a promise from God on a hopeless morning

People with blonde eyebrows make squinty faces when the sun shines, which happens to be 93% of the time in Norfolk. When we have news about the adoption, we'll let you know. As of right now we're still in the part before the home study.

I still, thank God, have a little baby growing inside me. We're almost to seven weeks. It's hard to explain the feeling for this baby, though I imagine it's pretty easy for y'all to understand. Our last baby died, but not before we made it to twenty-five weeks. So seven weeks, seems so dismally small. So far from the goal. And the goal is not some safe magic number of weeks. The goal is a living, breathing, blinking baby to hold in our arms. Until that goal is reached, I don't know how to express my feelings except to say that I wish and wish and want and want that this baby will live the longest, fullest life that anyone could live, but I can't even imagine that some day we'll have real, live children. 

I'm leaving those words because they're true. Two weeks from today, Lord willing, we'll hear this baby's heart beat for the first time. It's seems almost unlikely though, that the baby will be moving. That the heart will beat. Last time they went to listen to the heart beat of our baby, there was only that static silence. I'll have to steal myself from the room as she begins the process. I'm not even pessimistic. I'm not a worry wart. I'm not spending any time fretting over the life this baby may not get to live, but when I think about this baby, I like things like, "What are the chances?" and I know the answer. Mathematically. Scientifically. Even in the third trimester, three out of every thousand babies (in America) die. No one tells you that until you're the parent to one of those three. Someone has to have that giant loss and this nagging, quiet, fear that you'll never deliver a screaming baby into the world.

Pray for peace. For me. Peace that makes no sense at all. Pray for hope. Pray that I could come to expect that this child will live instead of die.

And then in my devotions this morning, after word vomiting this blog post, there was a promise...

Psalm 29:11, "The Lord will give strength unto His people: The Lord will bless His people with peace."

What a faithful, caring God we serve.