Abundance and Faith

A look back at 2022 and ahead to 2023

I woke up in my own bed for the first time in 10 days to a drizzly dawn and the familiar sound of morning hubbub out my window. It was Tuesday, January 3rd, and as far as the professional world goes, the first real day of 2023. Still feeling the effects of our long day of travel home yesterday, my husband and I bumbled through our morning routines of showering and brushing teeth, making the bed and eating breakfast as we both pulled up our work on our laptops. As tired as we are now — and as furious as our eight-month-old kittens are with our long absence — it was the perfect way to end our year and ring in the new one, surrounded by so many of the people that love us, that carried us through every heartbreak and prayed every day for our miracle.

While I could start off at the beginning, with all our hopes and dreams and intentions for 2022, I want to start at the end. If I started at the beginning, you’d see the story of our lives derail very quickly and instead of a reflection full of nuance and hope, like I want this to be, it would become something of a Greek tragedy. Starting, at the end, however, you see all the broken pieces of our lives come together, stitched with the love that carried us through, and sealed with the hope that now lives inside me and grows bigger and bigger every day. You see, this fall, after a year of tragedy, discovered that good things can happen to us too. That life can happen to us too. And we’ll meet that little life, our miracle Baby J, now growing inside me this summer.

At this time last year, the word Abundance was on my heart, which you might find to be a strange word for a year that saw both my husband and I lose our maternal grandmothers within two weeks of each other, forcing us to only attend one funeral as their ceremonies were on the exact same day. It’s, at first glance, an odd word for a year when we learned my husband needed to secure a new position and we’d have to pack up our lives in our small, rural college town, leave all our friends and life behind, and move within six weeks. It is, perhaps, the strangest word for a year when we lost our first child upon discovering that the pregnancy was an extremely rare non-viable and life-threatening genetic condition. But, looking back, it was the perfect word for all those life changes and griefs.

We were so abundantly blessed every step of the way, through the people that loved and carried us. I firmly am against the belief that every thing happens for a reason, or that God ordains such cruelties upon our lives. But I do believe in a God that can bring goodness out of every evil and redeem every brokenness. I saw that power at work this year. I saw our relationships deepen in ways I never expected, trust bloom like it never had before. At times when I should have felt isolated and alone, I felt surrounded by a sisterhood of women — mothers-to-be and women who want to become mothers, new mothers, mothers with grown children, and mothers who will never know their children until new heaven and the new earth, mothers who’d known loss keenly and mothers who were brave enough to stand by my side and imagine a grief they could not comprehend. I was blown away by the regular check-ins, the support, the prayers, and the outpouring of love that we experienced. And when, much to my shock, we found out in October that we were expecting again, that same outpouring of love stood by us every step of the way, through every doctors appointment, every ultrasound, every nerve-wracking week as we waited for the end of the first trimester. This year I saw and felt what it meant to have a community of friends and family around the country (and world honestly) for whom our sorrow was their sorrow, our hopes were their hopes, and our joy was their joy. Truly, we are abundantly blessed.

So where does this leave me on January 3rd, 2023?

Last year showed me what it means that God is faithful, even through our sorrows. It made me pause, and ask myself, what it means, then, to have faith. I’ve spent this entire pregnancy wracked with anxiety that I’d lose this baby too, not because there are any signs that this is likely, but because I know what that grief feels like. I described it in a conversation with a family member who’d also known loss that it feels like fighting losing odds — even when you aren’t. As much as I know the ghost of loss is one that stays with you, I don’t want to have it define this pregnancy or this year. I want to have faith in this blessing, in this miracle. So that is my prayer for this year, the intention I am setting upon my heart: faith. I know it won’t always be easy — there will be days when it is harder to have faith and then that fear returns. That’s the thing about intentions, though, they’re a journey we start again each and every day.

So as I enter this gray day of 2023, I’m setting my heart towards faith in all areas of my life. There are other hopes for the year — adventures I want to have, projects to complete, recipes to follow, books to read, habits to form — but at the heart of it all is faith. And I can’t wait to see what the rest of this year holds, especially once our little miracle is finally, at long last, in our arms.