(This post has been in the works for quite a while! The events it chronicles might be “old news”, but I find myself quite unable to move on to other things until it is complete. Since I’d like to start writing more regularly again, thanks for bearing with me. 😉 )

I began 2022 in the midst of a difficult season, and my sole blog post from that year is reflective of that. 2021 had been a year of mostly hard things, and I’ll be honest up front: for the first time in my life, I truly wrestled with the goodness of God. Lament came dangerously close to complaint and cynicism, to borrow terms one of our pastors used in a recent sermon.

We’d have to go all the way back to March of 2021 to where the first cracks appeared – my first miscarriage, and the appearance of a vague unease/anxiety, mostly health-related and generally unfounded, that would keep its head down as long as I stayed busy. Then my grandfather’s cancer took a turn, and we said a slow goodbye to him in the midst of a good deal of other relational stress. More early losses of sweet little ones occurred over a rather dreary holiday season and dark winter. Spring always comes, though, and in March 2022 we were thrilled to learn that Madeline was finally going to be a big sister.

Early on in my pregnancy I found myself already struggling with some anxiety about delivery, to the point of asking a couple of close friends to pray with me about it. As the early weeks eased by and the 24/7 nausea finally subsided, I breathed a little easier and, once again, distracted myself with busyness. Summertime was insane for us – we sold our business in North Carolina, travelled the entire month of July, went backpacking/camping out west for 10 days, and made a rapid – and hectic – transition to Tennessee.

October came, and I was really hoping and praying the baby would come early. (A new niece, due two days after our baby, made her entrance three weeks ahead of schedule. Ours did not.) As my mid-November due date came and went, I felt myself slipping back into a very anxious state. At my 40 week appointment, baby was breech-ish/transverse-ish and my midwife successfully performed an ECV (“turning the baby”). We hoped that labor would soon follow. It did not. Still very pregnant, plagued by prodromal labor, and absolutely exhausted, I cried on Thanksgiving, forlornly clutching the newborn gown that had been procured especially for that day.

Three days later the 42-week mark finally came, and in the dawn’s early light of the first Sunday of advent I dutifully followed my midwife’s prescription – a couple of ounces of castor oil, taken in ice cream – to help lock in the sporadic contractions that had awakened me at 3:45 AM. Before long we were headed to my parents’; we had planned all along for a homebirth, and various factors, including our very recent move, helped us make the unorthodox but comfortable decision to welcome our little one in the same bedroom I had shared with my sister for so long.

We arrived and, still in the early stages, I tacked a few things to the closet door where I could see them as I labored: the lyrics to “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need” and “I Take Thy Promise, Lord,” Isaiah 43, a particular stanza from “Sovereign Ruler of the Skies.” In case the theme of these meditations is not obvious, I was not totally convinced that my apprehensions about this birth were unfounded.

I’ll gloss over the next few hours; the memory of them is hazy, anyway. (Let’s just say this: yes, I will absolutely choose homebirth again, should the Lord bless us with the opportunity, but I’ll probably never be the woman summarizing her experience in flowery ecstasy!) Evening approached, and so did the end of labor. Then suddenly, within ten minutes of delivery, I was confronted with my worst fear. A significant hemorrhage from a partial placental abruption, later found to be caused by the tugging of a short umbilical cord in the final stage of labor. A baby in distress. Commotion. A hurried call to 911. Grave concern on every face in the room. The primal thought: am I going to die?

Praise God for His divine intervention and the gracious provision of a happy ending. My amazing midwife and her assistant handled the crisis with aplomb, stabilizing both myself and our beautiful, 9 pound, 5 ounce little girl even before EMS was well and truly in the room. We were both transported to the hospital as a precaution, but neither of us required any major intervention. Three short hours later we were back “home”, and as I lay there in the darkness, utterly spent and a bit breathless at all that had just transpired, I marveled at the certainty of having been carried victoriously through the trial I most dreaded.

I’d like to say that the triumph of that experience allowed me to move on from strength to strength, as it were. A tidy “lesson learned = check. Next.” If I were in charge of the script, it would have been the ideal dramatic climax to cap the preceding year and a half, the perfect segue to an easier, more tranquil season. The reality is that our precious Maggie’s first birthday approaches, and I’m still processing that “valley of the shadow of death” moment. This year has been one of navigating a significant amount of postpartum anxiety, many lessons in humility, and plenty of muddling through ongoing stressors in our personal lives as well as those closest to us, not to mention the surreal events in the world around us. So, after all, that post-birth “high” was really more like a brief reprieve than the turning point I hoped it would be.

Yet, as advent also approaches once more, so the profound simplicity of “God with us” grips my heart in new, hard-won ways. God. Is. With. Us. The infinite, eternal, and unchangeable One doesn’t miss a single step of the journey. We can be so enamored with the illusion of our own self-sufficiency that we prefer to think of God’s primary role as limited to “divine intervention” (and dive headfirst down a deep, dark hole when He does not, in fact, intervene). Oh friends, may we glory more in the constancy of His presence and be concerned less with where He takes us.

I leave you with some well-loved lyrics from Fernando Ortega:

Take heart, my friend, we’ll go together
This uncertain road that lies ahead
Our faithful God has always gone before us
And He will lead the way once again

Take heart, my friend, we can walk together
And if our burdens become too great
We can hold up and help one other
In God’s love and God’s grace

Take heart my friend, the Lord is with us
As He has been all the days of our lives
Our assurance every morning
Our defender in the night

If we should falter when trouble surrounds us
When the wind and the waves are wild and high
We will look away to Him who ruled the waters
Who spoke His peace into the angry tide

He is our comfort, our sustainer
He is our help in time of need
When we wander, He is our Shepherd
He who watches over us never sleeps

Take heart my friend the Lord is with us
As He has been all the days of our lives
Our assurance every morning
Our defender in the night