Run to Him

Hello! Hellooo! Anyone still here?!

Please forgive my lengthy blog absence. Re-writing half of my book turned into a very lengthy process and there just haven't been enough hours in the day. But the revisions were accepted and the book is headed out to a copy editor in the next week or so. For the foreseeable future, I’m hoping to write one blog post a week (I just typed “month” – think my subconscious is trying to tell me something??) J

FYI - The blog will be going through an overhaul in preparation for my book release, but that probably won’t happen until after the first of the year.

So, enough with the news.

Here’s what’s on my heart…

This weekend, we took a huge step in our family.

We packed away the nursery.

(sob)

We replaced Drew’s furniture with a big boy bed (really – queen sized – he looks so small in it) and a new dresser and some new shelves.

For those of you who don’t know, Drew is 3½. Yes, that’s a little old to be sleeping in a crib, but as there was no one displacing him, and as he wasn’t climbing out of it, there wasn’t a big rush. Little man liked his cozy space, telling me he didn’t want to sleep in a bed because he might fall out.

We’ve been talking up the arrival of the big boy bed for a few weeks now and he’s been excited about it.

Except…

My baby boy had one other thing that had to go, along with the crib.

The paci.

I was so NOT going to be that mom. The one with a 3-year-old who still took a paci. Oh no. Not me. But, somewhere along the way, I turned into that mom. Mainly because I have been dreading the nights of crying and wailing that I anticipated would accompany the loss of the paci.

But really, at 3½, it had to go. So we psyched ourselves and everyone else up for it.

“Drew, when you get your big boy bed, no more paci.” We'd been telling him this for weeks.

He didn’t love the idea, but he accepted it.

Until 1:30 a.m. the first night. His crying woke us and I went upstairs, prepared for what was coming.

“I want my paci.”

That’s all he said. Over and over and over.

If he’d been mad or screaming, it might not have hurt so much, but he wasn’t.

He was heartbroken.

This wasn’t a cry of anger or frustration. This was a cry of loss.

It almost killed me.

There wasn’t anything I could say to fix it, and I didn’t try. I just rocked him and told him I loved him and told him I understood that he was sad. I didn’t try to make him stop crying or fuss at him for waking me up. I just held him as his tears soaked my pajamas.

I didn’t give him the paci. I just gave him myself. My love. My support. And eventually, his sobbing eased and he fell asleep.

It was impossible as I sat there holding him, my own tears welling up because of his grief, not to sense the nudge of the Spirit. The one that reminds me that God loves me as a perfect Father and is not immune to my pain.

Over the past couple of years, there’ve been a couple of really hard things happen in my life. The kind of things that leave you curled up in a ball rocking back and forth as you sob and beg God to just FIX IT.

These aren’t the things that find their way to the blog. Not the specifics anyway. Because even though some people praise me for my transparency here, the truth is that there are some hurts that are too deep to share.

But as I rocked Drew, I could picture God—The Everlasting Arms—holding me as I cried. Brushing my hair back from my cheeks, whispering how much He loves me.

Not giving me what I want. Giving me Himself.

His love.

His support.

His peace.

Jesus experienced life fully man. He knows betrayal, loss, hunger, thirst, pain, exhaustion, homelessness, and family drama. He was misunderstood, misrepresented, and misjudged. He knows what you’re feeling. He’s felt that way, too.

I don’t know what you’re facing right now. What hard road you are traveling. What deep hurt you’re living with. I can’t promise you He’ll give you what you want.

I can promise you that what He gives will be exactly what you need to keep going. 

Run to Him.

Grace and peace,

Lynn

P.S. Drew has been doing great. He’s slept through the night the past two nights. I thought we might have had the smoothest paci transition in the history of toddlerhood. Until I caught him sucking his thumb…