My Sweet Teen

Introducing my newest little covenantal creation, by the grace of the Holy Spirit & creative Word…

This is our thirteenth child, the little guy I lovingly call Sweet Teen.
The beloved baby I hold now in the depths of my own body…
whose heart beats beneath my own…
whose precious limbs flail without me even feeling them yet…
this is the person I ache to look upon with my own eyes this autumn…
and until then, we pray and we hope and we rejoice…
I take medications and shots and adhere to dietary restrictions…
I rest and I puke and I ache…
and I give unabashed thanks every single day to the Author of life…
and it brings me such joy to share this glimpse with you
into the secret places where the Lord is secretly & miraculously weaving microscopic threads
into a little itty bitty person in His image
and in ours.

And I weep for joy
because the Lord has heard our cries
for life.

Sex as an act of creation, of art, of life,
filled our thoughts and bed and intertwined the parts of us
we didn’t realize we’d still been living separate.
This righteous act of love that reminds human creatures
that there is a miracle wrapped in the gift of pleasure.
A miracle that points to a good Gift Giver outside ourselves,
outside our control, outside our timelines,
outside our attempts at  manipulation or desperate demands.
Galaxies must align and collide in the secret dark,
and all we can do is humble ourselves
to be available to something much bigger than our comprehension.
~Lisa-Jo Baker, Surprised By Motherhood, p184~

~*~*~

God knits babies together in the secret dark.
And we can plan all we like,
but we have no actual control over the outcomes.
We bear witness to the miracle, and we women—
we also bear it in our bodies.
But we certainly don’t dictate it.
~Lisa-Jo Baker, Surprised By Motherhood, p166~

 ~*~*~

God already knows
He already delights.
He has already been singing over them in the dark,
secret hours of spinning life out of strands of DNA—
an artist at work, creating and shaping another Adam-child in His image.
And the sonogram is desperate to catch up.
The black-and-white shifting dimensions on the screen only hint at His handiwork.
At the brilliance and the raw beauty beating
with the brand-new chambers of a heart there on the dim screen.
It is the shape the Father sculpted in the beginning
and the shape the Christ-Son took.
It is the ancient, familiar form
that is still somehow new every time we see it fitted over a new soul.
Upward and forward and deeper into the heart of God
with each new life He entrusts us with.
Parts of us crack wide open,
and we are vulnerable to a vast army of fears,
for to parent is to ache over the unknown.
~Lisa-Jo Baker, Surprised By Motherhood, p166~