Time

NOTICE!! THE PICTURES BELOW ARE OLD PICTURES. THEY ARE NOT PICTURES OF THIS BABY.

There. I was innocently putting these pictures on here as I typed my thoughts out in this post. Then I realized how they looked – what with me being so close to my due date and all, and I realized people might simply scroll through, see the pictures, and begin congratulating me on the birth that has not yet occurred. Now, back to my real post.

I was looking through some old pictures yesterday and it struck me what a strange thing time is – how much can change in such a small amount of time.

For example, first, I saw this picture of me from a year ago at this very time:

I was running “The Dirty Dash” with several of my family members. It was a silly 10K race full of ridiculous and often very muddy obstacles. It was a very fun race, but mostly, as I looked at this picture, it seemed so strange to me to think that here I am, just a year later, awaiting the birth of a new child. At that point (last year) I actually had no plans of being pregnant again any time in the very near future, and it just felt odd to look at me there – laughing in a muddy race – and to think, “That Nancy had no idea that in exactly a year’s time, she’d be having another baby. Crazy.”

Then, by chance, I flipped open one of our photo albums right to this point (nearly three years ago):

It kind of overwhelmed me. I mean here I am – grumpy and complaining that I won’t go into labor, but hardly really thinking about what “going into labor” means. It means that in a matter of a few hours, your entire world, your entire eternity changes. Looking at these pictures from Jesse’s birth made me realize, “My goodness! At any moment, there will suddenly be a whole entire REAL new person here. He will have his own perfectly formed little body, his own tiny hands and face. He will be a real and actual individual all set to live out his life here . . . and it will just suddenly happen . . . all in one day.”

Anyway, all of that just had me thinking how crazy things are, how much things change, and how hard it is for us to really wrap our minds around all the things that are bound to keep changing and happening in our lives. Crazy crazy stuff.