here is where i explain the ground from which my poems sprout.
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my sister has been blessed with two pregnancies in her first year-and-a-half of marriage. one child i’ll have to wait a few more years or decades to know; the other child I held last night.
i remember that call. it was a total empty feeling. every other loss in this world is reliant on the substance of something. but this loss gripped us before we could ever hold the one we lost.
after we got the call we hurried over to the house. we went through the side door, the one with the colored glass panes and tin awning over. we stepped into the sun room and words simply failed us. hugs and tears and broken whimpers were our main mode of communication. we had all been robbed of the very thing we had hoped for. and the truth of the proverbs rang hauntingly true, “hope deferred makes the heart sick.” it was sickening to watch my brother-in-law hurt so hard. it was sickening to watch my sister lose so much. it was sickening to feel so empty.
not all hope was lost. the true and living hope was truly all that sustained us.
but last night we got a different call. but our response was similar. similar in the way we hurried over to the house, entered under the awning and through the stained glass door into the same sun room. but we were different. we had changed. we had come through the slough of loss and arrived with a deeper faith. but we were not the only ones who changed. for in that same room there was a new little human, an embodiment of all our prayers, tucked away in the arms of a glowing new father.
words once again failed us, but this time we settled for smiles and sighs and “awwwws” to communicate our sheer gratefulness. our hearts were ripe with joy.
both of these sun room moments we knew something. we knew that God was good and does good. the first time we had to tell our hearts so. the second time our hearts told us so. both times it was the truest truth ever.