I haven’t written anything for a long time. The reason for this initially was a bit of discouragement and self doubt, coupled with a rather unhealthy love hate relationship with my good friend Netflix and my buddy Stan. But then life went a little nuts and I don’t think I would have been able to write even if I had wanted to. I feel like my mind is still playing catch up with the last 6 months.

I am 26 (give or take) weeks pregnant with baby number 5. Madness? Yes. The gap between Evie and this baby is a whole year longer than between all the other kids because truth be told we just didn’t know whether or not it was the right thing to do. So many variables, so many unknowns.. health, finances, life, the other kids, my sanity, the fact that we live in a glorified shoebox.. but then a friend gave me the best piece of advice I have maybe ever received.. she said “Ferne, you will never ever regret having another baby, but 2, 5, 10 years down the line you may just regret not having it” and that kind of made up our minds.. that and a whoooole lot of trusting Jesus in ways we never have before. At the start I said I was going to treasure every moment of this pregnancy knowing it will most likely be my last… I said I wanted it to go slowly and I wanted to feel and remember and savour every moment of it. Unfortunately that hasn’t really been the case, not because there is anything wrong with me or the baby, I thank Jesus every day that I am carrying a beautiful healthy strong boy and that in 14 weeks he will be in my arms, and I thank Jesus every day that the rest of the kids and Hoody are safe and healthy and doing really well.. but life the last few months has been hectic..

In October last year, a small bush fire started 40 odd km away from us, when a bolt of  lightning struck a tree. Sounds so insignificant hey. Fast forward a couple of months, yes months, and that fire was blazing through 512,000 hectares of Aussie bush. I can’t say this little Irish girl ever imagined her daily existence to be centred around constantly checking a Fires Near Me app… or that I ever imagined loading up all of our valuables and precious things into the car and not unloading them for more than 6 weeks. If you had told me I would be evacuated from home the week before Christmas, and would sit in my sisters house and watch my town burning on tv, not knowing what we would go back to and if we would still have a home, I probably would have told you I wasn’t cut out for that. But when you’re living in it, it’s amazing the strength you find inside, the ability to deal with it, to carry on, to cope so much better in the moment than you even cope with it in the aftermath looking back. It surprised me last time too, when I was 34 weeks pregnant with Lydia and we would wake up in the morning and the first thing we’d do was check to see if we still had a home. Its amazing how we are so much stronger than we think we are..

Our reality is that we were incredibly lucky, if that’s the right word to use… we may have had to drive through kms of burnt out bush to get home 3 weeks after leaving, but we still had a home to get to. Hundreds of people weren’t so fortunate. Its funny how you can feel so grateful and so guilty at the same time.

These fires are out now. Because when it rains it pours. And boy did it pour… and only weeks after we drove over the bridge in one direction to get away from the fires, we were rushing to cross it in the other direction so we could get home before the river flooded. And then we found ourselves a little bit trapped, again, this time at home, this time by water… what a crazy country this is. Seeing floodwaters gush through the black silhouettes of burnt out trees is something I could never have quite imagined, and yet…

Hoody and I went for a drive the other day down a street in our area where so many people lost their homes.. we drove past ‘waterfalls’ that were a result of the few weeks of torrential rain, and we drove past trees brought down in recent storms, we entered the street and passed houses spared, with beautiful gardens and happy old men mowing the lawns, and then we drove past letter boxes with family names on them, announcing houses that just weren’t there. Blackened bush and tangled metal on the ground, ‘No Entry’ signs and lonesome chimney stacks. Abandoned sheds and devastation. And km after km of burnt trees, as far as the eye can see. It’s almost too much to comprehend.

But, dotted throughout the heartache and ashes, there was something beautiful to behold.. Tree Ferns. Hundreds of them. Blackened and burnt and all but destroyed. But out of the top of them, brand new leaves not just sprouting, but flourishing. And they are everywhere. Like black beacons with bright green flames, they are igniting hope and life. They took my breath away and I said out loud, “wow, there’s a message in that, a message for all of us.”

Beauty from ashes. What we assume is burnt and destroyed and dead comes back to life in spectacular fashion when the rain comes. What we have given up on, forgotten, what we have labelled too far gone or too broken, can flourish when the rain comes. New growth, new life, new hope, bright green against a backdrop of black, enhanced and exuberant because of what it has come out of, what it has overcome, what it has risen against, what it stands in spite of. Brilliant. Bold. Alive. When the rain comes.

And so the last few month have been crazy. They have made this pregnancy go so fast, and they haven’t exactly been what I had in mind. But they have changed and developed and strengthened me in a way that I couldn’t have imagined, and the lessons I’ve learnt and the mental battles I’ve fought have created in me something that will help me become the person I need to be to live this life well and raise this baby, and the rest of my babies, as best I can.

And oh what stories we can tell him now, of how he was forged in the fire and of how he flourished in the rain.