Don’t forget to make your guess! Lily’s weight and birth time. Instructions here: https://thecolleyhouse.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=19056&action=edit
And speaking of the babes/ It’s always “out of the mouths of babes”…
We have three with us this weekend, while Hannah is speaking at a ladies day at the good Sandyville church near Parkersburg, WV. When three are here it’s a noise competition and a general knock-down/drag out—not of people, but things. Today, I’m actually taking them to explore a nearby cave. I think the damage today will be under the earth and who will know? I think if Eliza Jane says “I a-uh-dentally” one more time, I’ll…well, I’ll probably grab her up again and tickle her. (Actually, I can no longer pick her up, which makes me very sad! But she is off the charts—both weight and height.)
So, it was 3:53 am and I was about done. I’d already been up with Ezra, who had a bad dream, when Eliza came pitter-pattering to my bedside and cried “I had a bad dweam!”
I must say here that I didn’t really believe her. I really thought that it was all those other times she’d said that and I had lifted her into my bed and snuggled her back to sleep that had driven her to imagine that her benign dreams were a little bit “bad”; bad enough to come and climb in. I lifted her up and put her between Papa and me. That cast on her right arm is “to be reckoned with” in a double bed with three people! (It is a “violet” cast and she is so proud of it.)
Eliza then whispered “I don’t think you can hear my wuhds.”
I said, :I don’t need to hear your words. We are not talking. We are going to sleep.”
Then she softly whispered “Well, God can hear my wuhds.”
I woke up then, for maybe the first time. “Oh, yes, you go ahead and talk to God. I can hear, too.”
The she whispered, “Dee-ah God, PWEASE, oh PWEASE, don’t let me have any mow-ah bad, ‘cary dreams. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
Well, I was pricked. I had doubted the severity of her dreams. But, I did go right back to sleep (With my arm securing the otherwise unruly cast) in spite of my conscience-ache .
In the morning, I asked her if she could remember her dream.
“Oh yes. It was mama and me and somebody else. Mama spilled a bag of cookies and a whole bunch of dogs came and ate dem all up. When dey finished eating dem, dey attacked us.”
I said “Did they bite you?”
She said “Dey didn’t get us. We ran and ran and while we runned, I waked up.”
Lord, Help me to be more trusting of the innocent ones, more sympathetic and comforting in their little trials and more assured that You hear our whispers. And help me to remember that sometimes the innocent ones who need me may be bigger people, too.
Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish (Matthew 18:14).
She will be here next month! Lord willing, some time around the middle of March, Lily Annette Colley will grace our family with her sweet presence and this mammy, whose name is Cynthia ANNETTE Colley, cannot wait. Her North Jackson family has given her every material thing she could need for the first year of her life (at least) and her older siblings, Maggie and Ellis have been thinking a lot about how to be the best-ever sister and brother. Lily will be a blessed baby, for sure. God is supreme, of course, in all His care.
But he exhibits his marvelous wonder, perhaps most of all today, when he breathes into tiny lungs the breath of life and lays a baby in the arms of a Christian mother for the first time. Glenn and I are already praying for heaven for Lily.