1 month

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Our little miracle little Miss E. is one month old today. Yesterday she officially visited her third country when J– and I took her into our country’s embassy to pick up her born abroad birth certification and to introduce her to those that had helped us get her passport in just five hours. It was truly amazing to walk in with her, security guards recognized J– and commented on the miracle of her and when we got inside and saw the two ladies that had worked overtime and come to the hospital to verify her existence to sign off on that passport we all shared a few tears.

I’ve been thinking on those tears. Behind a glass wall sat two gals that three and a half weeks ago had worked over time to get a child on life support a chance to get the medical help she needed.  Even though a panel of glass and a million unknown details about our lives separated us in that time we were bonded through the life of little miss E. as we marveled at God’s grace. The flood of emotion from me, and both these workers united us in our humanity, and encouraged us in our hope as I held a healthy looking little baby up and we gathered her paperwork.

We’ve been home one and a half weeks now as a family and are still sorting out routines, and getting to know each other. Behind us sits three weeks of a very traumatic birthing experience and medical evacuation. Marked over and over by measures of grace, but still demanding to be processed, prayed over, grieved and handled with the respect such a situation deserves. We are intentionally trying to create margin in our lives to process in a healthy and biblical way, allowing ourselves to grieve and process in one hand, while acknowledging God’s grace and goodness to us in the other – knowing that one does not negate the other, acknowledging the hardness of  those weeks does not negate God’s goodness but allows us to see it more clearly – and the fog of newborn exhaustion envelops it all.

The rain is streaming down our windows and there is a hot cup of tea next to me and today we are so happy to celebrate little Miss E., the miracle of her life, all the lessons and experiences she has brought us and the grace poured out in our lives through your prayers. God’s goodness to us is not because of the healing He brought but because of His character and we lean on it in the hard parts of processing, and in the joyful moments of gratitude we are thankful for who He is and how He gives us grace in each moment. So today the girls and I will bake some cupcakes and we will sing happy 1 month birthday to the little soul who has held a torch to God’s favor and grace in our lives.

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