Round Two (or Three).

Themes seem to recur in my life.
Maybe I haven't learned their lessons yet so the Lord keeps bringing them around?

After you have a baby the doctors tell you to "take it easy for a while."
That's a pretty ambiguous phrase. How long is a while? Isn't "Easy" kind of a relative term?
What exactly do they mean by "strenuous housework?"
Really, it was all very curious to me.
So basically for the first couple of weeks I just did nothing but stare at my baby, and I mean, when she looks like this, how do you blame me?

Doing our morning devotions.

I hope she always sleeps like this.

But after a few weeks of staring at the baby and luxuriating on the sofa, you do start wondering what the balance is between soaking this baby stage in and realizing that life just keeps on going...and I have to go with it.
How is a new mom to proceed with life?!? The prescribed six weeks of rest was getting a little long, I felt. I mean, even to ME six weeks is a little excessive.
Eventually, I just had to get off the couch.



Now what?

Friends and family and church members had been so generous and sweet as to supply us with meals, so I didn't need to cook yet. I had scrubbed my baseboards and floors at least three times in the week or two prior to delivery, so they were still looking pretty good. I wasn't supposed to exercise yet, so that wouldn't be getting me moving. Hubbs always mows the yard, so I didn't need to do that. I wasn't supposed to lift heavy bags of rock or soil to get my container garden planted, so that was out of the question. I am afraid of dogs, so I didn't want to walk my new baby around in suburbia (aka "We have pets, not children" land). I am new to town, so I didn't have any best friends I could just drop in on. We don't own this house, so I couldn't paint anything or rip anything out. We only really have a front yard, so I didn't even feel comfortable just going outside and sitting.
Yikes.
"Ah!" I thought. "I will go pull weeds in the landscaping!" But then I remembered that this is a rental and the land lord has chosen the easy-to-maintain "rock garden" for this property.
So there were no weeds.

Blast it all.

And for the first time in my life I didn't really have anything I could do. Nothing needed to be done.
And that will make anyone feel pretty melancholy.

Typically in my life early June had been a bustling time! Planting gardens, weeding flower beds, harvesting early crops, cleaning and painting and priming and getting everything all ready for summer, being outside all the time to enjoy the warmth! You have to do it now or it doesn't get done! And even when I hadn't owned my own house and didn't have those types of things to do I was either moving and unpacking and setting up shop (like last year), or making all kinds of weddings happen (as in previous years), or packing up to head to the Pacific Northwest or the Middle East or wherever.
None of that was to be done this year.

So I sat back down on the couch and I felt what a lack of Dominion feels like. I have talked about this before, and it truly is something the Lord has impressed greatly upon my life.
 By not tending, by not stewarding, I really started to understand that work is a gift from the Lord. We are creatures who need something to do.

Now, all these revelations being said, that still didn't stop me from being in a bit of a malaise. I KNEW beyond any doubt that that is what we are called to do as humans and without it we wither.
And I felt like I was withering. And I started to go into a pity party that I didn't live in the country so I couldn't walk freely, without having to fear neighbors' dogs. And I was becoming unthankful for our cute little rental cottage because it didn't have any weeds for me to pull and I couldn't dig up the ground to just plant a regular garden. I started doubting whether I knew how to cook anymore and doubting whether I would ever be able to run errands with a baby.
Blah.
It was a total case of the Blahs.

And just when I thought these feelings would last forever, these showed up.

*Sigh*

You will remember of course my longstanding relationship with berries.
Read about Round One and Round Two here.

And just like that. Out of nowhere.
God had planted in my yard, all those years ago before I moved here, a mulberry tree.
To blossom and fruit precisely three weeks after my first baby was born.
To be here right in the middle of my pity party.
Right in the middle of my pining for the country.
Right in the middle of my struggle that I had nothing to do and nothing to cultivate and no ground to till.
Right when I was thinking I didn't know anything about making and growing food anymore.
Right in the middle of suburbia.
And right in my own backyard.
Just feet outside my door.
Right next to those weedless rock gardens.

