Through it all
As Nate and I celebrate twelve years since the day that little boy in big-boy skin asked that naive wee thing to marry him, we tell the world outside our home that, as with Jacob’s Rachel, He remembered.
Twelve years later, He remembered.
Spring. I wanted a one-time miracle, a story I could shout from the rooftops that says, “Our God heals against all odds!” But He first gave me six long and quiet stories under this roof. Each of us preached the message of His healing with our lives, and this was only the beginning. This family of mine, we share a beautiful branding. All of us wear His scars.
Now I can only whisper the glory streaming forth with this baby announcement because it is so sacred to my story. It speaks of a healing, a remembrance, that didn’t just happen the day my womb opened.
Year one of winter felt like a lifetime. Year five indicated that we’d crossed into new territory. At years seven, eight, hoping in the unseen was becoming too familiar. Yet the power of His hand as Healer was working, even then. We had hearts to be healed and understandings of Him to be mended and conversations with our Daddy to be initiated.
I lived hundreds of miracles in the winter, when the ground felt hard to the touch but life was germinating, thick, within me. My heart was revived in winter. He breathed on the fractured parts of me with a tenderness that left me lovestruck. All the while, I couldn’t let go of asking for another miracle.
If hope died, it would only be a reflection of how my perspective of Him, and what brings Him pleasure, had grown dim.
To know Him is to hope for the impossible.
I thought my open womb would be the best and only glory story, but instead He let me cradle the fruit of other women’s bodies. He introduced healing, our truest healing, into Nate and me in ways we never knew we needed.
My life has been living the healing that my body has only just now revealed. It will continue to do so, through the winters bound to come. A baby in my arms is not something our healing has earned, the culmination of our hope. We each have a deeper journey still.
So I lean in close to my twenty-three-year-old heart, and I whisper, You will meet a Man in this pain who will pick up the slivers of your story and write His name on each one. Your knowing Him, alone, through this, will make every tear worth it. Hold onto hope. Hold onto hope. Even those closest to you will challenge it, as the world around you collapses, but hope is your greatest weapon because it is His invitation into the Unseen. Hope requires a true view of God. And that true view of God is not natural. It’s from Him. One day, the Unseen will be more real to you than what your eyes can perceive.
Turning back from myself as a young bride, I wrap my arms around the girth that now holds a child. Whispering, shouting, silent, I say, Father, I am overwhelmed by this new way You are showing Yourself to me as Healer. And I know that You are no more good today than You were a year ago.
You are good... to me.
