I am living in a period of forced weakness. The weakness is physical and its purpose is clear. But as I look back over my life, I realize this isn’t the first time such a period has occurred, and in the past, things were different.

For the past six and a half months, my antagonists have been confined to my own body: nausea, dizziness, lack of appetite, weight gain, excessive urination, headaches, absence of preferred amounts of wine. Then there are the gifts of the third trimester: achy joints, backaches, and the most recent–a swelling in my hands that has rendered my wedding ring unwearable and those hands almost nonfunctional. I can type (thank God), but when I sat down yesterday to start writing thank-you notes for baby gifts, my fingers began going numb after the first two. After a few more, I could barely grip the pen and my entire hand was going tingly. I realized that had I still been working, forced to hold a tight grip on a drill in one hand and a kid’s head in the other, things would have gone downhill fast. (All of this to say that unemployment can be a gift and if you receive a thank-you note from me that is illegible and covered in blood and tears, don’t be alarmed. I’ll make it. Insert martyr’s sigh here.)

But it’s all headed somewhere, and as The Sis teased yesterday in her sing-songy, I’m imitating a doctor voice, “The only cure is delivery.” Maybe that’s why I dreamed last night of going into labor, except that in an odd echo of my glucose test blood retrieval, the nurse couldn’t get me numb with the epidural needle so they sent me home and told me to come back later. I think you can imagine what I told them.

The thing is, though, it’s always been headed somewhere. I just didn’t always have a constant kicking reminder in my belly of that, and so I doubted. When I didn’t get married right out of college, I extended my search a couple of years and waited for The One to show up. When I was no longer the star student of the class, I settled for mid-range mediocrity and took solace in the fact that I’d still be called Doctor. When I was surrounded by married friends and still had no prospects of my own, I moved to New York to look for a new identity there. And when I got there and ended up broke and interminably single, watching my options reduce down not to The One, but to One, I clung to a raw faith bred not by Sunday School songs and easy platitudes but by disappointment and brokenness. I saw all the things I didn’t have for what they were: a means to an end. A form of attaining my own security and affirming my own worth. I would never have appreciated any of them had they been granted when I wanted them. I would have taken them for granted and made them miserable out of my own defensiveness and discontent, because underneath it all I would have still been broken.

Oh, okay, I’m still broken. Just let the internet stop working or the washing machine overflow or a crumb show up on the counter and that truth will rise to the surface. But. The cracks that showed up before New York, followed by a demolition afterward and a slow rebuilding, provided a new foundation of truth in which people are not provided to supply my happiness, and the roles I play are not the sum of my identity. So I can be a wife and, soon, a mother in freedom. Because I live in a home where patience is more than a virtue–it’s a self-sacrificing way of life (practiced, sometimes, even by me); where forgiveness is the new currency; where The One who did, eventually, show up can look at me and see one “faultless in spite of all her faults.” My lessons in humility have relocated their classrooms from the streets of New York to the confines of our home, but because of a greater wisdom than mine and what looked at the time like denial, they are now full of hope and laughter. And freshly painted walls. And Halloween decorations I never would have had the vision to create. And cleaning supplies.

And never forgetting the fact that I only have a home because of One who gave up His.