I'm too excited right now to decide if "full circle" is applicable to this story, but it sounds good.
On our Babymoon, I started Francine River's book Sons of Encouragement. It was a detailed narrative of Aaron's story, which largely involved the Exodus and crossing of the Red Sea. It was getting me pretty fired up about real faith, the reverence God deserved, and reminders on every other page that God is looking at the entire story from start to finish, whereas we should not presume we can see to the end of our sentence.
I guess it didn't get me THAT fired up, however, because I was still working on it a month later when our family was coming to the hospital for Ky's delivery.
Mom went by our house to pick up whatever we needed. I didn't want the bag I had packed because it had his cute little whale onesie to go home in, so I just asked for a change of clothes, that book, and chapstick (because I definitely remembered reading people wished they had chapstick). We were told to prepare for labor to last up to a couple of days.
NOTE: I didn't even unpack that book. Rookie request.
I've mentioned I have seen veryyy few (none?) women in my life go through pregnancy/birth. The one nearest to me was a pretty new friend, and I only knew her in the last several weeks of her pregnancy.
This friend invited us to dinner at the end of her pregnancy when I told her we just found out we were pregnant too. When Kyler was born, this friend put me in contact with her friend who had lost her baby at 26 days old. This woman sent me this blog as a backstory to an Ellie Holcomb song that had brought her comfort in her own journey post-loss.
In short, the song "Red Sea Road" was written out of despair of both the loss of a full-term babe and a 2 year battle against infertility.
"It is so scary and so hard to take God at His word some days, especially when you feel that grief will crash over you like the waves of an ocean and swallow you whole. So we wrote this song to remind our souls that God is with us. He is faithful. He goes before us. He goes behind us. He fights for us, and we can trust that He will bring us through even the most unbearable moments because He is in the business of making a way when there is no way."
I'm sure this song would've been special to me regardless of my own backstory, but I'd like to think its TRUTH sinks much deeper because of having spent several hours meditating on the way that God made for His people when they appeared to be in a hopeless situation.
If I see our God as SOVEREIGN, then it's not a stretch to say He could have used that Francine Rivers book to prepare my heart to both connect to this song and its TRUTH, as well as to remind me again and again what it looks like to have real faith, revere God, and follow His lead with a knowledge that He wrote and knows this entire story. Regardless of how much of it I am privy to, I know how it all ends. And that is the reason I can choose joy.
A specific thought that has brought Shay and me some peace: NONE of this is a surprise to God.
RED SEA ROAD: