Oh–I just felt her again. I think she just turned a somersault. This little one went from nudging at 17 weeks, to poking at 18 weeks, to acrobatics by 21 weeks. She’s already testing the boundaries of her world, and I couldn’t be more proud. I’m glad her introduction to life is so gentle. Right now, swimming in a dark, slow, comforting place, she fades in and out of sleep as her world sloshes softly and rumbles. “I,” she thinks with a grin, “am the only person who has ever existed.”
Just you wait, little pumpkin! You’re in for a rude awakening.
If my baby were a philosopher, how absolutely wrong-headed her conception of the world would be. The life of an unborn infant is so different from life after birth. The fetus wakes into consciousness in an aqueous, lightless environment. It learns to use its limbs for swimming and takes in nutrients through a belly-tube. And then–BAM! Let there be light. And there was light. Light to blind newly-opened eyes, and sound to deafen little ears, and air to burst little lungs. The experience is terrifying. When it is being born, the baby is probably convinced it is dying. “Ahhh,” it sighs to itself. “Well, it was a good life, and a long one too. I’m ready to go.” And then screams are coming out of its mouth (which it never knew was possible) and the baby is being patted down and cleaned by large hands (what? Other people exist?), and it realizes that what it thought was an entire lifetime was not even the beginning…
My conclusion from all this? It’s probably a very good thing that we can’t remember being babies.
Nonetheless, as a Christian, I stand to gain from this meditation.
I myself am an unborn infant in this womb-like world, surrounded by blurry, dark intimations of a life to come, ignorant, yet convinced I know it all–or at least that, given enough time, I could know it all. But God in his mercy has sent messengers of light who promise that all that we experience here is immature and incomplete, merely a preparatory stage for that which is truly life.
It is good, then, to compare my greatest ambitions to the incoherent sensations of a fetus. To become preoccupied with my ambitions and the fulfillment of my desires is foolish if I am truly so incomplete. Womb-life is limited and a fetus weak. Even if it had the mental capacity of a full-grown adult, an unborn baby could not comprehend what it means to breathe. It would think, “I am living that which is truly life,” even as it gradually developed organs suited for an utterly different environment.
“The world is passing away, along with its desires; but whoever does the will of God remains forever.” 1 John 2:16
If I allow God to shape me for birth–giving me legs to support my weight, lungs so I can breathe, eyes so I can see–I will be ready when the time comes for me to be delivered into life with him in Heaven. If I live as if this is all there is–rejecting his hand and living in disobedience, conformed only to the womb with no organs for survival in the outside world–I will be unready for Heaven. I will never explore the shining realm on strong legs, breathe in its fragrant air, or see God’s wondrous beauty. Instead, I will fall to the ground, crippled, blind, ignorant, hating this new environment and longing to be back where I was before.
So, as I await the arrival of my unborn baby, this shall be my meditation: Lord, make me holy! Shape me according to your will, just as you are shaping the infant in my womb.
“So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardness of their hearts. Having lost all sense of shame, they have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity, with a craving for more.
But this is not the way you came to know Christ. Surely you heard of Him and were taught in Him—in keeping with the truth that is in Jesus—to put off your former way of life, your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be renewed in the spirit of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” Ephesians 4: 17-20
Good stuff Amelia. An encouragement to me as well.