restoration.

I tell you. When you proclaim a theme, be ready for The Holy Spirit to grab that theme by the celestial wings and make a way.
 
2015 was filled with planned, unplanned, but ordained adventures.
 
I wanted 2016 to be filled with restoration.
 
A safe theme, right?
 
To be transparent, I really wanted that word to fall out of scripture somewhere, you know, heavenly appointed. I’m pretty sure I even did several Google searches looking to make a prophetic connection.
 
That just wasn’t the case. Restoration had been on the tip of my tongue. Restoration felt right. Restoration is what I truly prayed for.
 
When I told my friends and family about my theme. It just sounded right. Jason and I were now living in this meticulously restored home that had been customized to fit our lives, to be our forever home (even though my father-in-law still thinks 5 miles away is too far).
 
Jason and I both could focus 2016 on the restoration of turning this house into a home, finding rhythm and balance to our lives that turned catawampus during the chaos of 2015. It would also be a year to find restoration and peace with this season of life: this I’m-about-to-be-thirty-two, nine-years-married, and still-empty-wombed season of life.
 
And hopefully, prayerfully God would answer the desires of my heart and allow restoration to come to my body so that 2016 could be the year we finally create a family.
 
Every year began with those expectations. Every year began with the butterflies and the “what ifs” of the year to come.
 
Again, God’s sense of humor, timing, and perfect will laid out a year that not even James Joyce could not have constructed (shameless literary plug: if you haven’t read Finnegans Wake add it to your GoodReads. His magnum opus took 17 years to write and almost every sentence is painstakingly crafted to be a pun or double meaning. Sheer brilliance! And if you don’t know about GoodReads, Google that first!).
 
Anyways, I’m not going to dive into the hairy details of 2016 (I’m already working on that memoir, true story) but I am going to reveal the most vulnerable part to showcase God’s grace; God’s restoration.
 
Sometime around the New Year or maybe it was even at Christmas, God allowed Jason and I to finally conceive. Before the marathon in November, I had sworn off all hormones. That was best for my running partners and best for my life partner. People said it to me all along (in fact, there is nothing that people have not said to me regarding pregnancy and infertility, I’m sure that will be a post for another day), “the moment you stop trying, it will happen.” Well, it did.
 
So many things from this past year are crystal clear in my mind but for some reason this date evades me. I’m sure I wrote it down in my devotional and I have counseling appointments I could go back and reference but sometime in early February, I just knew. It was that, am-I-crazy-with-a-hysterical-pregnancy-or-is-this-really-real kind of knew.
 
When all you do is count your periods and hold your breath, you quickly stop talking about pregnancy. You’re pretty sure everyone else wants you to stop talking about it too, so the space in between gets larger and larger and isolation becomes lonelier and lonelier. I finally found the courage to open my mouth in mid February to my counselor.

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