pregnancy and labor: resources and reflections [part 3]

I have just finished picking up chewed up watermelon pieces strewn around Noah’s high chair, after putting Noah down for his 2nd and last nap of the day.

It is our last day in Tawas, Michigan, and Noah has certainly gotten his fill of sun, sand and watermelon pieces (he likes it so much he tries to stuff one more crunchy piece in his bulging mouth, while red juice streams down his chin).

11 months later, and I am capping off the 3 part series with its last and final addition – a motley of theological reflections on the experience of carrying and delivering a baby.

If you haven’t read the other parts of the series, catch up by reading part 1 on pregnancy and part 2 on labor.

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The gel is cool and glides effortlessly against my skin. Without any warning, black and white pixels coalesce suddenly to form a blob on the screen.

It takes my eyes a moment to adjust, to recognize the tiny nub on the blob as a nose.

“Oh my gosh, is that his head?” the words tumble out. I can’t think of anything else to say in response to putting form to what had only been an abstract idea for the longest time.

The technician nods and proceeds to show me grainy images I can barely make out of his moving leg, 4 of his fingers (she promises me there are 5) and again back to his nub of a nose.

“Can you believe there’s a baby inside of me?” I say to Peter repeatedly as we walk through the hospital halls, my heeled boots clacking on the linoleum floor, saying it more so to convince myself than him.

He takes the strip of photos the technician had printed for us – the one souvenir we left the room with – and his eyes glance from the film strip to my still flat belly.

“Wow, that’s wild.”

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My experience being pregnant is the closest I get to describing what it’s like to have faith.

In the 1st trimester, it often felt like nothing more than a mildly nauseous feeling and I doubted that anything was going on.

There were days that felt slow and very ordinary, days where all I could do was crawl into my perpetually fully reclined passenger seat in the car and let Peter chauffeur me to wherever I needed to be.

Then there were days like the day in the ultrasound room of the Jewish General, when the blurry black and white pixels arranged in somewhat distinguishable patterns on a screen stirred up my faith to believe that my still flat belly was carrying the weight of another human being.

It felt like I was seeing reality as it was, though veiled for a time.

And those few short minutes of seeing my baby’s ultrasound would buoy me through the faithfulness needed for the day-to-day choices of the following weeks:

Eat protein instead of the croissant because remember you’re feeding your baby.

No wine tonight, even though you really want that glass of red.

Don’t forget that prenatal vitamin; his nuchal cord might be growing this very minute!

When my faith would falter, I would pull up the baby x fruit charts and picture him the size of a blueberry floating around in my amniotic fluid.

I talked to my belly the same way I talk to God – not being able to see the being on the receiving side, but trusting he was real despite the lack of anything I could perceive with my senses.

Yet, other than create the right environment for the baby to grow (read: prenatal vitamins, breakfast protein and alcohol abstinence), there was nothing else I could do to make the baby grow.

The baby’s cells were differentiating into muscle, epithelial and blood cells on their own; all I could do was wait and trust.

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For someone who suffers from spiritual perfectionism, the work of waiting is both a vexation and a balm to my soul.

Surely there is something I can do, I pray, to make myself more holy, more like Jesus.

I get frustrated when I lack faith, or when I get anxious right after reading a psalm about peace.

I forget that I am unable to transform my soul; my work is simply to prepare my soul for the work of transformation, similar to creating the right environment for a baby to grow – and then wait.

I forget that while we crave the mountaintop experiences of God’s presence, the work of soul transformation is often slow and ordinary, or at least slower than we want.

Similar to how the work of pregnancy is life-changing momentous and many boring days of mild nausea both at the same time.

But in the same way I glanced at the ultrasound pinned to my corkboard every time I needed a reminder of what was true (especially needed in the 1st trimester of little reward and much sacrifice),

I do the same every time I sing simple phrases of worship while stirring soup,

every time I gather with our city group on an ordinary Tuesday night,

every time I list out – black 0.5 Pentel ink on Moleskine paper – all the ways I have been seeing the goodness of God.

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2nd trimester ushered in a season of excitement.

I no longer had to rely solely on the baby x fruit charts to visualize how the baby was growing, but I could see the outward protrusion of my belly growing day by day.

Our nightly routine started to incorporate a session of listening for baby, usually post-dinner, during which Peter would put his hand on my belly to feel for any movement.

In the twilight of dusk, we waited in the quiet – me for the fluttery feeling you get from right before a rollercoaster drop, Peter for the gentle, almost imperceptible, thrust against his palm.

“Here, feel over here,” I directed our listening efforts to where I believed the baby’s feet to be located.

