Supposed to be

Good morning. As October draws to a close, I wanted to celebrate Down Syndrome Awareness Month just one more time. This is a re-post, but it is one that it on my heart regularly. I hope you enjoy it--whether you saw it the first time around or not.  :-)

I'm up early. Roo woke me up at 4:45, and I never got back to sleep. I actually kind of enjoy the early mornings—I'm not a morning person by nature, but when forced into it by my baby boy, I like having some time to myself when the rest of the house is quiet, getting a head start on the day, and being fully awake and happy when my kiddos are up for the day. I would probably enjoy it more if I hadn't stayed up until 11:00 last night… I am an 8-hours-of-sleep-minimum kind of girl… but, well, there's nothing to be done about that now.

But this morning I woke up with a familiar grumbling in my head: This isn't how it's supposed to be. Not the 4:45 wake-up call—I would rather he slept through the night (We had a good run for a while, but now we're back to being up 1-2 times per night.), but I can deal with that. Not the short amount of sleep overall—that's my own stupid fault for staying up so late. No, I was just thinking of all the… stuff. Yesterday was Roo's semi-annual IFSP meeting. This is where I sit down with our Early Intervention Specialist and our Service Coordinator (I'm not even going to pretend that I can explain to you exactly what those two women do, so just go with it.) and we go over all of the notes from our various therapists and set goals for Roo. Goals for my 9-month-old. Things that he needs to work on. Seriously? Sigh. This isn't how it's supposed to be. Over the next few days I'm going to be spending time with some people who are likely to have a lot of questions about Roo and Down syndrome, and I am very happy to answer them and so glad that they care. But I wish I weren't the one answering those questions. This isn't how it's supposed to be. On Thursday I'm going to another conference about Down syndrome and development and how to help my child learn. I didn't have to work this darn hard at helping my other kids learn to sit, crawl, play, talk… This isn't how it's supposed to be.

But here's the thing: Yes, it is. This is exactly how it's supposed to be. This may not be what I had planned, what I envisioned for my life or my child's life; but it is what God had planned. From the beginning. This is how it's supposed to be. And I can tell you from experience, whatever God has planned is way better than any plans I try to make on my own apart from Him.

I've been reading Choosing to See by Mary Beth Chapman. I highly recommend it—what an amazing story God has given this family. And I don't have the book in front of me, so I can't give you an exact quote… but at the funeral for her 5-year-old daughter, her teenage son shared that God is an artist, and we are too close to the canvas to be able to make sense of His artwork. But someday we'll be able to stand back—way back—and see what He was doing, how it all comes together to make the perfect masterpiece. I love that image.

This is how it's supposed to be. This is all part of God's masterpiece.

So I brush my grumbling thought aside—again. It's not the first time I've had to do it, and it won't be the last. But I do it. I push it away, and I claim the truth that I know:

"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." –Jeremiah 29:11