As I touched on in the last post, Willa is struggling. The year and its sorrows have caught up with her and she’s weighed down by them daily. Her nights vacillate between the normal conspiratorial giggles and whispers with sisters, and crying herself to sleep over all the things she’s lost. Fortunately her delightful sisters don’t let the crying nights overwhelm the laughing nights, and the giggles dominate! We do have her talk openly about her feelings when these moods hit, and encourage her to let the sadness flow through and out of her. Most of it I expected: Jett, Sammy (though he died in 2019, it still smarts for my girls), Bethaney, friends that have left PNG for good, inaccessible family in America, all of Australia. Sure, all these things pain me, too. But then she listed a puppy she played with for a few hours that died shortly thereafter. What?? I didn’t even hardly remember the puppy. But she did. And she plunked it firmly on her list of grievances against this whole cursed year.

We visited the friends who had that puppy and played with their new (and vibrantly healthy) replacement. New life. New beginnings. Deep breaths. I feel out of my depth, as I believe most parents of my generation do, facing this year with children. It’s… a lot. And yet there is still new life. Small things to celebrate and beauty to be found. It’s not a cursed year, but a year of growth, refinement by fire, and a total dependence on the God of all creation.