On the second level of our farm house is an unfinished room, all honey-colored studs and rough edged planks. It smells like wood and quiet air that doesn’t move, and when we first moved in, we spent hours talking about what it could become.

The empty room is the upper level A-frame to a kitchen/bathroom/laundry addition that was put on the original farmhouse years ago, but never quite made it onto anyone’s list of priorities. It’s a big space, relatively speaking, and an uncommon find in a house its age.

After we found out baby number four would be joining our family, we did a few calculations. We currently have three bedrooms, only one of which accommodates our average-sized adult bedroom furniture. The other two are modestly minimal. (That’s a nice way of saying TINY. My eldest’s room won’t even hold a queen size bed and allow the door to shut.)

Bear with me. I know this is a privileged problem, and that numerous configurations of brothers and sisters have shared bedrooms since the beginning of time. But the empty room across the hall seemed like such a simple, obvious solution.

Decision by decision, things came together. Our architect’s original plan to include a bathroom, play room, and bedroom (a roof bump out would be necessary) was pared down to a bedroom and a walled off space for a bathroom… a few years down the road.

Tradesmen walked across the spongy wooden floor and pulled our their measuring tapes, plotting light fixtures and heaters, support beams and closets. My belly began rounding out, and I started pinning nursery and A-frame bedroom ideas. Financing came through, bids were agreed on, and helpful family members assisted us in carrying the miscellany out of my handy, hoarding-prone space.

But, as with any project, there are variables. Schedules. Quiet times. Dreams that can only flesh themselves out by waiting the way this fourth baby waits, suspended in the strange in-between space of darkness and light, emptiness and existence.

That’s how it goes these days. We dangle our toes off the edge of change, my husband and I, bantering about life with four and how our daughters will adjust. We peek in our empty space and try to imagine what it will look like, what will go where. Meanwhile the baby traces his feet in wild patterns against my stomach, as though he too is tired of running in place below my ribs.

Transition is never easy. Waiting requires a certain release, a letting go of when, and how, and what finished will look like. It demands that I have no answer to the question “how is this going to work” when I think about the next year of our lives and the logistics of preschool and shopping carts  and navigating months of sleeplessness.

Change demands that we adjust what we’ve become comfortable with, gulping faith and air alike in the face of the unknown.

It demands trust in a Father God working for our good. 

It asks for belief that even when we feel hard-pressed on every side, we are not crushed. Confused, but not abandoned. Thrown down, but not broken.

Baby boy is due in 25 days. Both his being and bedroom remain unfinished – each in their own stage of becoming – and it’s hard, some days, to let that truth hang in the air. I want to know when. I want to see how.

I want to plan and prepare and paint. I want to lay on my stomach and say yes to jumping on the trampoline in the sprinkler with my giggling wet tribe. I want to hold a baby with my arms instead of my hips. In true Scandinavian fashion, I want to get on with it.

But today, there’s no getting on with anything. Today there’s a floor covered in toys and laundry that’s been haphazardly stacked on the dryer for days. Today there must be something made for family supper. Dishes. Bedtime. An evening meet-up with a friend. None of which has anything to do with having a baby or finishing a bedroom.

And maybe that’s the answer. Because when change comes, it asks us to simply do what needs to be done, until it no longer feels like anything has changed. Maybe this waiting period, this plodding of one foot in front of the other, provides the momentum we need to keep moving once change arrives.

Maybe there’s grace to be found as we release the details and simply wait for our hands to be filled with what comes next.