Feelings......

I’ve been wondering how long all these different emotions are going to stick around, and since it’s been over a week now that we’ve known about the baby I guess I should get used to them. Maybe I’ll ask my mom if I can expect them to ever go away. Like I said in my first post, I am mostly filled with an emotion that would probably fall somewhere in between “ginormous excitement” and “everything is kind of a blur.” I mean, I cannot wait for this baby to come out. I can’t wait to see what it will look like, which characteristics it will have from me and which ones it will have from Susie (I hope that if it’s a girl it looks more like me than Susie because then I won’t have to worry about guys calling too much).

I’m trying to temper this rushing feeling by remembering a piece of advice I was given before our wedding day. I can’t even remember who told me this, but they told me to make sure I purposely slow the actual wedding day down and take care to savor each moment or else it will go by too quickly to recall. This is something I’ve tried to do during significant moments of my life. I can still remember what the cool dry air felt like, the perfectly manicured grass under my feet, the twinge of pain in my elbow, and the grayish color of the clouds when I threw my last pitch in college. I remember the way Susie tackled me when I proposed and the way the little pools of tears collected on the lower rims of her eyes in front of all those people we love when I gave her my wedding vows. I’ve been fairly good at slowing moments down. But now I have seven months while our baby lives in Susie, and then hopefully a lifetime of moments to slow down. Kinda feels overwhelming right now.

I also have other emotions that I try to keep at bay. I have a small part of me that wants to keep my excitement reserved. A good friend of ours has recently undergone some extensive testing to examine her unborn baby for different disorders. I have only seen an image of our baby once and it was during the ultrasound. As you can see by the picture on my first post, it still looks like a bean. But seeing the flicker of a heartbeat inside that bean created this new feeling of connection that I can’t say I’ve ever felt before. I’d be willing to bet that this feeling intensifies when I actually get to hold him/her. I love little kids. There are a few that I really love to see and love to play with, but despite how much I love them, the affinity for all the other little kids in the world pales in comparison to what I’m feeling now. This connection to my bean has caused me to have this concentrated fear of something bad happening to it. It’s a protective instinct and I’m guessing that it will stick around for the rest of my life. The thing that’s hard for me is that I haven’t waded through this enough yet to sort out if it’s an instinct rooted more in worry or more in love.

Jesus is crystal clear in Matthew 6 where he rhetorically asks, “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” He mentions the birds and the flowers and how God takes care of them and implies that we are so much more important to God than the birds and the flowers. I recently downloaded a talk by Tony Campolo where he talked about how even if eternal life wasn’t part of the deal he would still become a Christian. He would still become a Christian because it takes away the guilt of the past and the feelings of worry about the future. We spend so much emotion and time feeling guilty about the past and worrying about the future that we forget to enjoy and savor the present. God has removed the sins of our past so it is fruitless to dwell on them (Psalm 103:12), and He has established an incredible plan for our lives so we can rest in the assurance that we don’t have to do it ourselves (Jeremiah 29:11, Ephesians 3:20).

So the challenge for me so far, and the challenge that will probably face me from here on out, is to take the worries and fears that come along with opening your heart up to loving someone and to stuff them away and not acknowledge them. I have to choose to wallow in the expectations of a little baby growing inside Susie and live each day and take each breath and acknowledge them all as the gifts from God that they are.