Day Eight - Jan 8, 2019
Fourteen years and a tiny bit ago, Andrei and I were blessed with surprise baby Number Three - just sixteen months after planned baby Number Two! She arrived on a cold evening in December - just before an ice storm. I was induced and she wasn’t buying the timing… We sat all day waiting for her to make her appearance - which she finally did just after Papa left the hospital to put sick babies Number One and Number Two to bed for the night. He whipped the van around and was present to welcome Leah Margarita into the world.
The day she arrived, my life was never the same… She turned my semi-orderly world upside down. She tipped the scale of parent/child ratio!
Fourteen years and a tiny bit ago, Andrei and I were also muddling and struggling through a dark season in our marriage. We found it hard to run a family business with him being gone overseas much of the time and I often had the three kiddos alone.
Baby Number Three was named on a dark cold night in December… Her name means “misery.” At the time, I didn’t know this and was somewhat horrified to discover this one evening. Leah’s birth and the days and months that followed set my heart on a path for freedom. Freedom from a life of frustration, anger and worry… It would be years before I saw any fruit.
Leah has to be one of the most energetic and challenging toddlers ever to set foot in my life! She had way more courage, strength, bravery, determination, grit, and stubbornness than I ever possessed in my entire life! I felt lost most of the time in how to guide her. And so I prayed… hard and long, in my sleep, while I was awake, in the grocery store, on the side of the road, in church, out of church… never-ending, short prayers, “Please God - show me how… teach me how to guide her…”
I remember pausing a lot and waiting for a scrap of calm to come over me - before determining my course of action. But at our core - we loved one another deeply. She would always apologize of her own will… always express her care and love for me - way before I ever would have expected from the little “hooligan…”
And today - she is “nearly perfect”… she will most likely always be more courageous, brave, determined, stubborn… than anyone else I know. But she continues to learn the discipline of a grace-filled heart. She continues to discipline her attention on her Creator and His ways of living that make our lives full and alive.
Her birth set my heart on a trajectory I may never have traveled if not pushed to decide what kind of person I wanted to become - by the grace of God. My beautiful,
sweet, sanctified slice of “misery” forever and ever continues to change my life.
