For You formed my inward parts; You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully set apart. Wonderful are Your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in Your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. (Verses 13-16)
We waited five years after we were married to have children. It was a thing with Bill, my husband. I was only twenty when we married, and he, a much older twenty-four. I've always wanted children. Was an expert mother to the many dolls of my early years, dressing them, washing them, cutting their hair (which was not the best idea when Mother caught me mid-perm on my Madame Alexander doll). The five years between marriage and children was a bit of a struggle for me, though I did finish college, teach junior high and high school, and travel to Europe during that time. As is my wont, however, I wasn't terrifically silent about my desires in those years and more especially as the end of Bill's self-imposed five years approached. Submissive, yes. Quiet, no. "What do you think about starting our family now?" Every few months or so. "Not yet." And so it went until one magic day when Bill said, "How about now?"
I didn't know the day or hour of my conception. It happened in the darkness of my womb. Life beginning with the joining of sperm and egg. All the DNA of Heather, our first, already set to create the woman I know today as my oldest child. Her perfectly shaped lips, her gorgeous long legs, her love of tradition and her big blue eyes. Everything already in motion before I knew she was even there. And this is how I knew:
Bill and I had to move his aunt from one apartment to another on a cool November day in 1973. Her husband was ill and the extended family came to make the move as quickly as possible. There was much bustling that morning as we walked clothing items, kitchen utensils, pots and pans and furniture from one place to another. Not much contemplative time. That's why it was such an unusual day for God to stop me in my tracks. I don't know why I was alone on the sidewalk, but I was. Just me, the cool air and the warm sun, as I walked back for what seemed the hundredth time to his aunt's place. Then I heard it. "Daughter, remember November the ninth because there is life within you." I was absolutely stunned. I looked around. Thinking someone was standing there. The voice seemed really loud to me. So real it couldn't just be in my head. But...there was no one on the sidewalk but me. And I could see Bill in the distance hurrying my way. I went a little limp. Not as in fainting limp, but as in I just heard God limp. Trembling a bit from the voice and the message. I was pregnant and it didn't take an early pregnancy test for me to know it. Bill was like, "We'll see.." But I knew. Heather came on my twenty-sixth birthday exactly nine months later. In fact, my dear friend, Barbara, fascinated by the encounter with God, predicted the day because it would've been the exact gestation period from date to date.
My point? The same as David's in this psalm. We matter. Our matter matters. In the darkest most private regions of our existence God hovers over cells as they multiply because there is a child being completed...not a fetus (which, by the way, is defined as "a baby"), a blob of cells, an inconvenience or an extension of the mother's body. A person develops in the darkness, where it should be safe. Where God is designing, knitting together a unique individual who is not like any other person ever created. No two fingerprints are alike. You'd think God would run out of designs, wouldn't you? Like Cabbage Patch Kids, we all come with a story. Already written with the pen of a God intimately involved in its playing out on Earth. Each of us set apart for a thing only we can do.
So how does God feel about abortion? The suctioning from the secret place of utmost safety and ultimate creativity of the child who bears potential beyond our imagining? The snipping of the back of the neck of a near term or full term child because the mother decides somehow in the eighth or ninth month that for some reason she isn't really into being a mother right now? God feels that is murder, because believes He's creating a person. It's pretty obvious that abortion is the taking of a life. But mothers have been convinced that the child is a part of their own body. Like a tumor would be. Attached to the wall of her womb. Not a child clinging by a life-rope to another's body for safety and sustenance.
This isn't a tirade. God's love is bigger than our hurtful choices and our careless youthful dalliances. Because of Christ, there is forgiveness available for even this. But it is an intimate look at how God feels about the babies in our bodies. He loves them, writes about them...sees them there not impassively as the casual observer, but as His own unique creations. They were not destined for the trash cans of the world. God isn't politically correct enough to care about the changing mores and semantics that have allowed us to fall for the propaganda mills that tell us it's not a kid, after all. Though their little spirits are with Him now, I fear God's justice will one day deal with the injustice of the deaths of His most vulnerable creations.
