Reflections & Thankfulness

On Friday night my husband and son joined me  in Thailand. I am overjoyed to have them here now. But I will forever be grateful to Sean for giving me these last two weeks on my own here. It has been a most relaxing time, filled with reflection, sleep, reading, preparing etc. 

One of the things I did those weeks was to go back and read what I had written during the most hard times of the last 2 years. I could barely start reading a post I had written then without bursting into tears. Because even though this baby I'm carrying now is real and will be here soon, the hurt of all those years is still real too. I wish i was a better writer so that I could truly express all I feel now. For starters, I am not sure if this is a common feeling people who walk through infertility have or not, but I still feel like this pregnancy and this baby are still 'dream like'. I wake up and still think, "Wow this is REALLY happening." I am not sure when it will all feel real, that there will be another life in our family! Maybe when we finally decide on a name {we are close but not quite there, another post to come on that hopefully before she arrives}. Maybe when we see her? I am not sure. And I also feel not ready to be done with being pregnant quite yet, which I realize may sound weird. Of course I am more than excited for this next part, but to know that this is it, the last time, is also difficult (and apparently way to hard for me to explain adequately - I hope I am not the only one out there who has gone through this though). But I trust the Lord with our family and what it does now and will in the future look like. I have no idea what that holds, but we are fairly certain that we won't be adding any more biological kids (via IVF) into our family. Anyway I am getting more and more excited by the day to meet our daughter (see that even feels weird to say!).

Reflecting back I also can't help but be overwhelmed by God's mercy to us in all of this. In giving this new life. There is nothing 'right' we did to deserve this. And it keeps flooding back into my mind how blessed we are, and how none of this is deserved. I read in Jesus Calling today (Oct 14) that "Bearing your circumstances bravely--even thanking me for them--is one of the highest forms of praise." I remember reading A Thousand Gifts of Thankfulness last year and how on the hardest of days (like when one of the babies we lost would be due, or when we thought we had lost this baby) it hurt to sit down and list things I was truly thankful for. But there were ALWAYS things to be thankful for. And on those days it was an act of obedience to list them out, to speak them out loud, and remember how blessed I really was/am. It reminds me of the song Blessed Be Your Name and the line, "When there is pain in the offering, blessed be your name." Not quite sure where I am going with all of this, but I wanted to write it all out for future reflection :)

Today I woke up and felt like thankfulness was just flowing out of me. It wasn't hard, it wasn't painful, it didn't feel like a sacrifice, it felt like it was unavoidable. I woke up thankful for: being next to my loving and self-sacrificing husband, the last two weeks of relaxation, the beautiful October Thailand weather, our super creative/funny/imaginative son (he comes in our bed in the morning and we play family games like today he was a little cobra in an egg and he would hatch then want to eat hamburgers, then cuddle with mom and dad then after he said "I love you" the Dad snake would give him poison in his fangs - we had about 14 of these 'cobra births' in our bed today), thankful for the place we are staying where we don't have to cook at all, thankful to be around all the people here and get to hear all their stories, thankful for technology that I can call and see my mom pretty much any time, thankful that my parents are coming all the way to the other side of the world to support us, thankful that there are a group of other boys staying here ages 6-12 and on the first morning here Caed looked out the window saw one and said to us, "I see a boy around my age out there, I'm going to go be his friend, I'll see you guys later tonight!", thankful for that kind of personality in him who loves to make new friends and who is overjoyed to be around "English kids" {right now he has been off with them for over an hour, I can occasionally hear them and their antics}.

 So yeah the list can go on, easily. It reminds me how easy it is to overflow with thankfulness in the good times, and how hard it was to sputter out thankfulness in the hard times. So those words today from the JC book were good "Joy emerges from the ashes of adversity through your trust and thankfulness."

I know there will be many ups and downs in the future and I hope I can come back and read this and remember to "Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Jesus Christ" - the verse we have hanging in our living room. 

And now it is time to head to the pool for a mid-morning swim with my baby cobra. 

my heart is happy