This Most Blissful Emotion

It happened!  The baby is here!  And this baby-wecloming, for the first time, found me in the hospital with Wi-Fi and the devices necessary for instant access.  There are up sides and down sides to this seemingly ubiquitous technology, and that debate should be saved for another day (she says, head down, staring at the computer screen).  The point is that with the entrance of our beautiful daughter into the world, we were able to immediately communicate that news to the waiting world (maybe I exaggerate), and in response we got dozens and dozens of well-wishes and congratulations.  And it was FUN.  There was so much joy in and of itself with the arrival of our baby, but it was heaped up—overflowing—when we were able to share it with so many people.  It made me think of Luke 15:10, “Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”  We are told to “rejoice with them that do rejoice.”  And so I thought: If I can be this happy over the physical birth of a child, what must God feel over the spiritual birth of a child?  And if I am encouraged by the joy of my friends and family, what must the party in heaven with the angels of God be like? 

Charles Spurgeon summed it up in this sermon:

Oh! there is enough in the salvation of Christ to make heaven full of bliss; there is enough to make us full of praise. Let us take up the theme; let us talk by the way to one another about it; let us talk to sinners about it; let us recommend religion by our cheerfulness. Levity be far from us, but happiness let it be the happiest sphere in which we live if we have little else to rejoice in, we have enough here. Whatever may be our condition or prospects, we may still rejoice in God's salvation, and let us not fail to be filled with this most blissful emotion.

Moving On From Noodles

I had an epiphany last week.  I was feeding my kids what they ecstatically call “cheesy noodles”—a.k.a. good old macaroni and cheese from a box.  I ate a forkful from the pan and stopped.  I realized, with shock and horror and some satisfaction, that I no longer liked this food.  In fact, it doesn’t appeal to me much at all!

Then my mind went back to all those summers growing up when my mom required us to cook one meal per week as part of our regular chore list.  One of our favorite meals to prepare was box mac-n-cheese.  We liked to make it because it was both easy to prepare and because we loved—and I mean adored—eating it.  My mom would often be busy working with her gardening or sewing while we partook of these meals.  “Would you like me to save you some?” I would ask.  Gently her no would come back.  She once said she didn’t really like this food.  How can this be? I wondered.  In a Peter-Pan sense of losing one’s childhood, I vowed that I would never give up my love for macaroni and cheese.  I could not fathom life without it.  

So discovering last week that I have outgrown my childhood food love was in some ways a letdown.  It was a betrayal of my innocence and simplicity.  The feeling you get when you watch your toddler master some brand new skill or suddenly fit into a whole new shoe size.  There is pride in the accomplishment along with a twinge of sadness that growing up is inevitable.

But perhaps my greater astonishment in leaving behind mac-n-cheese was the sense of rightness that accompanied the departure.  I realized that what I have now discovered—grown-up food—is infinitely better than what satisfied me as a child.  Now I love to eat warm crusted goat cheese and roasted asparagus and made-from-scratch pierogies.  The culinary world beckons, and I am delighted to discover new and delectable edibles from around the world.   

The parallel here is to our spiritual “taste” in food.  A couple times in the New Testament (see I Corinthians 3 and Hebrews 5) there is a contrast between “milk” and “meat.”  The trouble seems to be that those requiring milk didn’t even know what they were missing!  They had stunted their spiritual palate.  C. S. Lewis uses the famous analogy of “an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”  The encouragement here is that even the things we love about God and His word can still be deepened as we grow in Christ.  Unlike my noodle analogy, we will not “dislike” what we loved as young Christians; rather, they will cease to satisfy us and we will crave more complex and deeper relationships with the God of the universe.  We will understand Him more fully (though never completely), and we will  . . . grow!   

And this progress in spiritual culinary understanding is good and right.  Let us not cling to our childish loves but embrace and seek to grow in Christ as we live each day.  It happens slowly and gradually until, one day, we look back and see that the progress has been being made and we are no longer the spiritual children we once were.  As Paul said, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (I Corinthians 13:11).

O taste and see that the Lord is good:

blessed is the man that trusteth in him.

O fear the Lord, ye his saints:

for there is no want to them that fear him.

The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger:

but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.
Psalm 34: 8-10

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.