Birthing Glory

As my body cycles in its feminine glory, I find my thoughts and feelings moving with its rhythm, moving me to come here and write to you. I have been on the verge of tears for days. I think my weepiness is connected to my hormones and the time of year. As I remember the best birth story, I remember other birth stories that find their place in the Christmas one.

Mild he lays his glory by
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth

Sometimes my body shakes like it did when I was preparing to have Wylie with all the big emotion and questions swirling around--palpable. Her birth was alien, so different than my natural labors with her brothers and sisters. Hers was holy and shocking. 

I had never had an epidural. I had never had a c-section. I welcomed them, though, as that was her way to our arms. I panicked with the medicine and felt so badly for days from the surgery. I needed a wheelchair and used it much longer than I ever imagined I would need it.

Though so tiny, her weight was glory--God's glory all over her and in her and through her. I walked around stunned. I was dumbstruck. I still am so thankful for Kristy Wheeler's poem about the day (https://karladuerson.blogspot.com/search?q=Kristy+wheeler&m=1) because words alluded me for a long time.

Wylie spent her first Christmas in the hospital intubated and struggling for her life against RSV. One of the nurse heroines encouraged me to go home on Christmas Eve and have time with the family on Christmas morning which I did. I remembering returning that afternoon to sit beside Wylie. I had called Mom on the way to help me get there. The depth of Wylie's pain and struggle was so difficult to witness.

If you have followed me here, you know that her suffering bore her much fruit. She gained so much strength through the tumult of her first ten months. And we all are unpacking the trauma of its wake--not her wake, the wake of the promised trouble.

"In this world," Jesus announced, "you will have trouble, but take heart. I have overcome the world." What a comfort to know that Jesus is bigger than any difficulty I have, am, or will ever face. I have been taking heart these days. 

So, in thinking of Wylie's birth story, I have considered Mary's. She had been visited by angels, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, greeted by her senior cousin's unborn baby, smeared by her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, married to the obedient Joseph, ordered to Bethlehem, and birthed her first baby surrounded by animal filth. She did not have her mother, her sister, birthing help. She and Joseph must have been terrified. Strangers appeared. Prophecies swirled. Then they had to flee.

I wonder now how the birth trauma stayed with her. As her body mirrored the moon, as she beheld her firstborn, as his birthday neared, did she shake? Did a lump take up residence in her throat as she remembered His holy entrance? Because surely when the Son of God filled her womb and left it, she was never the same.

Pondering that reminds me that I am changed, too. When a baby is born, so is a mother. Each baby's birth holds a new birth for the one birthing. It all makes sense when I consider that I am only two and half with Wylie. I am just two and half years into this change. I still shake because the weight of glory is both terrifying and wonderful.

The Kingdom of God presses and we are the wombs that give Him birth over and over. So, "we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." (2 Corinthians 2:18). Through His birth, we are born anew.

Glory to the newborn King!