“A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world.”
John 16:21
I gave birth to three babies in three years. Pregnancy and childbirth are amazing but they’re also tiring, long, painful, and crushing in many ways. A few months after my body had begun healing from the first pregnancy, the pain was already a distant memory. (Of course, my brain was so foggy then, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what I had for dinner the night before.…) But my eyes could clearly see the precious baby in front of me. He had won us all over; Jason, Ali and I were so in awe of sweet little Isaiah that we almost immediately started talking about having another baby. When he was five months old, I was pregnant again. The second time around the pregnancy was much harder. My body had not had time to heal all the way, especially my core strength (AKA pancake abs). I had an infant and a four year old. I decided that time around I was going to keep a journal and make sure to note how uncomfortable I was and how unpleasant being pregnant was, because I knew as soon as we laid eyes on our beautiful little Josephine, it would all be a distant memory. We waited a little longer the next time. I intentionally gave myself almost a year to recover before diving into pregnancy again. Now, our handsome little man Noah is six months old—my favorite baby stage—and the anguish of pregnancy and child birth is a fading memory, while the baby sleeping in the crib across the room, the one who is growing way too fast, brings us joy daily.
We’re in the midst of a tough transition right now. It’s been more than 3 months since we moved out of our clean, new, peaceful, modern house and into our old, dirty, cluttered, remodel project home. It’s been over one month since the original kitchen was removed. That’s one month of cooking dinners without an oven or stove and then hand-washing dishes in the bathroom sink. I like order, beauty, simplicity. It’s hard to not let the chaos surrounding me impede my access to Peace and Patience. This transition feels a bit like the anguish of child birth. Before long, we’ll forget the pain of this season as we enjoy our new, finished home. I want to remember how much we did, the layers of house history we uncovered, how the kids helped us, the friends who came and worked along side us. I want to remember how we grew and got stronger as a family and as individuals while we waded through the challenges of living in a big renovation project. God is doing important work on us while we’re working on and through this renovation and I don’t want to forget.
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