Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Keeping the Faith

IF there's one thing that being pregnant does for you, it helps you enlarge your faith.  Because deep down you know that there's nothing you can do to to keep that baby safe inside you.  You can eat right, you can work out, you can follow all the rules, and you could be in a car accident on the way to work one day that ends it all.  Life is short and it's beautiful and it's terrifying to know that you JUST have to rely on God to bring you through.  Even the people with the strongest faith find they are just big hypocrites when a baby is placed in their care.  Because immediately you want to take care of it and nurture it and be the best parent you can be, in a really broken world.

So today, at 31 weeks, which I totally forgot until Lauren text me about it, and then Andy text me later about, I'm plagued with the knowledge that every time I've been taking the last 15 minutes of the day out to go to a doctor's appointment, they've been docking me an hour.  That's policy.  That's policy I had no prior knowledge about.  So down from 80 hours, of which I was fairly sure I had most of left...I've got 31.  31 hours of vacation time left.  I have at least 5 more appointments, which will dock that at least 5 more hours.

And here's my lack of faith.  We were trying to get me four weeks vacation, using savings for two of them, and then using vacation for the rest.  We'll be lucky if I get 20 hours of vacation out of that, after all the appointments are done.  Another clincher is, my office isn't open on Black Friday, but we can't work either, but we don't get paid.  Fast forward to Christmas.  We aren't open the week between Christmas and New Year, but we don't get paid either.  That leaves LOTS of time where I don't get a paycheck.

Where are we going to get the money?

When you start to lose faith, you start to doubt.  Lack of faith equals lack of hope.  And when you believe there is no hope in a situation it's a slap in the face to God- the author and illustrator of the Universe.  I'm sorry, you think your money problems are too big for God?  No, but sometimes I wonder if the starving children in Africa aren't more important than making sure my son makes his way into my white,  middle class life in style.  If money for the people who don't eat on a regular basis takes precedence over me having a few more days off to be with my son.

Maybe what frustrates me more is that Andy is working so hard with the money to make sure we have enough for me to be off.  I've gotten a decorating job to cover my time off, and he's been painting on his days off and just making sure we're not going over budget (which we manage to do many times).  He's trying to make ends meet for his new family.  And now this.  He says to me, "I just want you to have enough time off to heal."  My precious, precious husband.

So instead of counting my pennies, I'm going to reaffirm that all things are possible with God and start counting my blessings again.  (How much things can change from one blog post to the next...)  Our shower is on Sunday, and we will be surrounded by friends and family.  Lauren's shower was on Saturday and she loved her blanket.  Here we are together:


Enough of this pity party.  Time to get back to work.