Miraculous Joy

Do you know what’s crazy about the NICU? How you can have pure joy during a moment that warrants deep sorrow. This is what I call miraculous joy.

I have counted hundreds of miracles from our NICU journey. Both during the NICU and over the last two and a half years since our twins’ birth. But I’m always grateful when I get to “record” one more miracle on my list. I might have missed this miracle had I not seen a picture of a mother going through the NICU today on my Instagram feed.

In this picture, her face was beaming with love and joy. At first glance, I thought “how can she be smiling like that?” Because in this particular picture, I can see the state of her son’s health so clearly. All the uncertainty, the pain, the procedures that have been done, the distance between where he is now and where he still needs be before coming home. But to that mother, just for a moment, she has pure joy, because in that moment she has her hands gently placed on her new baby son.

I am reminded of this disproportional joy during my own NICU journey. No other time in my life have I looked at my kids in a time of illness or injury with a beaming smile on my face. But that is one of the beautiful things about prematurity…though it is filled with many thorns, it also has the sweetest most fragrant blooms. I can remember the butterflies in my stomach with joyful anticipation each morning I’d arrive at the NICU. In those beginning weeks, there was so much sorrow, and yet my joy swallowed up that sorrow, just for just a moment, as I gazed upon them or touched them or talked to them. For just a moment the wires, the breathing tubes and the alarms disappeared and their identity as my daughters was magnified. Their innocence bigger than their injuries, their humanity bigger than their hurting bodies, and my motherly love for them brought joy bigger than my sorrow over. Although prematurity robs mothers of many things, and there is much to grieve in that, prematurity cannot rob our God-given love for our children. And that love that God has placed in our hearts, has the incredible ability to overpower our sorrow.

Even if just for a moment.