When we both felt the kick happen, I would let out a gasp of delight while a slow smile would spread across Peter’s face, both of us privy to a reality we increasingly knew to be true.

Only a mother can truly know what it is like to have a baby kick inside of you, in the same way that only that person can know what it was to have a spiritual experience with God.

I know the response to individual spiritual experiences is often, “It’s good that works for you.”

Underneath that phrase the idea that everyone has their own truth; individual spiritual experiences negate the existence of objective truth.

Yet, the individuality in the experience of feeling of my own baby kick (and necessarily so) did not in any way negate the objective reality of the baby existing in my womb.

To be sure, personal experience is not the undiluted, untainted truth; all human experience necessarily is mediated by our distorted and fallen senses.

But the fact that people claim to have spiritual experiences with God should at least make us curious about whether there is a Reality behind that experience.

And those of us who have had personal experiences with God ought to keep listening intently for them the way a mother does for every movement of her growing baby.

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If there was one word that characterized 3rd trimester, it would be yearning.

It was a yearning to hold in my hands what I now knew intimately inside of me, to see with my own eyes the features of his face I had only conjured up in my imagination.

The Bible speaks a lot of this yearning:

we hope in what we do not see but we yearn for the day when we will one day see the God we love face to face.

There are spiritual principles one only grasps in certain seasons of life, and for me, that longing and straining for a day to come was one I became familiar with as I moved closer to my due date.

As much as I wanted those days to be over, I know they were precious –

walking up the Rue Peel hill holding up my now-cumbrous belly with both hands,

smiling to myself when I felt the baby move as if it was a secret shared between us,

consuming copious amounts of dates and raspberry leaf tea in preparation for what could be any day now.

I know heaven will be incredible but I also wonder if we will look back on our days on earth with fondness, for these were the days when even though we did not see him, we believed in him and were filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy.

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Then, there was labor.

It’s interesting how in the Bible, suffering is intimately tied to joy and hope.

It says in Romans 5 that we rejoice because suffering produces in us perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope.

In Hebrews 12, it was for the joy set before Him that Jesus endured the suffering of the cross.

We often desire joy and hope, without pain and suffering, but part of me wonders if they are inseparable at all.

Would we know the joy of an ice-cold lemonade without the blazing harsh heat of the summer?

The joy of sinking into Sabbath rest without a week of honest, determined work?

The joy of holding a wrinkly, sticky newborn without the 9 months of carrying its weight culminating with the pains of labor?

When we say we want technology and AI to make things easier for us (less struggle and pain for more efficiency), part of me wonders if we’re exchanging the ease of technology for the joy that comes from successfully struggling through pain (a question I am still mulling over).

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The question of why an all-good and all-powerful God would allow suffering has been with us from the very beginning; the failure to reconcile God with one’s experience of suffering continues to be one of the main reasons people deconstruct their faith.

The very fact, however, that we even recognize pain and suffering means we have an intuition and a longing for an original good.

If not, suffering, loss and death would be simply a matter of fact in a cold and unfeeling universe. There is no answer to your pain; it just is.

Why, then, do we feel in our suffering a tension for the way we think things ought to be?

And when the suffering gives way to relief, why is our soul flooded with joy, as if there has been a restoration to an original order?

In a way, the story arc of the Bible – creation, fall, redemption – is told over and over again every time we experience suffering giving way to joy.

But without there being first a created order, a way things “should be”, there can be no “fall from order”, suffering in other words.

And when there is no suffering, there is no chance for redemption, the restoration to the fullness of joy.

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The moment one’s baby is born is one forever emblazoned in the memory of a mother.

In my memory, I emerge from the delirious haze of unrelenting surges of pain into a still shock.

It’s all over, is all I could think.

Then, they put him – warm, wriggling, sticky – on my chest, where my heart is still racing from the pumping adrenalin.

But then he lies, quiet, curled in and snug, and the joy swells up inside of me.

Not a bubbly champagne sparkly kind of joy, but the proud joy of a mama who has labored hard and come out the other end holding her newborn, triumphant.

And I think – this is just a small taste of what it will be like at the end of time, when we see Jesus revealed in all His glory.

When all suffering has to give way to the fullness of joy.

When all the waiting, all the yearning, will be worth it – and we find our deepest, unfulfilled desires satisfied in Him.

When we no longer have to see through blurry, disembodied black-and-white pixels on a screen, but finally, as things are in their full embodied form –

alive, glorious and together forevermore.

⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. ¹¹ When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. ¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

1 Corinthians 13: 9 – 12