remember...

Tonight I was reading through some old blog posts, and was brought up short by some words that were never published.  They reside in limbo, just after I posted a soup recipe in June 2014, and immediately before the post of September 2016, where I jump right back in to blogging without any explanation.

June 2015

My absence wasn't intentional; there have been many evenings in the past year that I've pulled up the blog and stared at my last entry.  I haven't had any words, or at least any words I wanted to commit to paper about the frustration and anguish and joy and exhaustion and finally peace that have filled my days since I shared a soup recipe.  A soup recipe!

Last August I knew, knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was pregnant. Right after the little line showed up on the pregnancy test (or tests, to be honest), reality hit.  God had taken us for a ride on an airplane, opened the door to the sky, and said, "Jump!"  
 

August 2016

Not long after my last post, I realized that I was pregnant for the fifth time.  We were on vacation in Michigan with my parents, and I remember making some hasty due date calculations while watching a monarch caterpillar chew on a milkweed leaf near their cottage.  I couldn't move, mesmerized by the caterpillar, and trembling with anxiety.  The baby's due-date would be our Good Friday, April 10. 

My stomach sank into my toes and stayed there for the next fifteen months.  At the time, my husband was working four part-time jobs, and applying for dozens of positions at colleges and universities throughout the US.  We were living in a two bedroom condominium above a ferocious woman who hated our noise, and made our lives there miserable.  I still

I don't remember what follows "I still," but I do know how the Lord has wrought miracles in our lives since I had my last positive pregnancy test.  That little child is now six, the delight of our home.  She is the ever present reminder of how God is acting in our lives, for our good.  I wish the wise me of 2021 could visit the apprehensive me of August 2014, although the me of the past would be totally incredulous that our family would thrive after a walk through such hardships. Monarch caterpillars will forever remind me of that time of anxiety, of not knowing what would happen next.  (I should have known--caterpillars become butterflies, do they not?)

We (finally!) had two monarch caterpillars on our garden milkweed this past week.  No one more than Little M has delighted with me in observing the fat, tiger-striped caterpillars devour the leaves, twitching their black tentacles at us.  We enclosed one in our butterfly habitat to form its chrysalis, and let the other wander away.  We're now on butterfly watch, visiting our chrysalis a few times each day.  God is so faithful--ungainly caterpillars become dainty butterflies.  It's an everyday miracle!  Glory to God for all things.