No Guarantees

I endure pregnancy.  In actual fact, I have some of the most routine, easiest pregnancies (and deliveries, so far!) that anyone could ask.  For me, though I surely dread the fatigue and other common symptoms of being pregnant, it’s not the pregnancy I hate.  It’s the waiting.  I want that baby in my arms—NOW!  The one consolation for all my pregnancy complaints is that, “Well, at least at the end you have a baby.”

Lately it seems God has been showing me just how presumptuous this idea is.  While it is true that the vast majority of pregnancies in modern USA do go to smooth completion, this week has brought story after story of just the opposite.  A friend of a friend whose baby died the day he was delivered.  Another friend who yesterday gave birth at 28 weeks and now waits anxiously while her baby’s life hangs in the balance.  There was a couple in our childbirth class who gave birth at 35 weeks only to lose their precious boy a few hours later. 

And history is replete with tragic stories of the death of babies and toddlers.  Infant mortality rates in the previous centuries are breathtakingly high.  Consider Charles and Sally Wesley: “Only three of the couple's children survived infancy: Charles Wesley junior (1757–1834), Sarah Wesley (1759–1828), who like her mother was also known as Sally, and Samuel Wesley (1766–1837). Their other children, John, Martha Maria, Susannah, Selina and John James are all buried in Bristol having died between 1753 and 1768.” 

When I spent a summer in Kenya we had a well-baby clinic on Friday afternoons.  The clinician would ask the mother how many children she had had and how many were currently living.  Almost without fail the mother would give two different answers.  Nearly every mother there had experienced the death of a child.

Another loss I’ve learned to grieve more deeply is for the mothers of the soldiers killed at war.  I used to think of soldiers as adults, whom their entire family would miss but mostly their wives.  Now I realize how young an 18- or 19-year-old boy is; and no matter how old her child, a mother loses so much—so much investment, so much promise, so much love—with the death of her babe.

All these sad thoughts to say that we are given no promises in this life.  As “sure” as a thing seems, it is still in the hands of an almighty, providential God.  A God who loves us, but who also rules our lives in His omniscience.  A God whose thoughts are not our thoughts, whose ways are not our ways.  Our ways are for ourselves.  For peace.  For black-and-white pictures of beautiful, perfect, sleeping infants.  God’s ways are perfect.  Sometimes that perfection looks perfect to us, too.  But not always.  I truly pray and hope for a healthy, beautiful, living infant in my arms.  Soon.   

When, and if, this happens I pray that I remember what a gracious gift He has given.  Not taken for granted.  But blessing upon blessing, received with a grateful heart.  And open hands.