How to Have a Happy New Year

Life is Good: God Knows What is Best for You

Happy 2015! Our New Year's Eve celebration was a quiet one. We got pizza for the kids and Grant picked up my beloved sushi for us. Of course, the big kid highjacked the tuna roll and the little kid consumed both an avocado roll and a salmon roll (which he kept calling a cinnamon roll--a new concept to him thanks to Grandma bringing some for Christmas!). Stolen sushi aside, dinner was just what we needed. Snuggled in at home escaping the frigid Minnesota temps. Lively with conversations of Star Wars, Legos, dinosaurs, aliens, dragons, and Sesame Street characters. Decked out with an amalgamation of costumes--a superman cape over a Flash costume (including sculpted muscles) and a race car driver ensemble, Robin mask, and Batman tunic. Certainly we have had fancier celebrations and those with more people. We've had plenty of celebrations with close friends, gourmet food, opulent surroundings. But this New Year's Eve was grand in a way that we can never repeat again...our first as a family of five.

I welcomed the new year nursing (sorry for the TMI) or just finishing nursing or just about to nurse. Life is pretty much all about nursing our month-old baby boy these days. But that's okay with me. Truly. This time last year, we were wondering if we would have a third child. A child we wanted so very much. A child we felt was necessary for our family to feel "complete". But we had committed to giving it six months of trying and at this time last year, no plus sign had appeared on the EPT. Each month was a rollercoaster ride of hope and then disappointment for me. We grasped tightly to our faith, we hung on to hope, we prayed.

Six months came and went. And no viable pregnancy. No third child. That third child that seemed to be missing from photographs. That third child that seemed to be the missing piece of the puzzle. Grant and I had agreed from the start that we would give it six months and if it didn't happen, it wasn't meant to be. We truly believed that God had one more child to share with us. But we also knew that trying to get pregnant took a toll on our lives---whether it was abstaining from caffeine (agony!) or just being distracted by the constant wondering. We decided to put it in God's hands.

And we did. We prayed. We told God what we wanted. We asked, we pleaded. And then, we begged for it. But six months came and went. Neither Grant nor I wanted to keep our six month commitment. We felt so strongly that our family was supposed to be a party of five. So we decided to keep trying. Our faith in God was strong that He would give us that baby we so very much wanted. And loved already.

I had confided in a friend, who happens to be my awesome chiropractor, that we were trying to conceive and that we were giving ourselves a 6-month window to do so. As the seventh month approached, I went in for an appointment and told her that Grant and I had decided to ignore our six month deadline and she said, "Oh. You're finally going to let God be in control of this!"

On my drive home, I thought long and hard about her words. Of course. We had said all along that we were putting this in God's hands. That we were trusting in our faith. But in giving ourselves a timeline, we were giving God a timeline. How egotistical. How ignorant. How absurd.

It's amazing what having an epiphany like this can do. We reevaluated our attitudes. And then we truly handed the situation over to the Lord.

And after seven months of trying, we got that plus sign on the pregnancy test. We got hope. We got happiness. We got answered prayers.

And so this is my long-winded (would you expect anything else) way of expressing my message to you for the new year. Wherever you are right now, whatever your hopes and wants are, whatever good place or bad place or unknown place you are, God is with you. And He remains. So trust in Him. Hand over your needs to Him. Fully. With no timelines or expectations or deadlines. Instead, share your heart with Him. And He will carry you through where you need to be. Surely, our prayers have been answered in many of the ways we wanted, but not exactly. And it is because we humans really don't know exactly what we need. But God does. He doesn't always answer them the way we want or expect, but God always, always answers our prayers. And in the end, we can see that it was what was best for us.

I hope whatever you are praying for right now comes to be in 2015. I pray that you always have hope. And I know that God will take care of you, will remain right next to you, and carry you through no matter what.

                      
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