I have been working on a very different post, about how I’ve transitioning from one eating plan to a different one and why and how it’s going. But this morning, a Facebook memory popped up from 5 years ago, and it changed my direction. The other post can wait a few days.

Five years ago this morning, I was wrapped in pure joy. I was freshly turned 41, very pregnant with my longed-for rainbow baby, and honored with a lovely, overwhelmingly generous baby shower by my home church, surrounded by supportive women, some of whom had known me since I was 2 years old. Glorious. (And that’s my sweet, excited mama by my side).

Today, exactly five years later, I got up early on this holiday weekend morning, threw on the first available pair of shorts and a t-shirt, ran a brush through my dirty hair, and left the house with a notebook, an iPad, and a grim determination to get some desperately needed alone time. I was supposed to be having it in my jammies at home, leisurely flipping through magazines and listening to the birds. Instead, my daughter threw a colossal tantrum, my husband had to rearrange the special plans he’d made for an outing with her, and my choice was to feel grounded at home myself or “run away” before my alone-time, sanity-preserving window closed. With my husband’s blessing, I ran.

Did I go off to a salon and decompress with my toes in swirling bubbles? Go on a shopping spree? Sip coffee in a hip, comfy coffeehouse chair? Nope. Inconveniently, we have recently set out on a journey to be debt-free, and my “blow money” budget was already spent up for this month. So in the interest of fiscal responsibility, I drove to the parking lot of a closed business to borrow their wi-fi so I could watch a video from a parenting series literally titled “Have a Different Child By Friday.”

I really couldn’t have anticipated this at that shower. We knew so many things before her birth – we’d seen her face and her gender and the chambers of her heart from her ultrasound, we tracked her development size week by week relative to various fruits and vegetables thanks to a prenatal app, we’d even chosen her name years before. But with any pregnancy there is no way to know ahead of time the one thing that would actually truly be useful information: their personality.

You can’t possibly know what will make them laugh and what will make them dig in their heels. What they’ll absorb easily and what will be hard for them to understand. And most importantly – you can’t know how very much your own strengths and so-human flaws will be reflected in their little life. I shared about this a bit before I went back to work from maternity leave (you can read that post here), but at 11 weeks old, she still wasn’t offering up a real glimpse of who she might be.

My daughter is bright, funny, and gives the best hugs and kisses. She is extraordinarily observant and loves art and books and our kitty and dresses and glitter. And she has what I have to believe is actually a 2-child’s-worth dose of stubbornness and a highly charged sense of outrage when challenge is presented to her own ideas,  which she might possibly have gotten from me and then amplified it. She will set the world on fire one day, and I pray over her daily that she will allow that strength to be used as a mighty woman of God as she grows up.

Really though, the biggest thing I didn’t know at that shower five years ago was that I’d be challenged to grow up myself. I’d spent over four decades learning myself, just to be beautifully, and possibly humorously from God’s perspective, reminded that in no way do I know it all, can do it all, or can control it all. When I’m stressed out and wonder if I’m doing any of this right, that reminder can feel like a curse. Oh, but it isn’t. It’s a gift.

How much more clearly can I be brought to understand God’s great, infinitely gracious, patient love for me (and for those around me whose deservedness of grace I may be tempted to measure) than to be called on to show that grace, patience, and guidance to my daughter? Today is just a day. There will be so many more; more opportunities for laughter and strength and remembering that the loudest lesson I teach is my own actions. Of course I feel inadequate to the task. I am! But He isn’t, and I can trust Him, with her and with myself. Thank you Lord.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.” Jeremiah 29:11