Changing of Seasons

This time last year I was in the home stretch of planning the most significant day of my life. My wedding day. As I walked along the bluff on a cool afternoon this past week I looked down to the spot some of my bridal portraits were taken. It was about this time last year, just as we were getting some cool days, that I was there looking out over the river in my wedding gown trying to imagine what it would be like to be a wife.
Seasons have changed from fall to winter to spring to summer and now coming back to fall. As the months have gone on I am amazed anew at God's faithfulness. I think back to a year ago and find it hard to remember what it was like to not be married to Cole. Now, with our first daughter due two days before our fist anniversary, I have different questions. What will it be like to be a mother? What will she look like? How will our lives change because of her? I don't worry, though. Because I know through all of the challenges and changes of my life, God has been faithful.
Sometime in the next 9 weeks, my life will change forever - again. And though I know that will bring good things and difficult things, God will be there and he will sanctify me through it.
As I write, our little baby girl squirms and moves within me and I think of something that a friend of a friend said years ago in a paper he wrote: "Remember that you are a living chalice which will one day bear souls for which Christ died to save. There is no greater calling in life than that." At the time I first read that I was about 15, but it has stuck with me. When I hear her heartbeat, feel her move, or try to imagine holding her in my arms for the first time, I know this is part of why I was created. To give her life, and prepare her to live eternally serving our God. What a privilege! What a responsibility! Ready or not, here she comes :)