The Baby branch

It's funny that when I went to college (I really like my college), we discussed trusting in God so much. A great many of these conversations revolved around our inevitable (we thought) marriages and the amount of kids God would send us. [We were in college after all and sex is on the brain of the majority of 13-30 year olds whether this is a good thing or not.] Saying I trust in God and actually allowing Him to decide how many children I would have were very different things in my mind even then.

This is where "the rubber meets the road" as it were - pun totally intended.

But, for a long time now, my focus has been on truly believing in God and believing in His love for me and believing that He does take an individual hand in my daily life. As an "intellectual" person, believing all of these things has never been entirely easy for me - so some days, I simply have to live as though I always believe these things and just hope that they are true. For me, this is what Faith is. And this is the faith I've been living since my 18th birthday and this is the faith I apply to my life even now.

When I met my husband, who seems to have a different type of faith (which is no less Faith), we struggled with the contraception question for awhile before we were married. How would we both "let go of the branch" of control and believe that God would actively give us as many children as would lead to our eventual happiness? There was many a difficult discussion and S was only eventually swayed by the scientific 99% effectiveness of Natural Family Planning (which is not and never was "the Rhythm method," so please don't get me started). Obviously, there was still to be a measure of control in our "letting go."

Ironically, those discussions I had with my college friends all those years ago, and even those talks with S as we were first falling in love revolved around accepting the huge amount of kids who were bound to come our way as young, fertile beings. We grappled with accepting (and paying for) 5-7-even 12 children as God-given gifts.

We never discussed that God might only plan on one child for us - or maybe even none.
We never thought of the possibility that trusting God goes both ways - to many and to few - and that the accepting of God's will is no less required for "those to whom he gives little."

I have come to grapple with these things these days. That in all my holy talk, I never considered that my one, precious boy would be what God asked me to accept. And only him. How do we, who beg for so much more, let go of this branch?

Right now, my only answer is: by free-falling into the hands of a Living God.