I have some weight to lose.  No surprise there, as I recently had a baby.  I’m still 10 pounds higher than my pre-pregnancy weight, and 15 higher than I’d like to be.  But at this point, with memories of the 41st week of pregnancy still fresh, this fat has never felt so good.  But that is not the point of this entry....

 

I was looking through old pictures last night as I updated this website.   I found a picture of myself holding 8 week old Samuel.  And my internal dialogue upon viewing the picture went something like this:

“What a cute baby he was - and amazing that a quintessentially “Samuel” look is already present on his tiny face.  And hey - I’m looking pretty good, too.  Why it is harder to lose weight this time?  Abby is already 4 weeks old, and there is no way I’m going to be as thin when she’s 8 weeks old as I was when Samuel was 8 weeks old.  Well, they say it gets harder with each child, and she is the 3rd...  WAIT, you idiot!  You did not give birth to Samuel!  You are comparing a never-pregnant body with one four weeks removed from its second birth.  And YES, you just genuinely forgot that you adopted Samuel!  Of course other people forget, but how funny that you did, too.”

 

I’ve often wondered how God can ‘remember our sin no more’.  I used to think of it in a legal sense - like the judge telling the jury to disregard that last piece of evidence.   They aren’t supposed to base their ruling on that evidence, but everyone knows they don’t actually forget.  So I felt that God would choose to disregard my forgiven sins, but they’d always be lurking somewhere.   But yesterday I forgot that my son did not grow in my womb.   The relationship I have with him - my love for and delight in him - is so great that I truly forgot that we were not always together.  If my imperfect love can bring a moment of forgetfulness, I am quite sure that God’s perfect love for and delight in us can bring perfect forgetfulness of that which once kept us apart.