Nine Years

Nine years ago today, I am sure I was sitting in my bed, in our first home, nursing our second daughter, a mere twenty four hours old. Yesterday we celebrated her birthday with gifts and singing and phone calls from family and friends. Today we will finish the celebrations with foods of her choosing, as I have been under the weather for a couple of days and her foods just didn’t get made yesterday. I am thankful for her grace and understanding.

Our second born daughter, Emma Joy, she can be a great mystery and offers her own challenges. I, too, am a second born, so I understand what it is to live in the shadow of the first born child. But I was also the youngest by many years, so really I had my own lime light. Emma has to work for hers, striving to stand out from her steady, responsible older sister, and her wildly unpredictable younger sisters.

Emma is funny and smart. She is sometimes quick witted and sometimes quite ditzy. She is stubborn and has an inner passion that I pray God will use one day. She is beautiful and sacrificial. She rarely walks through the house, preferring instead to dance through in some nature of ballet movement. She.loves.horses. And while the driving to lessons can be inconvenient, it delights me to give her that one hour a week that is entirely hers.

She keeps me on my knees and on my face, revealing so many of my weaknesses. But then she will blindside me with her generosity, like when she took all the money she had been saving for herself and decided to buy her sister a birthday gift. Or the time she had saved up half the money she needed to buy an American Girl horse (this girl who does not like to work and so has a difficult time earning money) and came quietly to me one afternoon and said she could always save more money and would instead like to give this money to a missionary. And I still tear up at the memory of it because that is not me, that was God doing His thing in her.

I know God has great things planned for Miss Emma. He will use her sweet spirit and the gifts He has given her for His glory. I look forward to seeing His plan revealed in her life as the years go by.