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Sit. Still. Settle.

Do you ever hear yourself saying something that one of your parents would have said to you? There’s often a mixture of horror that you are turning into one of your parents and a realisation of why it was that they said it in the first place.

I was sat with Sully on the stairs, actually i was sat on the stairs semi hiding from the children who were watching trying to read some more of my book, but i digress. Sully came and climbed onto my lap. He snuggled in for a cuddle and then shifted position and snuggled differently, then he knelt up and tried another position, bumped his head, got frustrated and then tried another position. To say that it was irritating would be an understatement.

I found myself exclaiming “if you are having a cuddle would you just sit still and settle”. He settled into the original position he had been in, snuggled in and had a good long cuddle.

As we sat cuddling I felt one fo those God nudges that said “That’s what I’m trying to say to you” and so I stopped and I thought for a few moments about what I had said:

“Sit still and settle”

Sit. Still. Settle.

For a number of months I have been avoiding just stopping and sitting with God. I occasionally set out to spend time with Him but I fidget, get distracted, DO something instead of just BEING with Him but I don’t just sit with Him and rest in His arms.

The thing is that it’s really hard to just sit with God at the best of times. It’s an even harder thing to do when life is tough, when your heart is broken, when you’re filled with grief and when you don’t understand the segments of your life.

Pain makes stopping and sitting with God so hard. It means coming face to face with the fact that the realitiies of your life don’t match up with the goodness of God. It draws your heart to the fact that you don’t feel that goodness and it doesn’t feel like God is in your reality. That’s a painful place to sit.

What’s even more ridiculous is that I know if I were to make the effort to BE with God I would find that those two conflicting states would become less conflicting. God’s peace would become a reality and that pain would be experienced in the presence of a loving God not on my own.

So God wants me to just sit and stop fidgeting… not an easy call but if it’s something God is calling me to, it’s probably for a good reason.

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Set backs

I wonder if you ever find yourself trying to workout how you ended up back somewhere that you thought you’d left behind for good? I mean emotional and spiritually as well as physically.

As the result of one life change event I find myself wondering how I’m back here. By back here I mean experiencing deep and painful longer for a baby in my womb and in our lives. I also find myself back to comfort eating and having lost the belief that I am worth the effort.

Losing a very wanted baby back in September at 10 weeks pregnant has left such a huge hole in my heart. That grief has tapped into emotions and experiences that we faced when we spent 3 years and 3 months trying for our first baby. Although we have only briefly (so far) been in this situation we find our selves longing for a baby and I find myself feeling the weight of infertility on my shoulders again – despite the fact that at the moment that is not our situation.

The feelings of helplessness, despair, grief, longing, hopelessness, loneliness, jealousy, overwhelmed and sadness flooded back in with the grief of our lost baby and the hope of his life that went with him.

Losing Toby, who’s name means God is good, has not removed the desire to have a baby, it has amplified it. Just because I can’t have THAT baby does not mean that I do not desire to have A baby. Not that a baby will replace Toby and all those lost dreams and the place he would have had in our family and our hearts because there will always be a hole for him. BUT we chose to have Toby because we felt our family was missing one more member, felt we had love to give another baby and so that feeling remains.

3 years of infertility were accompanied by 3 years of comfort eating and dieting in vicious circles of failure and backward steps. In the years since we had our first and second babies I felt God speak to me about how I was worth the effort that it takes to lose weight. Worth the investment. Worth the time. Worth it. I felt that God showed me that was the problem. I never believed I was worth the constant investment that losing weight would take.

When pondering life with God through fasting I found that God spoke to me and revealed something more.

In experiencing infertility and now in experience grief of a miscarriage I find myself having to ask God to get me through each day, because each day feels like a mountain bigger than I can climb alone, sometimes bigger than I want to climb full stop.

In wanting a baby both during infertility and now I find myself committing to petitioning God to give us the desires of our hearts.

In having children I find myself praying that God will protect them, help them to grow, help me to care for them well and make wise decisions.

In a world a throw away marriage I ask God to protect mine, with some baggage from the past to make this feel harder.

God revealed to me that I feel that as I’m already asking so much of God which all feels so important I don’t want to waste His love and grace on something that is just for me. I don’t want Him to be with me and help me to lose weight if it may mean that one of the other things I’m asking for will fall through the gaps.

And YES I can see how proud that statement is, that I think that I can influence God’s actions in such a way, but it is just the truth of the thought process and to be honest I am at a loss on how I will move forward.

It’s so hard to feel like you’ve gone backwards in emotions. It’s so hard to see the progress but feel those past feelings. Emotions are hard.

I don’t have the answers. I’m full of uncertainty and confusion. But I hope that I can help you somehow to feel normal?!

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Real beats perfect

It’s so hard to be real. It’s a so hard to vulnerable. It’s so hard to admit our weaknesses. It’s so hard to stop striving to be perfect and just aim to be real. But REAL will ALWAYS be more beautiful, more inspiring, more present and will ALWAYS build community.