When I was a little girl, my parents instated a bedtime routine for me. It was some iteration of bath, snack time, brush teeth, story time, and then saying prayers. Like most prayers for little kids, there was a rhythm to it so that eventually I’d be able to say them on my own and know what to pray for. One thing we always prayed has always stuck out to me. Each night, we’d thank God for His many blessings, seen and unseen. As a kid, I didn’t understand the full breadth of what that meant, but as I got older it meant more. It’s simple, but hard to wrap our minds around: the fact that God blesses us in ways that are readily apparent and obvious, but He also blesses us in ways we aren’t even aware of, simply because He can see things going on around us that we could never possibly see from our limited perspective.

I haven’t mentioned this in a long time, but if you were keeping up on Soul Deep in February, you found out that I am currently pregnant. Right now, as I write this, I am 34 weeks along, so coming into the last home stretch. At this point, we’ve painted a nursery, set up the furniture, celebrated with a shower, and now Sam and I are nesting in full force. Every day, I tackle a small project getting ready for our daughter. One day, I wash, fold, and put away all her clothes, the next I set up her changing table, then sanitize and find a place for her bottles and pacifiers– every day is a new chore and I’m excited to do it. As I break down packaging, sort, sanitize, decorate, and find a place for everything, I pray. I ask God to grow her healthily inside me– body and mind. I ask Him to make my body ready for a safe delivery. I ask Him to give Sam and I the wisdom to raise her and the grace to teach her how deeply she is loved by God; to hold her close to His heart every day of her life.

The Fruits of the Spirit remind me of Sunday school lessons. No matter where you go to church, odds are, if you were a kid there was some kind of poster or coloring sheet that had pictures of apples, oranges, bananas, grapes, etc. and they all were labeled with a different fruit of the Spirit. There are songs that we learn in order to memorize them, and maybe you were given a piece of candy or a prize if you could list them all off the top of your head. As we get older, the term “Fruits of the Spirit” feels like a Christianese phrase that is glossed over and never really thought about beyond that Sunday school lesson from decades ago. It’s kind of on the same level as the armor of God, or the Ten Commandments: really, it’s a foundational idea to the Christian walk, but it’s reviewed so often that we forget the precious values these things hold for us to spiritually mature past the Bible basics.