Birth-days

In Milan, the central heating has come on in our apartment. Rory and I sleep with the doors open. I’m starting to put away sandals and get the woollen singlets out. The leaves are falling and the days are often gloomy and threatening rain. Milan has a pretty bad reputation in terms of pollution and it is hard to tell what is smog and what is fog.

Back in New Zealand  my sister and my mother-in-law are turning another year older (and so is Kaaren in India).  We lost 2 babies to miscarriage this year and the first would have been born about now.  My situation brings to mind a favourite Michael Leunig prayer:

God give us rain when we expect sun.
Give us music when we expect trouble.
Give us tears when we expect breakfast.
Give us dreams when we expect a storm.
Give us a stray dog when we expect congratulations.
God play with us, turn us sideways and around.

~ Leunig

Just when I thought I would be cradling a new born, tender and sore from breasts and birth, I instead find myself ordering caffe macchiatos, making new friends in random places and mastering apartment life.

This new arrangement is surprising when I reflect back on a year of unexpected changes, on abrupt changes of direction. A strange mix of comedy and tragedy like Leunig’s prayer suggests: dreams instead of storms…and in bad moments, tears while ordering a coffee.

But this is life in all its richness (and pain)  and for those of us from Christchurch, if anybody could have told us before the fact that our city would rock and fall and people would die crushed in the rubble, we would have lived our lives paralysed in fear. Instead, we got up, ate breakfast, admired the morning sunshine and went about our day without the burden of knowing what was about to befall us. And for me, not knowing is the better way, since as Jesus so clearly taught us: worrying about tomorrow is pointless, today has enough worries of its own.

And most of us learn that when we get exactly what we want, it comes with its own unpredicted problems and unforeseen issues and when things land in our lap that we never thought we wanted, they come with gifts that we could not have guessed at.