prayer has most often felt difficult and awkward. As often as prayer is difficult, I feel like I should be better at it. I should be enjoying prayer more. I should come to prayer in awe that I can approach God at all rather than seeing prayer as a chore. I should have more to say because of what a gift it is to be able to say anything and know that I am heard and seen and loved by the Father.
Perhaps I am the only one who struggles like this. It has certainly felt that way in the past as people have shared with me how sweet their time with the Lord is. Prayer has seemed liked an inside joke I’d never understand, like something only an exclusive group of people ever fully experienced. I just didn’t get it.
Longing for Home
A few days after we announced my pregnancy to the world, there was a For Sale sign stuck into the grass in our front yard. A man showed up to our house to take photos of the rooms, and those photos were uploaded on a house listing. Strangers I’ll never meet have stepped foot in the closet where my clothes hang, the bathroom where I first learned there was a baby in my belly, the kitchen where I learned how to bake bread.
My husband and I are renting this house, and soon we’ll pack up our things and try again to make a home somewhere else.
I shouldn’t be so sentimental about a rental house, but we made this place a home and had no intention of leaving it so quickly. There’s an unmistakable feeling of being uprooted, of having the rug pulled out from under our feet yet again.
When I imagined the next few years of my life, I always imagined them against the backdrop of this home. I planned how we would arrange the furniture to turn one of the rooms into a nursery - a comfy chair in the corner by the window, changing table against that wall, crib other there. I imagined bringing home the baby growing in my belly to the familiar white walls and beige carpet. I imagined more dinners with my husband in the kitchen, celebrating Christmas this year in the living room, and watching more movies with our friends sprawled out on the couches.
When I saw the For Sale sign stuck in our yard, I was angry, the kind of angry that makes your heart beat fast in your chest and your eyes well up with tears. I blamed my anger on the sign, an exclamation point at the end of dashed hope that maybe we could stay here a little longer. When I finally got quiet and honest with myself, I was really angry at God.
Every morning it seems I wake up with a list running through my mind full of unmet expectations. I expected more years with my husband before taking on the titles of both wife and mom. I expected my aunt and uncle to be in my life for decades longer. I expected my job to be fulfilling rather than frustrating. I expected pregnancy to be easier physically than it has turned out to be. And I expected to live in this home for years, saving pennies away to hopefully buy a home later when we felt ready.
It seems no corner of my life has been left untouched by suffering these days. And yes, I trust that the Lord is good and loving and sovereign over each of these events and yes, I know each of these things can foster a greater dependence on him, and yes, I know there are still good things, candles in the darkness. But those words are so much easier to say than to live into, and I still find myself waking up to painful reminders of unmet expectations every morning.
Last week I texted one of my best friends a long list of all the things going wrong, all the things happening and not happening, all the things I want to stop and the things I fear will never stop. At the end of it, I was expecting her to echo back to me my own shame but she didn’t. She said all the things I had mentioned were really hard, and I cried.
Every new wave of suffering kept knocking the breath out of me, but life carried on as normal. There was no break, no slowness to process all the things that were happening. There were still dishes to do and laundry to wash and hours to work and prenatal vitamins to take. I felt like I had to carry on as normal too, talking to friends the same way, working the same way, praying the same way. I never made space to acknowledge I am sad and angry and confused.
My friend acknowledged it for me, and I think the Lord’s comfort is like that too. He has been present, witnessing the pain of his children and weeping with us. He never asked me to pretend like everything was great.
Nothing has been fixed, and if I’m honest, I don’t even feel all that much better. I am still sad and angry and exhausted. Acknowledging pain doesn’t make it go away, but I think it is a step in a good direction. I found myself echoing the psalmist this morning and praying, “How long, O Lord?” because I want things to be different, easier. They’re not yet and they may never be, but it was an honest prayer and I think God is after our honesty.
I don’t know what house I will be living in in a few months. I don’t know where the crib will be set up or what door I’ll walk through when the baby inside me has made his or her entrance into the world. It’s a hard place to be. Even in that hardness, what I know is that my heart is ultimately longing for home, true home, and that longing will not go unmet.
