gifts of pain

If anybody had said to me, 14 years ago, hey, this is what you will have to do to have kids and this is how it will all go down, with the bedrests and the sirens and the hospitals and the teensy tiny hard-wired babies and the paperwork and the emotions, I mighta been like "90's catchphrase!" with my Meg Ryan wannabe haircut. I'm glad nobody told me, though, because nobody could have told me how great it would be, before and after and even during storms.

That's a thing about trials. If it wasn't good, what you have, then it wouldn't be so painful to fight for it. Grieving is evidence of goodness. It's all mixed together, all the laughing and crying and fighting and pleading and dancing, all of it. I wouldn't trade it, as crazy as that sounds. It's all part of this insanely loud, beautiful life that God gave me as a gift.

In Ecclesiastes when Solomon whines about times and seasons.... (And when I get to heaven, maybe Solomon's gonna be like, "Called me a whiner, eh?" and I'll be all like, "Are you Canadian?" and also I might be like, "I bet your 3000 wives never got to write a whole book of complaints for the world to read for all of eternity..." or something like that, and then I'll notice Mother Teresa giving me the "eye" and I'll probably get kinda embarrassed if things can even go that way up there) But there Solomon is, "wisest man in history", with his women and his money and his brains, and he's bummed, talking about seasons. The thing is, sometimes seasons are all jumbled together. I mean, time to weep, time to laugh, all of that. Life doesn't slow down so you can make a transition, you just tumble around sometimes like a human in a giant dryer, smacking into the funny and the profane and the sacred and the agony, all of it.

So this is it, this is what we get. It's a blip, a nanosecond on the timeline of eternity and somehow so full of richness. We get to love, to live. We get to.