No guarantees

It's July.....and so life goes on.  Three years ago (I wrote this 2 days ago) we were in San Francisco. Life was good, we had a lot of fun, I was feeling good after being sick for weeks, I was pregnant. We took a lot of pictures. But I don't ever want to go back there. At one point in the trip, we were driving and I asked Ryan if he would be prepared if something was wrong with the baby. He said that why should we worry about something like that now, that if that were to happen we would deal with it then. He asked me why I would ask him that, I said I didn't know but I felt like something was wrong with the baby and that we should maybe prepare ourselves. I wonder about that day. I wonder if that's when Luke died. I certainly didn't think he had died though. We came home from SanFran on a Sat night. The next day, someone at church commented to me that I was starting to look very pregnant and I said that I was starting to feel quite pregnant as well. Monday morning I had a midwife app. The boys had a babysitter. I was excited to hear the baby's heartbeat again. My midwife was also pregnant, she had 3 girls and me 3 boys. We talked about a lot of things for a good half hour, we laughed. Then the 5 words before everything changed. "Shall we have a listen?"

One never knows how one moment can change everything. An accident, the phone call. A regular Dr.s visit, the news. Someone knocking on your door in the middle of the night, the grief. The doppler that can't find the heartbeat, the panic. You wake up, everything is fine. You go to bed and nothing will be the same. And yet somehow you make it. You are given strength from the One that never leaves you. When you feel you can't go on, God carries you through. When all you want to do is lay beside your dead child in the ground, God whispers to you that your time here is not over. He is not done with you. You are still needed here on earth.

Halfway around the world there was another mother pregnant. A little further along than me. Can feel her baby move around by now. Maybe this mother is scared of someone finding out she is pregnant, fear of being arrested and being forced to have her baby killed. Maybe she is in hiding. Maybe she is getting prenatal care, maybe not. Maybe her family tells her that if her baby is not a boy, she has to kill her child. I don't know, I do know that she loved her child enough to give birth. To let her baby live, to not let anyone kill her. To give her baby  a life, even though her heart is breaking. She leaves this child where she will be found. Maybe she hides in the bushes watching until someone finds her baby. Two broken mothers worlds apart. One mother loses her baby so she can give the other mothers baby a family. I wish I could find this mother and let her know that her baby has a family that loves her and will give her the life she wanted for her. I wish she had the comfort we have. We know where Luke is, we know he is safe. Anna's birthparents don't have that comfort. They don't know. That is a grief I don't know. One that would be harder to bear.  

Luke led us to Anna. Loving her doesn't mean we don't miss him. It doesn't mean that we don't long for him to be here. Yet we can't change it. We can't wish him back. He's gone, just like the babies before him and the baby after him.  They are safe, they will never be alone.  One day we will meet again. Until then, Anna will have a family that loves her and will know a God that loves her even more. God has opened our hearts to her. We can only pray that she will open hers to us.