THE TETHERING PLACE

A year ago August, our family was serving on assignment at Malibu, a Young Life Camp in Canada, and the blog was just taking shape. After full days of adventuring around camp, digging up crabs, laughing and crying and melting down {my boys, not me of course} and doing life in the most lovely community of people, I would stay up late after my little men were in bed, planning, brainstorming, writing. I had no idea what was to come, what rhythm or shape the blog would take, how an imminent achilles tendon rupture would be the labor pains that would cause the blog to be birthed, and how my writing would serve to heal, give hope, offer a space for me to learn and grow and find comfort and perspective through one of the most unpredictable and refining seasons of my life.

Achilles tear, no walking or driving for 3 months, pregnancy, miscarriage, grief, another pregnancy… so much unknown…

And here I am a year later, revisiting lesson upon lesson – trusting that “I cannot do it all”, and preparing for labor and delivery of a different sort, as we are three weeks away from meeting the fourth {and I trust, final} little man to emerge from my swollen belly.

Labor. The only sort of purposeful pain we experience. Or is it?  There is something terrible about knowing that the only way to meet this baby boy is to move through pain, in fact, to embrace it and lean into it and let it engulf and take over me so a little one can be pushed out into the world. There is no sidestepping labor.

And I know enough to know that I have no idea what to expect. Each of my boys has a different birth story, but all have been late, so I am banking on the fact that I have three weeks to go… the calendar is full and I have things to do! But who knows when he will decide it’s time?

There is pain coming. And there is joy coming. And these two truths are just about the only things I am sure to expect in every season of my life.

And above all, the core truth I cling to is that I desperately need Jesus. His eyes, his heart, his perspective, his peace, his comfort, his encouragement, his redemption, his healing, his hope, his truth, his direction, his wisdom, his friendship, his love.  It’s Him that makes every bit of pain we experience purposeful, every bit of ugly beautiful.

With feet in my ribs and cramps in my legs, feeling nightly like a rotisserie chicken, and holding close to Jesus, I am preparing. I have been this way before, and then again, I haven’t. But I do know the One who will make the path straight and the road light.

Can’t wait to meet you, little man.