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But then she was born and though she was delicious and sweet and filled my heart with love, I was still anxious and sad and everything just felt a little muted. And to spend as much time sniffing sweet Penelope’s neck as I could before all that new baby smell disappeared. And in those moments, there is one thing to which we can cling and that is the knowledge that God is on his way, coming to bring us new life. It can only be found in believing absolutely that the God who loves you beyond all imagining, the God who delights in you and wants to woo you and finds you utterly enchanting, the God who wants to dry your every tear and make you whole and happy, is on his way.

He loves you when you *accidentally* spend your grocery budget at Sephora and when you eat the entire pizza (and maybe the gallon of ice cream, too) in one sitting. So here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to let him. We’re going to let him love us and stroke our hair, wrap his arms around us and and heal us and dry our tears. And don’t worry; I don’t think he’ll mind too much if our noses run all over his warm grandfatherly sweater or if our tears don’t stop right away.

And this time the only purpose of my sharing this story is to make you feel like the most amazing person on earth…or at least super super super glad and relieved that you’re not as awkward as I am. And it’s been going so well that I’m 78% sure that somewhere deep down inside of me there is an actual people person who’s been hiding for basically my whole life (and for a wide variety of weird reasons that we can explore at a later date). In practice, what this looks like is me smiling at people in the grocery store and not pretending to be asleep on airplanes and not wearing my earbuds every time I leave the house so that people won’t try to engage with me (though let me state for the record that these are all very brilliant maneuvers and I am keeping them all in my back pocket and patting them lovingly at regular intervals so they will not feel neglected and leave me). And so I said a little prayer that God would, in his magical God way, remove my comment about grandchildren from this man’s brain and only leave the memory of my smiles (which I think was a pretty brilliant idea by me, God, so I hope you were listening).

And by “rough,” I mean the kind of day that makes you wonder what you were thinking when you decided to get out of bed that morning. My to-do list was too long, my sick little Lucy too sick, my body too pregnant, my house too messy, big transitions too transition-y, ETC. My mischievous, tenderhearted, 4-year-old Charlie was being way, way, way too FOUR. If you had a hard day, sweet friend, turn to God tonight and let him love you.