Brown Trees

This year, spring has refreshed my heart in a new way. The new leaves and flowers that are blooming all around me feel like God's beautiful reminders that in a world that can be so dark and painful and sad, there is still beauty and joy. I love to sit on my couch and look out the window at all the fresh signs of life, and looking out these windows as the trees bud always makes me think of a funny story.

Matt and I moved to Chicago rather hastily. Matt was just graduating grad school for architecture, and he got a promising new job offer. There was one caveat. They needed us there in just over three weeks. We were in the process of looking to buy a place in Minneapolis. We had already been pre-approved, were analyzing our finances and dreaming of all the personal touches you could put on a place of your own - like painting and drilling things into a wall. (We had been so trained in college about not nailing or drilling things into the wall, that this seemed oddly appealing). The prospect of having to rent again in Chicago seemed dreary. So we decided to head to Chicago for a weekend and meet with a realtor to see if it would be possible to choose a place and close on it in just three weeks.

After looking at just over a million places in 2 days, we fell in love with a small condo in Edgewater. We put in an offer, and just three weeks later we closed. When we looked at our place, it was just before the leaves came out on the trees. We loved all of the giant trees on our street and we couldn't wait for the beauty of the green canopy of leaves that was sure to follow.

Well, I came up a few days early to interview at my new job and do a walk through of the condo and I came across a startling realization. Our trees were brown! I remember calling Matt and asking him how we could possibly have just bought a place with the only brown trees on our street!

Life can be like that. We expect certain things. Like you would expect green leaves on a tree in spring, you expect life to fall into a certain pattern - like that old nursery rhyme..first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage. The first two parts of that worked for me so where is my baby in the baby carriage. Twice now, once through an early miscarriage and then through the loss of Isaiah, this dream has been shattered before my eyes. The carriage that we borrowed from a friend still stands empty.

I still struggle with the meaning of all this. Why me? Does God really care? How in the world can He allow me and so many other beautiful women I know to go through such tragic loss. God still hasn't given me an explanation and I don't think I will ever get answers to all my questions, but over and over, God keeps showing me how much He does care. Lately, He has been giving me glimpses of how He prepared my heart and my faith to walk through this valley and He has shown me how He continues to walk through it with me and hopes to lead me out. I will never understand why Isaiah can't be here with me and there are a lot of other things about life and my past that I will never understand, but I am leaning on this verse:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge Him and He will direct your path. -Proverbs 3:5