Prelude

After so many years of believing my story to be not uneventful so much as uninspiring, I suddenly and surprisingly discovered that I, yes myself, am the very center of a beautiful and exciting tale. I am writing this story of me because I love it, and I love to tell it. I feel simply awestruck to be the heroine of such a fantastical and compelling story, and I feel a kind of giddiness as I watch it unfurl about me like so many colorful ribbons snapping and whirling in a wild wind. 

For at least a decade, flashes of color have teased the edge of my vision—revelations through a friend’s words, or a book or blog once read, a scene from a film or a song, a thought gleaned from the sacred and monotonous tasks of life: Contemplations blooming in my mind from Holy-Spirit-planted-seeds. So although I have been experiencing grand leaps of transformation in the past three or four months, I find that so much groundwork was laid before this year. It was happening around me though my sight was turned from it. And then around February of this year, I spun around to find, stretching as far as I can see across the plains of my life to the very horizon, dancing, swirling color moving in intricate patterns, and I the subject of this living painting. 

What I once interpreted as random splashes of paint on the canvas of my existence are far more artful, intentional, vibrant, complex, and alive than I have realized. Moments that felt so stationary and done in my past have revealed themselves to be constantly on the move as they take meaningful shape in my story. They meant something then, and maintain that meaning even as their significance has deepened, enriched, and expanded in capacity. 

But that is further along the path already than I have wished to take you.

What I mean to give you here is background without exhausting your attention. Suffice it to say I had a beautiful vision for my life. I grasped it firmly between my hands and then discovered, as we all do at some point, the hubris and futility of such an act. My version of this process had to do with fertility, or the lack thereof. From the first dream of children to the birth of our firstborn adopted son was about 7 years of harrowing spiritual and physical struggle that I will not endeavor to describe here. Despite the joys of pregnancy and parenthood, our experience through infertility had done lasting damage on my spirit. The dark gash cut into my story was defined by devastated trust in the divine. My primary narrative became “I am on my own. No one is coming for me. I have to take care of myself.” 

Likely, it is easy for one to believe that the joy of parenthood will break the pain of infertility. There are numerous anecdotes liberally shared by those eager to lead one to this conclusion. On the contrary: I found that my new narrative followed me into parenthood. My pain was not left behind, nor was it transformed, but it shrouded my life with the interpretation I had made of it. 

I have to tell you: this is not a story of rejecting darkness and pain to finally embrace happiness and gratitude. It is about welcoming grief and joy into the same embrace and rejoicing in their harmony.  

I am finally coming to an amateur understanding that in this mural of me, the dark colors are not separated from the bright, but they dwell next to each other, touching and melting into one another in order to create beauty. I have spent quite a lot of time trying to separate the dark from the light and so being unable to see the breathtaking image they create together. If you’ll forgive my mixing metaphors: 1 Corinthians 15:36 reminds me that this is true of nature itself, that “what you sow does not come to live unless it dies.” Lament and joy are different forms of the same plant, and life rises from the death of the seed source. It is no wonder that I spent so many years scratching my head over the events of my life, as I tried to have the one without the other. 

Infertility was a death of great significance in my life. At the moment, I am basking in the intoxicating fragrance of the flower it has produced, but I have been present for every agonizing moment of its germination: in every still moment in the dark where microscopic development was unavailable to my watchful eye, to the bursting of the seed for the first green shoot, to its slow climb towards the sun. 

So, I will try to tell a story of how I watched a flower grow. 


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Chapter One: Surveying the Soil

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Remembering