Gifts

Every now and again, I get these thoughts. They stick with me, glued there in the back of my mind. I’m not sure what started this thought. I’m not sure where it came from. Nothing in particular happened. It just started. Now it won’t stop until I just share it.

It’s not for who you might think it’s for. In fact, the intended audience even surprises me. When this one tiny thought bubbled into my head it exploded at a group of my peers. At my community. At the Christians in this world, in this County, in this state, maybe even in my home town.

Here’s the deal: we had a baby. A beautiful, precious baby girl. We are and were young. We are and were not sure what we were doing. We were sure of one thing though, and that is what the bible has to say about children, about babies. About them being a blessing. About how Faith can be as small as a mustard seed and it can be all that you need.

Not everyone applies this to every aspect of their lives though.

Christians, when did babies and children become what the world thinks instead of what God thinks? When did we decide to pass judgment on our own people, the ones who feel called to raise and love their children? When did we decide that we needed to comment on how many kids a woman has, or how far apart her children are? Why can’t we simply love one another and stay out of their uteruses?

I don’t understand. I don’t understand being told that Eleanor was a choice. She was our choice? Really? Is that why I cried when I found out I was pregnant with her, terrified I would watch myself bled out and miscarry again? I really wanted that, right. I had to give up a lot of fear and doubt and remember that the God who parted the Red Sea was also the God who had given my husband and I this gift.

We need to change how we think Christians.

When we devalue the loss of a baby at 7 weeks, we are devaluing life. If you read the Bible, you know that life is important to God. So we get up in arms about abortion but don’t comfort the weeping mother who is struggling with each day because she miscarried? I don’t understand. We preach and tell the world that babies are not choices, and then we tell young Christian couples that it was their choice to have babies so they can deal with all that entails on their own? What?

We needed help after our daughter was born. We still do. I still go talk to my mother and other Christian women in my church, asking for their help, advice, and comfort. I still need help doing laundry some days, because I’m just so tired. I still text my sister in law about things like cradle cap, and ask my best friend who had her daughter the same day if she is experiencing the same thing.

I’m not asking people to pay our hospital bills. I’m not asking people to be up with me at four am. I am tired, but I don’t go around complaining about it, I knew I would be. Believe me, you adjust. You become less selfish. You have to. It’s not about you anymore.

I am asking that people love us. That they don’t say demeaning things. That they don’t judge the piles of laundry, or make fun of me because I didn’t do half the things I thought I’d do. I am asking that Christians stop acting like babies are only good under certain circumstances, within the walls that they place. Christ lived outside of the boxes we put Him in. If He’s bigger than all the things we say He’s bigger than, then why aren’t children included in that?

We are such a society that picks and chooses.

So. To every couple that had a honey moon baby, to every mother who just didn’t have time to shower. To all the Mommy’s who are crying right now because it’s their third, fourth, or Heaven forbid, fifth child and they don’t feel loved, to every mom who knows what it’s like to be sick and nursing an infant, to all the Dad’s who work to pay bills and feel that they aren’t home enough. To the Momma in the grocery store with the screaming two year old and the round belly of life, to all those who feel like you are devalued because how much you love you babies, or are afraid to announce your fifth precious baby, please know, from the bottom of my heart, I. Love. You.

You are enough. You are beautiful. You are hard working. You valued in the eyes of our Savior. I feel like this has been said before, there are plenty of blog posts out there that say these same things. But it needs to be said, again and again and again. Because our hearts are so full of love, because we think that no one knows how we feel. Because someone in your Church made a comment about how “it’s your fifth so you don’t need a baby shower”. Every child is a gift. Not a choice. If they were choices, there wouldn’t be any children. Because our world is a selfish one. And Christians are just swimming right along with the world…and I can’t stand it any more…