When God gives you a promise, you oftentimes sit and day dream about what that promise fulfilled will be like, look like, feel like. You envision living in the promise and try your best in your human mind to conjure up what God’s plans will look like played out.

When we found out we were going to have a baby, Cale and I constantly talked about what we thought she would look like and what her personality might be like. We day dreamed often about what that new season of having an actual baby 24/7 would be like. Our human minds tried so hard to wrap themselves around God’s plans, and we thought we were prepared. But the biggest thing Lydia has taught me now that she is here is that God’s plans and promises fulfilled are so much more incredible and perfect than anything we could ever try to picture or come up with on our own. Any ideas we might have about what God’s promises will be like once we are walking in them are nothing more than a shade of the vibrant and beautiful reality of what it is really like once you’re there.

When we were naming Lydia, we prayed about it and wanted to see if God would give us any insight into some of the things he had “marked” her with– characteristic traits, things she is called to, or ways God wants to use her life specifically as she grows older. We wanted her name to mark her identity; to speak the truth about who she is every time someone says it. Overtime the consistent things we both felt were that she would be a worshipper and someone who was a ray of uplifting light to those around her; that she would fill people up and not drain them. So we chose Lydia in reference to the woman in the Bible named Lydia who was described as a “worshipper of God”, and we chose Rae to symbolize a bright ray of sunshine. We spent time thinking about how those traits would play out and when we would start seeing them come into play.

But none of the dreaming even came close to the little person that we are discovering her to be. She is so intimately designed to be exactly what gives Cale and I life and makes our family so much more complete. She relaxes and falls asleep to worship music, not her lullaby songs. She will sit quietly and listen to Cale practice worship songs on the piano or his guitar. And she has been so much more life-giving to us than life-draining. She brings the joy of the Lord to my heart and refreshes my spirit every single morning when I go to pick her up and she is smiling at me. She smiles WAY more than she fusses, and is just a radiant beam of light. Always. She’s barely 2 months old, and already I see everything we thought the Lord was speaking over her flowing out of her little life.

It’s incredible how detailed God is with us. How he orchestrates our lives and leaves no small thing out. Even the things we don’t notice don’t go unnoticed to Jesus. He cares about all of it. I am learning this more and more as we watch this little baby grow into the person God designed for her to be, and designed for us to be as a unit.

The past two months with her have been so joyful and sweet, to say the least. I want time to stand still so we can soak in these short precious months of her infancy and just watch that face full of innocence and purity discover her new world with wonder and awe. She’s nothing short of a blessing.