"I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is 'Abortion', because it is war against the child...a direct killing of the innocent child, 'Murder' by the mother herself...and if we can accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always we must persuade with love...and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts..." Mother Teresa
We waited five years after we were married to have children. It was a thing with Bill, my husband. I was only twenty when we married, and he, a much older twenty-four. I've always wanted children. Was an expert mother to the many dolls of my early years, dressing them, washing them, cutting their hair (which was not the best idea when Mother caught me mid-perm on my Madame Alexander doll). The five years between marriage and children was a bit of a struggle for me, though I did finish college, teach junior high and high school, and travel to Europe during that time. As is my wont, however, I wasn't terrifically silent about my desires in those years and more especially as the end of Bill's self-imposed five years approached. Submissive, yes. Quiet, no. "What do you think about starting our family now?" Every few months or so. "Not yet." And so it went until one magic day when Bill said, "How about now?"
I didn't know the day or hour of my conception. It happened in the darkness of my womb. Life beginning with the joining of sperm and egg. All the DNA of Heather, our first, already set to create the woman I know today as my oldest child. Her perfectly shaped lips, her gorgeous long legs, her love of tradition and her big blue eyes. Everything already in motion before I knew she was even there. And this is how I knew:
Bill and I had to move his aunt from one apartment to another on a cool November day in 1973. Her husband was ill and the extended family came to make the move as quickly as possible. There was much bustling that morning as we walked clothing items, kitchen utensils, pots and pans and furniture from one place to another. Not much contemplative time. That's why it was such an unusual day for God to stop me in my tracks. I don't know why I was alone on the sidewalk, but I was. Just me, the cool air and the warm sun, as I walked back for what seemed the hundredth time to his aunt's place. Then I heard it. "Daughter, remember November the ninth because there is life within you." I was absolutely stunned. I looked around. Thinking someone was standing there. The voice seemed really loud to me. So real it couldn't just be in my head. But...there was no one on the sidewalk but me. And I could see Bill in the distance hurrying my way. I went a little limp. Not as in fainting limp, but as in I just heard God limp. Trembling a bit from the voice and the message. I was pregnant and it didn't take an early pregnancy test for me to know it. Bill was like, "We'll see.." But I knew. Heather came on my twenty-sixth birthday exactly nine months later. In fact, my dear friend, Barbara, fascinated by the encounter with God, predicted the day because it would've been the exact gestation period from date to date.
My point? The same as David's in this psalm. We matter. Our matter matters. In the darkest most private regions of our existence God hovers over cells as they multiply because there is a child being completed...not a fetus (which, by the way, is defined as "a baby"), a blob of cells, an inconvenience or an extension of the mother's body. A person develops in the darkness, where it should be safe. Where God is designing, knitting together a unique individual who is not like any other person ever created. No two fingerprints are alike. You'd think God would run out of designs, wouldn't you? Like Cabbage Patch Kids, we all come with a story. Already written with the pen of a God intimately involved in its playing out on Earth. Each of us set apart for a thing only we can do.
So how does God feel about abortion? The suctioning from the secret place of utmost safety and ultimate creativity of the child who bears potential beyond our imagining? The snipping of the back of the neck of a near term or full term child because the mother decides somehow in the eighth or ninth month that for some reason she isn't really into being a mother right now? God feels that is murder, because believes He's creating a person. It's pretty obvious that abortion is the taking of a life. But mothers have been convinced that the child is a part of their own body. Like a tumor would be. Attached to the wall of her womb. Not a child clinging by a life-rope to another's body for safety and sustenance.
This isn't a tirade. God's love is bigger than our hurtful choices and our careless youthful dalliances. Because of Christ, there is forgiveness available for even this. But it is an intimate look at how God feels about the babies in our bodies. He loves them, writes about them...sees them there not impassively as the casual observer, but as His own unique creations. They were not destined for the trash cans of the world. God isn't politically correct enough to care about the changing mores and semantics that have allowed us to fall for the propaganda mills that tell us it's not a kid, after all. Though their little spirits are with Him now, I fear God's justice will one day deal with the injustice of the deaths of His most vulnerable creations.
"I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is 'Abortion', because it is war against the child...a direct killing of the innocent child, 'Murder' by the mother herself...and if we can accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always we must persuade with love...and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts..." Mother Teresa
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