This is my afternoon sunspot. I sit on the bed for our afternoon nursing, or rock in
my glider rocker and watch the sun and talk to baby.
We've settled into a rhythm here at last, and I'm starting to add little things to my day. Laundry-doing so my husband won't have to do it on weekend. Sitting in sun to play my little-used piano, remembering God's faithful as I sing songs I have sun before, as my fingers remember their place on the keys. Picking up around the house, planning meals, answering emails, returning comments. Making time for necessary conversations, for reaching past the comfortable, for choosing vulnerable and welcoming tears.
Sometimes, on
the hard days (I've had two this week), I have to make myself stop. Sit down. Breathe. Recognize that no matter how much I do I will not be able to accomplish all I have planned, all I feel I need to accomplish. Let go of the me I think I should be and remember with God that I am dust, that it is His Spirit in me that gives me strength for anything, His grace that must be enough for my not enough on every level.
It helps me. He is my safe place now. There is rest I haven't appreciated before now.
I am sick on top of sick on top of sick right now - a cold and cough on top of yeast on top of gall bladder on top of lyme - I guess this is what happens when you're not sleeping so much. It's always kinda cool to me to get regular sick, the kind that runs its course. It's an odd thing to be thankful for, I suppose, but there it is.
My new computer is almost here, and I will be able to play with the pictures I have taken: Piper's silly, Bredon's smile, his first bath, our new fish, my bright tulips from last weekend's grocery run. I filled an 8-gigabyte card with photos and started another.
And we have a new dream now, one that is coming true, one that will change and freshen things, a new home and an easy move three streets west, with one room that is full of light now and new floors and new paint and two bathrooms instead of our one and four bedrooms instead of our two and a garage for the cats to play. It's not much on the outside, and we had refused it months ago before they removed the fireplace and added a sliding glass door, a wall of light, but now we can't turn it down, this offer for some safe from Pete's boss, from God-who-provides.
I squirm a little to admit that I have already considered that we might have room to have a third and even a fourth little person in our world. I squirm because Bredon's birth is still fresh in my memory, and who would willingly put herself through that kind of pain again?
And yet the life...
Every day, I hear echoes of my own birth cries, remember me helpless against the shocking pain of transition, remember how I cried out to God - at God - or against Him - or for Him... Some feelings cannot be defined; some moments can only be remembered, never described. But I know what the earth feels, how it groans to be subjected by His will. I know its travail, the sound of its cry.
Even so, come quickly, Lord.
He is near to me now, and I can't define Him or pinpoint Him - I just
know it. I have quiet joy, peace I don't understand and I look at it and touch it gingerly and try smiling and it doesn't disappear, not even when I consider that bad things happen and dreams get deferred and hearts get broken and kids scream and laundry piles up and things are just hard sometimes.
That is my light right now, the bright that insists on piercing the dark that haunts me, that has been here since before my baby was born, in the questions, in the frustration, in the fear that God would not come for me. I haven't lived this before, this free.
It is a lovely rhythm, this. It is not too much. It invites even more.
I love that.
(Image © Informal Moments Photography)
My friend Emily at Chatting at the Sky hosts a weekly "noticing" party - giving us a chance to unwrap and share the little gifts (and the big ones!) God gives to us in the midst of our dailiness. 
