Grateful

This week was a little rough for me. I know this because everyone in my house had trouble sleeping. Eva, by all likely accounts, has an ear infection. (We'll be visiting the doctor tomorrow morning- pronto!) Kyle has been up late studying every night. I have been tossing, turning, and worrying! I am a world-class worrier. If there is something I can worry about, something even remotely possible, I will worry about it. For example, every time it thunderstorms I worry one of the trees in our backyard will fall on our house. I know it could happen because it happened to a friend of mine. It doesn't matter that all of the trees are healthy; I'm convinced that my worrying is keeping them up and off our roof.

Alas, I digress. What had me going this week were serious matters. Every now and then I'm reminded again how precious life is. Two dear friends of mine faced very difficult challenges this last month. One gave birth to a stillborn baby with a neural tube defect, and one's newborn son was born prematurely and diagnosed with Down Syndrome. I have witnessed these friends move through their grief (and joy) with grace. I have been awed by God's presence in their lives. Each one recounted to me that they felt the Lord with them when things seemed most dire, and both are finding the strength to hope and trust that God's plan remains before them. In my conversations with my friend who lost her baby, our focus has centered on the concept of risk. For her, it takes an enormous amount of trust, strength and faith to dare to hope for a healthy baby again. What it seems to come down to is that trying for a baby is risky, being pregnant is risky, giving birth is risky, and being a parent is risky. Having and sharing a life with a child is the ultimate risk and reward. There is no promise of how things might turn out. For us, Eva's birth was scary and unexpected. In many ways, it represented a valley in our lives, and the fear of what might happen sometimes won out over my faith that things would be okay. As I thought about my friends this week, what kept me up at night was my desire to be there for them, and also the realization of just how amazingly grateful I am for the way things turned out for our little one. We have come such a long way! I also realized that I would not hesitate a moment to do it all again, even if I did not know how well things would turn out, just for the chance to be Eva's mom.

"Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof."
-Khalil Gibran