God provided berries for me. Again.
Because he is good like that.

Deliverer.

Hi Wolfies!
I am pleased to announce that last month Hubbs and I welcomed our sweet little daughter into the outside world. We are all adjusting to each other quite nicely, I think, and Hubbs and I are just over the moon about our sweet little Vivy. Sometimes I cry just looking at her because I am so grateful that we get to keep her. She is contemplative like her daddy, doesn't handle the heat well like her mommy, and is stubborn like probably both of us. What a doll :) I can't believe she is real. I can't believe she is ours. Sometimes all I do all day is stare at her and sigh as I say to myself, "She will never be this little again....."

Being a baby is hard work.

Listening to daddy sing a Hymn during family devotions!

Overall I had a pretty uneventful pregnancy, for which I was thankful. Towards the end I kept thinking, "Really? Is this really how the world is peopled? It seems like something more monumental should have happened if I am about to give birth." And while the size of my swollen ankles did seem like they could be some type of monument, that was pretty much it.

Physically, that is.

Spiritually, though, I have to tell you, I felt like there were arrows coming at me and battles I was not up to fighting for a lot of the time.
Maybe I have mentioned this, but since I met Hubbs I have been more fearful and convinced myself that I have more diseases, ailments, and syndromes than I ever even thought about my entire life before I met him.
Chalk it up to the fact that when my life is now linked to someone else's, I feel more of a weight to be here. More of a weight to stay around longer.

The devil knew this, of course. He knew the fear; he was the one putting it there. But with the pregnancy he made me terrified that either the baby or I wouldn't be making it home. Which, to his treacherous credit, is not ENTIRELY irrational. It happens. Which is why I so easily believed it; it was not outside the realm of possibility.

As the due date was approaching and then receding behind me on dates on the calendar, I kept praying and praying for some insight about these fears; something to help me through.
And Him being good like he always is, not too long before our little Sassafrass was born I was doing my devotions one day and the Lord gave me a picture of childbirth. No, not like a vision of it (thank the Lord, that would have been terrifying), but a picture of how childbirth relates to the gospel.

Because everything relates to the gospel. If you have been reading me for any length of time I would hope that you would see that the gospel can be seen everywhere if you are looking for it.
It's what I pray my eyes are opened to. I want to see Jesus in the supermarket and the wind and in Tuesday night dinners and cold rainy mornings.

That afternoon I was reading in Romans and came up to chapter 7.
"Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord." (verses 24-25)

Huh. It struck me as funny. "We call Jesus Christ 'the Deliverer.' Rightly so," I thought, "wretched woman that I am. I needed a Deliverer."

"And so does your baby," Jesus said back to me.

Suddenly in that moment I wasn't afraid for my life---or hers----anymore. I got to be her first picture of the gospel.

You know, it's pretty neat that only inside a woman's body can life be created. Up until that point my body had been the place that gave her life. Without me she could not exist. I was her breath, her sustainer. But you know what? If she just kept staying inside of me forever, I would not continue to be Life to her. No, she would die inside me.
Wretched woman I would be, the cocoon she was in would become a body of death to her.
She had to be delivered.
I had to be her deliverer.


And in that moment I knew a little bit more about the gospel.

Like Vivy in my womb, this body of sin we are born into we have to be delivered from. Spiritually, we are walking around in our locked tombs unless Jesus comes and delivers us from these wretched bodies of death.

And Thanks be to God! He came and has delivered us! This short life, where we will never be as young again as we are today, does not have to be our end!

As for me, the Lord didn't let my devil-imposed fears come true. I didn't have to die to deliver our sweet girl. I got to do it in a hot tub and on a squishy bed. But a few times during labor as I was trying to remember that I got to be a "Christ figure" to Vivy and deliver her from her first body of death, this picture kept coming to mind:

And I realized that he DID have to die to deliver me. Thanks be to God, wretched woman that I am.