For those of you who somehow follow this blog but don't follow me on Twitter or are friends with me on Facebook, I am now a dad. Not just technically, but in fact. Eleanor Violet Goodwin was born on 26 July 2011 at 9.45am, weighing 8lb / 3.625kgs and measuring 21.7" / 55cm. Three weeks later, she's almost 9lb / 4kgs.
And I'm totally besotted. But allow me to backtrack for a moment...
As I posted earlier today over on the other blog I write, it's been a busy season of life since this blog went silent earlier in the year. Some people write to process that kind of change; I tend to get stuck in with living the change and seeing where we end up.
Much as I love writing - both words and music - seasons in life change the urgency for that writing to take place. For several years, I wrote and finished a song pretty much every week or so. Over the past year, surrounded by some of the finest songwriters on the planet (no, really), I've only written a couple here and there, and most of them have been for my baby daughter in the last few weeks. It's not because I think my songs don't stand up (ok, that may be a little bit of the reason - lol), it's because the time & energy I once dedicated to songwriting has been invested in other areas of life; those requiring my time & energy more urgently, but no less passionately. Sure, it means that my files of song seeds are overflowing because I've not planted any of the seeds from the past year, but that's ok - a fallow year lets the soil rest, ready for a bumper crop in the future, whenever that might be.
Until the God-given urgency returns, the God-given rest continues.
So this most recent season of life has seen a new job, a new house, and a new baby. Those are pretty much the biggest things a married couple is going to do, and to have all of them happen in the space of three months (let's not get technical on the baby cooking time) has meant my time has been better spent loving my wife than writing about loving my wife.
The best gift I can give my daughter is to show her love; teaching her how much I love her mummy, how much we both love her. And that takes time. Intentional time.
It's not overly likely that this blog is going to get busy again like it was back in 2009, or even parts of 2010. Life has changed, changed for the better, and when I do write, it's mostly going to be over on that other blog I mentioned earlier. It's a blog all about love, from a church founded on love, for a people in need of love - often more urgently than they'll ever know.
