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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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Wave of light

It’s october 15th – it’s a day for lighting candles for babies and children who have died. Who good to remember them. How much it sucks to have joined those who do it for such a personal reason.

We grieve and remember our lost baby and all that they would have been to us in our family. Those lost dreams.

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Unformed and raw….

 

I keep thinking that I want to write out my emotions. I keep feeling like I want to share. And then I decide I’m too raw, I’m too weak, it’s too fresh and that people don’t want to read or hear feelings from that place. I recognise how those thoughts won’t be well formed or even linear because that entirely how my thoughts are. There’s this overwhelming fog that stops some level of process and function. Not so much that you can’t focus but so much that you don’t feel you always makes sense. Why would I put that down on paper?

But the reality is that maybe I need to do this for me, for our baby, for our family and for those who walk alongside us or others.

Our baby was ‘only’ 10 weeks gestation. We never even got to see that baby. We didn’t know if it was a girl or a boy, although in my head he was totally a boy because it is what I know. But what hits me so hard is how much love my heart has for our little one. I am flooded by this feeling of love I will never get to share with its recipient. Flooded with a sorrow that a part of family will always be missing. Devastated that a part of my heart will always be broken. When the sonographer confirmed our baby was gone a part of my heart shattered and though I am assured and understand that the rawness of that reality will go, the brokenness of that reality will always remain.

At 10 weeks gestation our baby was just a quarter of an ounce heavy and only around 4cm long. Such a tiny speck but the baby had our DNA and all of it’s arms and legs and a heart. At 10 weeks they were our baby as much as when they would have been 10 weeks post natal.

I fight the feeling to lessen the reality of this babies life. I fight the feeling people will think we are ‘over reacting’ in our grief since we had not met them, or seen them or held them. I fight those feelings because this baby was every bit our baby as Zachary and Solomon and every bit a part of our family and my heart.

I grieve the love we never got to give them and the fights they never got to have with their big brothers.