Weary but not faint

I have tried to right this post now 4 times and each time it has gotten deleted and I start over again.  However after much consideration and a little bit of annoyance in myself the best way I know to start is Thank You.  Thank you all for your prayers, your support, your love, and encouragement.  Thank you for walking with us through our many different fires the last year.  We are finally back home and acting like a family again.  It has been a long many months getting to this point and there were many days I was not sure if we ever would.  Now I can say with a great amount of certainty it looks nothing like it did before, but we didn’t expect it to.  The walls are the same, the stuff is the same, but the people in this family will never be the same.

 

After 3 hospital stays, a surgery, more tests than I can count, and 8 bottle trials later our sweet Brylee is home to stay and we could not be more in love with that fact.  We were fortunate enough to get Maddox and Adaline in “school” two days a week so that they can be free from the burden of responsibility that comes with knowing your baby sister is at the doctor all the time.  They are loving it and both excelling getting the opportunity especially Adaline to get to be a child for the first time in about 2 years.  She has relaxed and isn’t asking for her own hospital for her birthday any more.  While they are in school Tuesdays and Thursdays as well as Wednesdays when they go to my moms I take Brylee to Speech, Occupational, and Physical therapy.  She has a total of 6 sessions a week and works extremely hard.  I will not bore you all with the details of what all is done each time but I will say that it is amazing the things that can be done to help little bodies like Brylee have the most potential for the future.  She is making many strides and we rejoice with each one of them, some cheering is usally affiliated and keep working towards the next ones.  The strides are very small, things like turning her legs like she is trying to roll over even though her upper body cant follow suite, but for her those milestones are as big as walking was for our other two.  I am probably going to fall apart the day she learns to walk.  We work very hard to keep our focus on the strides and not the deficate but I have to confess that some days this is very hard.  As she grows bigger so do her challenges.  The challenges really don’t change, but as we were told very early on, the more she grows the more we see it.  The more her good parts can do, the harder it is for everything else.  I struggle sometimes when she is having a bad day, when she cant open her hand, or her leg is so tight she struggles to lift it up, to not get a lump in the back of my throat.  It is in these moments I have to remind myself that she does not and has never belonged to me.  She was entrusted to my care by a God who designed her in HIS perfect image and loves her with a love that is greater and deeper than my human self is physically capable of.  He had a plan for all of this before I even knew her. 

 

All of that to say we are so very richly blessed, and we are so incredibly tired.   There have been so many things that we have tried to devoted our time and energy, thoughts and prayers to in the midst of all this and if we were being totally transparent we would tell you we are feeling a little weary.  A little run down.  However tonight when I went to the store I was listening to a cd I have and was reminded of such a simple and profound truth, and yet even in its simplicity it met me right where I was at.  I was never promised a life where I would not feel weary.  We are all weary.  Do not discount your feelings of being tired and run down as less important, because they are not as bad as some one elses, because we are all weary.  The bible even addresses the issue of being weary in Isaiah 40:30-31   30 Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; 31 but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.

 

I really do not think I grasped the magnitude of what this meant until now.  I know so many people right now who are weary.  Weary because they have no asnswers, weary because they feel like they are constantly being knocked down, weary because they are lonely, weary because of grief, weary because they are having to wait patiently not knowing when their prayers will be answered.  We are all going to go through this from time to time and sometimes all the time, but I love what it says in verse 31.  They who WAIT for the Lord shall renew their strength.  We are not promised that the weary will go away, but we are promised renewal if we can wait and trust in a mighty God who never grows weary.  Right now that is a peaceful promise for me, knowing that in our feelings of tired, and uncertainty of the future I am still promised I will never hit the point of being so weary I can not go on if I choose to rely on a mighty God. 

 

We love you all and we thank you and continue to covet all your prayers.

 

Austin