Waiting for Strength

I'm sitting here in my sun room, watching the sun slowly rise in the early morning hours. It is Sunday, four days after my due date, and I can't go back to sleep. Yet, all is calm...peaceful...as it should be somehow. Birds are welcoming the new day, not questioning if four hours of sleep is enough to get them through it. I almost skipped this moment...sitting here and soaking it in and basking in the quiet. Maybe, because I'm eager to get to the next step. I'm eager to go back to sleep, to finish one last work project, to try and naturally induce labor. But thankfully I picked up my devotional instead. Hence, an old, familiar verse met me at the crossroads once again.


"Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint." Isaiah 40: 30-31


How fitting. As if someone were trying to tell me something.


I've done a good job in the last week of letting go of things to prepare myself to wait. I stopped working on Thursday. I finished up my to do list and refused to put more things on it. I slowed way down and let go. This is the great irony of labor and birthing: total surrender. It is a very counter-intuitive action for someone so used to proactively leading the way. Yet labor...kind of like a baby...kind of like God...isn't really concerned so much with my proactive good intentions. I cannot control this. Just like I cannot control how quickly I will heal after birth, how and when Baby Girl and I will bond or how I will feel about my new work-life balance.

The truth of the matter is that I will have to wait on all of this. I mean, to really wait. I'll have to trust that Baby Girl will come at the exact perfect moment and in the exact perfect way. I'll have to trust that I'll know the right day to return to work, that I'll know how to balance the new role of mother in the middle of everything else and with the right timing. It's hard to let go and be patient when thinking on these things. Yet, this promise has always been fulfilled in my life: that if I wait for the divine, it will come. And better yet, when it comes, it will strengthen me much more than I ever could.


And so, I think I'm finally ready to go back to bed...to wait a little longer and to just enjoy the moment. Somehow I believe that although I might be exhausted right now, strength is on the horizon.