Update - Fast Forward a Year

::Kristen logs in to blogger, looks sheepishly at the date at the top of last published post, grimaces.::

Apologies, people.

Life is crazy. You know it, I know it. Yet, most people still manage to keep a blog up-to-date within a year, at least. Oh well. Life goes on.

Well, life has changed a lot at the Learned house over the past year. We live in a different place now. We moved from our two-bedroom apartment into a three-bedroom townhouse over New Years' this year. It suits us well - definitely better than the apartment. We have room to live. Hopefully this will be the last place we live until we buy a house.

Last year was a good one for us.

This one, however, got off to a rough start.

In December, we discovered that I was pregnant. We were so excited - and it was really quite surreal. It seemed like no sooner did we find out and manage to absorb the news and get excited about it that I noticed that I wasn't feeling right. I wound up losing the baby at about 6 weeks. It was an early miscarriage, so it wasn't as painful as it might have been later. Physically, that is.

Emotionally, it was terrible.

The fear I experienced when I realized something wasn't right.

The dread I felt when I was going through what I thought it probably was.

The smallness I felt when I realized I couldn't do anything to stop it.

The emptiness I felt when I knew it was over.

The humiliation I felt when I had to tell the people that knew (there weren't many).

The grief I felt (and have continued to feel) for the little person I loved and lost, and for what could have been.

The minute amount of hope I had been holding onto until my doctor's appointment in the middle of the following week. I cherished a teeny tiny flicker of hope that I'd go to the doctor's office and they'd say, oh, Mrs. Learned, you ARE pregnant, and everything is fine, and it must have just been a scare. Here, let's do an ultrasound and prove it! However, that wasn't what happened. And I knew it wouldn't be. But it still was another crushing blow when, at the doctor's office, they confirmed that I wasn't pregnant.

The loneliness I felt. I only shared my body with the baby for a few weeks. But I felt very alone in my body all by myself when he (I feel like it was a boy, for some reason) wasn't there anymore.

The confusion. What went wrong? What should I do now? Should I keep the estimated due date on the calendar, or white it out and pretend it never happened? Should we try again, or wait? Should I even feel this way about a miscarriage that happened so early? Am I overreacting?

I can't wait to meet our little one in heaven. I never dreamed that I would be one of those women who had experienced something like this - the loss of a child. Some might scoff and say that I haven't experienced the loss of a child - and I know that compared to the loss of some I know who have lost babies during birth or the first few months of life, I have lost little. But it is a loss. My life is changed because of that experience, and earth has lost a little more appeal. I can't wait to get to heaven and meet my Lord, and also get to meet my baby.

But life is good, too!

I have been experiencing a revival of sorts in the past month or so. At church, Jeff and Jason have been teaching through a series on four attributes of God: God is Great, Good, Glorious, and Gracious. They were so timely for me. Each message was delivered, it seemed, right to my heart from God's. (If you want to hear them, I highly recommend. Download them at www.visiodei.org).

I'm not ready to describe in great detail what God's doing in my life right now to people en masse, but I will be. And until then, I will continue to try to keep up the posting here. For posterity, if nothing else.