Turning 5 by His Faithfulness

Birthdays.  Days of celebrating. Making the honoree feel special.  Reminding them how much you love and are thankful for them.  Reminiscing about their lives. We love birthdays!  But to be honest, a couple of birthdays around here are hard on the heart.  And it's taken me 5 of these birthdays to figure out how this is going to go.  

You see, it's strange because as I remember the first time I saw my sweet ones, the first time I touched their precious little perfectly formed bodies, I remember how much I loved them and how perfect they were.  But at the same time I'm taken back to the most traumatic event in my life. When my health was in serious question.  When these incredibly fragile, but totally miraculous two babies were fighting for every breath and on the brink of being too small and too immature to be helped by modern day medicine.

These birthdays are a strange business for the heart.  

But 5 years later I'm finding that the emotions of incredible thankfulness and great joy for the miracles is by far outweighing the heartache that came with their birth.  You see these babies have had every statistic in the book thrown at them and more tests than I can remember come back with less than favorable results.  X-rays that said we would be ventilator or at least oxygen dependent for life, eye tests that said we would loose vision, brains scans that said we would have limited communication and be unable to walk, heart scans showing holes, tummys that wouldn't work right, throats that couldn't swallow and blood that promised leukemia.  

I know there are lots of sweet little ones that don't leave the NICU.  And many who leave with huge health and and developmental hurtles to leap.  And while I don't know all the reasons why these 25 weekers, weighing in at 14 and 18 ounces, don't fall into the statistical norms, I am certain that it has everything to do with Jesus.  I don't know why He heals some on this earth and completely heals others by bringing them into Glory, but I know I don't want to waste one day of this gift of life.

So with hearts full of thankfulness, we celebrate all the chapters in these little lives.  The good and the hard, because it's a story that can't be denied the hand of God as author.  Because He is faithful and personal and the giver of life.  Because He loved me to the cross long before he sustained and healed these little people.  Because of Jesus...life is worth celebrating!  

Journeying On,