Our second baby girl: ultra-tiny and way early.

I love you – yes, I do!  A  bushel and peck and a hug around the neck.  For almost your entire life, from such a young, young age, you’ve been a songstress, a singer, a psalmist.  You were the choreographing, twirling, flowing-fabric, scarf-dancing music track of the family ~ just skipping down the happy hallways of life.  Everything got a little more colorful and a little more ebullient when you came along.

Yes, I cropped Stormie (the other half of the trend-setting www.MayDae.com.  It Is not her birthday!  *smile

You were born to 

Heavy-with-flowers lilac bushes, your sister learning to wear “slip-slops” when she came to see you for the first time at the hospital,  purple irises lining established streets in Kokomo, a little charcoal gray house and a month with which you’re joined by name.   You were more than 5 weeks early and may have arrived because of a crazy carnival ride and took your first post-hospital nap atop an old pulpit in the corner of the fellowship hall while I taught a VBS class.  You were like a china doll, I was afraid to make noise.  We sewed and created and worked hard to prepare your space, we wanted everything to be just right –  and in that tiny pink and lace bassinet, you looked like a miniature. 

The rainbow-girl

God heals.  He is the Healer.  That is the blazing-across-the-skymessage of your life, Steph.  And the adversary gets no points in the battle for our baby girl.  With God’s blessing-kiss on the love between your dad and me, with your big sister praying to have a little sister all her own - you were sent.  But you know the enemy, he always tries to stop a miracle at its birth.  You live in the ranks of Moses, Jesus, even, with spiritual war- decrees against their very lives: Stop the miracle before it can begin to change the course of everything…

But God, who is faithful, healed you wholly and fully.  Breath.  That is what He gave you.  Unlike others who never had to struggle for air, you, like Adam, had to have a supernatural miracle of the very Ruach, the breath of God {the actual very Spirit of the Living God} breathed in to you.

And so, though I now see the miraculous in every day and can look back at the faithfulness of the One who created me and all the times He was saving me from myself and certain disaster, you were the very first miracle I ever really knew I needed.  And in the quiet, dark night following your birth, when your life hung precariously in a balance I didn’t even comprehend, when they’d taken you to James Whitcomb Riley Hospital in Indianapolis and you were not in my arms – I cried out for your life, and the Faithful One heard me and graciously granted my petition.

And though so much could have gone wrong, there could have been so many problems, later, He, by the driving force of His very breath in you, instilled so much color, so much texture and pattern and creativity and gifting and vivaciousness and animation.  His very Spirit filled your lungs and your heart and soul and personality and every rainbow has symbolized you since.

You are Rainbow Bear.  Always have been.  And it was confirmed by the laying on of hands more than once.  There is so much there.  May you always know in all things that you were created to declare in the heavenlies that God keeps His promise.

Happy Birthday, Stephanie.  I put some words together so you will know how & why I celebrate your birth and your life!

Happy Birthday, sweetie-pie.  With love from your momma