I'm here again at last. Let me share where I've been and why I don't know whether I'll be back... back here, that is.

Since Last I Wrote...

This March, we got the news: I was pregnant! This was exactly what we’d hoped for.

Over the past year, I’ve occasionally wondered whether I spent too much time blogging about simplicity and not enough time living that lifestyle. However, hoping to make a difference in my readers’ lives, I had pressed on.

Within a few weeks, though, the feelings intensified. Exhausted from pregnancy, absorbed in baby blanket projects, and thinking about the future, I wondered... How can I be the Mama I hope to be when my time is split between family and the computer? Unsure what to do, I continued, but with less-frequent posts.

Until April 27th.

I started bleeding.

Though scared at first, I had hope. A disappointing ultrasound came next, but we clung onto the words of hope we were hearing from friends, music, and scripture. During this time of waiting and hoping, nothing mattered to me but relationships: God, family, friends. And we wanted their words of hope to mean that our baby was okay.

But they didn’t.

Two weeks after the ordeal began, I miscarried. After returning from the hospital the next day, I journaled, “We shed no tears - all those throughout the week had been enough... yesterday just gave a sense of finality to it all and reassuring hope that He was in control, since everything happened naturally and no further procedure was needed.”

What Now?

It seems to me I now have two options. I’ve recently realized it’s the same options Jesus’ followers had when they heard Him make the incredible, mathematically inaccurate statement “this poor widow put in more than all the rich people” (Luke 21:3). Option one: assume He’s wrong, or else a (in my case, cruel) liar. Option two: realize that He means something different than I understood.

The disciples had to realize that Jesus’ “more” didn’t mean money amounts. I have to realize that His promises of “hope” didn’t mean “this baby will make it”. The truths Jesus was teaching the disciples, about His value of money, giving, and motives, were far greater than what the disciples’ own eyes saw. I’m waiting... and, yes, hoping... to see what greater good will come out of our experience. I know I might never see it... but I can hope.

Simple Living?

Simple living is still what I do. In fact, my simple living has been refined as I’ve seen the uselessness of things that were clearly unimportant compared to our baby. For the moment, this workaholic-produced blog, SimpleMakes, is one of those unimportant things to me. I’ve decided to begin blogging again, but at a more personal, less time-consuming site. In the next month or two, I plan to begin regular posts there. I hope... there’s that word again... it’ll be an inspiration to readers and to myself.

I still get sad sometimes, I still wish I were pregnant, and yes, I have to fight jealousy when I find out about friends who are. But hey, Abraham “hoped and believed against all hope, and that’s how he became the father of many nations” (Rom 4:18, my paraphrase)... who knows what will happen to me!

I'm almost home! Until I am, I'll leave this post live so you can share your thoughts.

Please Answer:

"Why are you reading a blog about simplicity?"

You can take that to mean whatever you want, and I welcome anything from a few words to an essay full of your inner thoughts! :-)

Please also encourage, ask, and discuss amongst yourselves; the IntenseDebate commenting system I use lets you reply to specific comments which will show up threaded... meaning it's easy to see who's responding to whom.

I'm away, but wanted to introduce you all to a website I've been using more and more lately. Check out SpringPad and play with it for the next few weeks; I personally use the Weekly Meal Planner, Date Planner, and several others.

When I come back, I hope to post some ways you can use SpringPad in conjunction with SimpleMakes posts. Think one-click grabbing the content from the Efficient Packing List into a SpringPad list you can customize and use as your own!