I started writing this blog post six weeks ago.  It is the first time in four years of blogging that I felt called to write something that I could not finish.  I wrote what was on my heart, what I felt God was calling me to write, but couldn’t figure out what on earth He was trying to say. I finally decided to just scrap it.  I am glad I didn’t permanently delete what I had written because it took two long months of writer’s block but God finally told me the ending so that I could write it here.  I have written on this blog, in months and years past, about God’s timing.  Apparently God put it on my heart to write about the seasons in life, but, in His own timing, did not tell me the end of the story until many weeks later.  Which, as it turns out, was all a part of the story.  Have I confused you?  I’m sorry, please read on and all will be explained.  Here is my part and God’s part, in the order in which I lived, and wrote them.

 

Part 1

{written September 2012}

Both of my babies were born with the change of seasons.  One fading, the other emerging.

My toddler boy was born at winter’s end, his first weeks marked by early red bud blooms and open windows.  I can still feel the breeze, the snowflakes of that March finally over.

Our new baby boy was summer’s grand finale.  In the final days of that long pregnancy I walked through early contractions barefoot on the beach. I was waiting.  Waiting for a new season.  Anticipating.  In the days following that sweet baby’s birth, fall was alive and fierce with its suddenness.   In a matter of days, everything had changed.

 

At the time our baby James was born, his great-grandmother Helen lived out the last of her days in a hospital bed, 900 miles away. God’s words played over and over in my mind during those days, like an old record with an insistent skip:

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens.  A time to be born and a time to die.”  Ecclesiastes 3:1

They tell me they whispered in her ear as she lay unconscious, “James is here, Mama.  He is born.”  She was waiting for him, I think.   Soon after he came, she was gone.  And how she had longed to hold him!  Yet God’s truth played and played over and over, a comforting cadence, that record spinning ’round and ’round . . .  “to everything there is a season.”

“to everything there is a season.”

Part 2

{Written December 2012}

In those early fall weeks, we tickled baby toes and mourned and celebrated a life, 93 years beautifully lived.  We started to think toward closing our beach cottage for the winter and returning to North Carolina but the house we had rented the previous winter and spring had been sold.  We had looked online at houses to rent or buy nearly every day all summer but nothing was right.  And in a manner that is entirely uncharacteristic of me, I didn’t worry about it.  I was sure that God, in his timing, was preparing a place for us.  Then, as only God could have authored it, we were graciously invited to live in Helen’s house, which by then was sitting empty and waiting.  In North Carolina.

We, of course, accepted.

The next step in our journey was being written and as I have at every juncture, I prayed that we were walking in God’s will.   It has been 2 years since God spoke reassurance to me by way of a kitchen window.

“Are we still on the right path, Lord?”  I questioned.

“Are you still with us?”

And then God, as only He could, reassured me.  We got to Helen’s house the day after Thanksgiving and we walked through room after room of her extensive home. Then finally we came to her master bedroom at the very back of the house.  And I stood in an otherwise empty bedroom and God spoke to me.  Yes, we were in the right place and yes, He is here.  Beloved, He is always there.

“Oh that’s just something that I cross-stitched for Mama years and years ago, ” my mother-in-law explained, as she followed my fixed gaze to the wall at the far side of the bedroom.

“You can take it down . . . ” she offered.  There was nothing else hanging on any of the 4 walls of that room.

“No, it’s not that,” I said, shaking my head and running my fingers through my hair.  I laid my hands over my face and just shook my head in what I would otherwise call disbelief, but in this instance was a belief as plain as the writing on the wall.

Father in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Please continue to speak, Lord.

Speak, for your servant is listening.  1 Samuel 3:10

 

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