After walking around for much of the afternoon, I came home to crash on the couch. Contractions were strong. Intense pressure. I laid there on the couch and breathed through them letting them wash on and over me.
My mother is leaving tomorrow with the kids. It would be incredibly inconvenient to have a baby in the midst of the chaos of them trying to leave.
Pain, life, faith are hard and inconvenient. Left to myself I would rather make my plan and follow it - scheduling baby's arrival for the most convenient moment. It would be nice if God would phone in to the weekly staff meeting and fill us all in on details. Allowing us to schedule births, sickness, and death. It would also be quite a bit much nicer if he could take the struggle out of it as well. Conveniently muting all the hard parts of life and turning up the volume on joy.
We try to do it ourselves. Quickly hush up pain -- take some tylonol, distract ourselves with TV or alcohol. We try to prevent it for our kids. We yell at God in protest against the pain of the world. God, why do you allow it? and for goodness sake, why why why does pain accompany birth and rebirth?
Jesus gathered with his friends for a holiday celebrating freedom, knowing he would be tied in ropes by the end of the night. God is no stranger to pain. It is a holy mystery that I struggle with at the end of every Lent. Why the cross? Why the pain? Why didn't God choose another path for humanity? I think my faith will always wrestle with the gruesomeness of the cross and the beauty and promise of Easter morning. I think it has something to do with ultimate vulnerability creating space within us for love. Jesus became the essence of vulnerability, poured out, broken and abandoned as a testament to the power of God's love.
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