Good morning…
“Dear friend, as always, I am SOO PROUD of you for this wonderful birth,” she wrote after yesterday’s post, I Just Birthed A Baby. “You are just in an amazing season of being highly in tune with God’s rhythm.”
She continued: “When you asked the question of us however, what am I pregnant with? I burst into tears- I’m just being honest- I am not sure I am pregnant with anything- except a love and devotion for Jesus and God. Trying to listen to his direction day by day- hour by hour- I am thankful that He is the first way I spend time in the a.m.- with him, yet at the moment, I am feeling pretty lame.”
She concluded: “I’ll keep trusting and asking what my spiritual gift is:- It must be service. Thanks for letting be be transparent-”
I replied: “I totally get the feeling of being pregnant with nothing. That was the base feeling of my deep depression in 2003 and 2004. I had left a full, vibrant life back in Pennsylvania, and I came here to nothing. Absolutely nothing. While Steve returned to everything, an adoring Lovett community overjoyed by his return. I remember praying one dark, lonely night, ‘God take my nothing, and grow Your Something.’ It was a very long time before I sensed any internal movement from God’s hidden, expanding plan.”
I continued: “That is the thing about our womb, we cannot see what God is growing inside us. So, I come alongside you dear friend, feeling your pain, knowing that not knowing can be so exhausting. Patience is a virtue that puts us on God’s eternal calendar.”
I concluded: “I love you and am praying for you while you wait in the dark womb of Mystery.”
I wrote back a little later: “I am thinking more about your honest thoughts and I bet others are feeling the exact same way. May I use your words anonymously as a spring board to help us discuss how hard it is to be an empty vessel for the use of an invisible God?”
She replied: “Sure, that is fine. It is not a good feeling to slip into that place of uselessness. I KNOW that is not of God- so I rest in all the ways God loves me and directs and has a plan- and has all along- I feel like I am made up of a string of ways God has used me- maybe I’m never going to be pregnant with one big baby? I don’t know……..”
I replied back: “Interesting possibility. This Advent manuscript is certainly not the only baby I have or ever will birth myself. God uses us daily, and we do not always see how. That is the evolving Mystery of our good, great, gracious God!”
All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy (Romans 8:22-25, MSG).
Sometimes when we observe a pregnant creation all around us, we feel sterile, barren, useless. This is exactly how I felt during our four years of infertility (1991-1995). Everywhere I looked there seemed to be another pregnant woman living out my dreams. We want to be delivered from our difficult times of pain. Yet mysteriously we are enlarged, not diminished, as we wait on God to move. The longer we wait, not seeing, not knowing, not understanding, the more securely the Spirit arouses us within. The longer we wait, the larger we become, more joyfully expectant.
One day our due date on God’s calendar quietly arrives, and we are finally birthed, pushed through life’s pain, into our forever Home.
…Sue…
