Miracles?

So, as I said in my last post, Lily was born this last Monday. Autumn and I are no longer the only members of our group to have kids. This time instead of being the well-meaning yet almost useless support to my wife in the delivery room I was one of the anxious family and friends in the waiting room. Although I normally hate sitting around waiting for things, it was a welcome change.

The one problem about me waiting and not doing anything to keep my mind busy is that I begin to think and when I think my mind begins wondering down odd paths and back ways and before you know it I have something I want to get out of my head so I can sort it out. The problem was I found myself in a place where most of the people I usually ramble to were either MIA or busy tending to more important things at the moment. So, I decided I'd hold it in a little longer and maybe revisit the old blog for another round of rambling.

"The miracle of birth." I normally dismiss a statement like this as sentimental crap made up by people that feel the uncontrollable need to over dramatize everything in life to somehow give it more weight then it warrants. The more I think about it, however, the more I agree with this one. Oh, not because babies are cute (some are) or because life is precious (even though it is), but rather because of the process. If you've been privileged enough to have a front row seat to a pregnancy, labor, and birth either as an expectant father or probably better yet, as an expectant mother than you might have an idea of what I'm trying to say.

What makes it a miracle in my mind is that it doesn't seem much like one through the process. All of us enter this world through pain, discomfort, anxiety, blood, tears, sweat, and shear exhaustion just to start. Entering life is messy, traumatic, and a little dangerous. Before you were told, you never would have guessed the change that takes place and if you didn't know better you'd swear the way it works out in the end was impossible lie made up by those before you. Yet, in the end you find yourself holding something fragile and beautiful that wasn't here before the ordeal. I've seen a few real miracles in my life and read about one or two during my studies of the scriptures and the messy and dark situations they come out of bear some resemblance in my mind to this "miracle."

It struck me as I was sitting there that just eleven months earlier I was with Bekah at this very same hospital when they told her that she was losing the first baby. I remember the sadness and darkness that day. I remember the pain I felt for her, pain that was nothing compared to how she felt. I remember repeating the words that everything would turn out all right and I remembered how hollow those words sounded in my own ears. Most of all I remember the feeling of helplessness and the wondering of why it always seems that God cares a little less about us than He should. Yet here we are eleven months later and Lily has taken that all away. God has taken that all away.

The last few months you have read my ramblings as I struggled through the church plant and how I've wrestled with God over and over. I remember telling a friend once during that time that I felt like I still loved God, but I didn't think I could trust Him. Something has changed since then, I still don't think I can trust God in the way that we want to trust Him, not like a trusty old dog that does just what you expect. He is too great for that, too above us, too "other" for a lack of a better word. To paraphrase Lewis, God is dangerous, but He is good. No, now I trust God for the miracle after the pain, after the fear, after the unexpected. I trust no matter what is thrown at me the end will make the beginning strangely dim. I trust the God that will be there at the end of the day. "Though He slay me..."

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened.”
-Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov