THE PROMISE OF LIFE’S LABOR PAIN

“No one can really spare a woman the process of labor,” the doula muses. Pale and dehydrated, she herself is hooked up to an IV in an overflowing labor ward, nearing the end of her own excruciating pregnancy. On the other side of the curtain, someone gags in agony while someone else moans, and empathy trumps her own trial. “I’m praying for them.”

Familiar with the miraculous, mysterious process of birth, Grethel is in the clutches of “hyperemesis gravidarum,” which to my untrained eyes seems to be to morning sickness what a root canal is to a dental cleaning. She is torturously incapacitated, while homeschooling her three boys, the youngest of whom just experienced his first epileptic seizure, briefly after his father was rushed to the hospital with the same. This is taking them to places of weakness and surrender no one in their right mind would choose.

And it’s not just this family. After I recovered from my own harrowing illness, which in comparison spanned less than a month, I surfaced to what looked like war wreckage. All around, sicknesses and stressors spike to intensities I have never seen before. The menial becomes bizarre. The common becomes crisis. My people are battered and bruised – too much to be coincidence.

So we huddle and pray.

These continuing emergencies are changing us from friends to family. Meals, rides, even children become communal, not because of romantic ideals, but by the insistence of necessity. It is exhausting and ethereal. We prayed to become ONE, but never expected this to be the answer.

Not born of the tribe of practicality, I set out in search for understanding – the context that makes the inexplicable become bearable.

If we lived in 14th century Europe, knowing the indiscriminate and expansive sweep of the ravaging plague would help me wade through the death in my own camp.

If we lived in the States in the 1930s, awareness of the Great Depression would make my family’s poverty less personal.

So what is happening now? What is the greater reality?

“And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pangs.” (Matthew 24:6-8)

And graph after graph really does resemble labor pains.
(From left to right: Natural disasters 1900-2010, people killed by terrorists worldwide 1996-2007, and total U. S. debt 1950-2009.)

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.” (Romans 8:22-23)

If indeed our local pain is interwoven with the global turmoil – if this is from Creation’s labor instead of merely my experience, then what is being born, and what are we to do with that?

A whole new world is being born – right now (spiritually) in the hearts of those impregnated with the incorruptible seeds of eternity, and eventually (physically) in the birth of the new Heaven and Earth – as tangible as any newborn child.

But we are still in the violent grip of labor. Of course groan.

If indeed our local pain is interwoven with the global turmoil – if this is from Creation’s labor instead of merely my experience, then what is being born, and what are we to do with that?

A whole new world is being born – right now (spiritually) in the hearts of those impregnated with the incorruptible seeds of eternity, and eventually (physically) in the birth of the new Heaven and Earth – as tangible as any newborn child.

But we are still in the violent grip of labor. Of course groan.

When we lose sight of the beautiful baby, the intensifying contractions can seem random and swallow us in despair. It’s too much! So we track the progress, not to celebrate the agony, but to help us focus on the finish line and pace ourselves to get there well.

As I ask Grethel for more information on the labor process, she invites me into her world:

“As a doula, the biggest part of what I do is not necessarily in the moment of labor and birth. I believe that the birth journey is powerful, and I like to help women become involved in the experience. In labor, you soon realize how alone you can feel, if you have the false idea that someone else can walk the journey for you.

A huge part is preparing the mother the best I can for what is to come. Understanding what is happening to her body physiologically, plays a crucial part in navigating all that she does and will experience.”

As the life of Jesus growing inside and among us increasingly crowds out selfishness and self-sufficiency – anything “self” – to make room for the fruit of the Spirit, it hurts. We are being stretched thin, and unless we are continually hydrated by the Living Water, false labor ensues.

Drinking the water of the Word is no longer optional; it’s vital for survival. And as oil soothes the parched, extended skin of a pregnant abdomen, so the Holy Spirit alone can balm frayed nerves and spent souls.

And He does, when we direct our pain for Him to kiss, rather than raise our fist in anger and turn against Him.

Resist the temptation to dream of brave new worlds where fruitfulness and beauty would be available without pain. It’s an illusion dangled in front of us by the same Tempter who offered Jesus the world without the Cross.

But that Cross was central to His plan, and the world He won on the other side was of incomparable worth to the bait appealing to His senses.

“I try to encourage her to stick to her plan by assuring her that she IS doing it, even though she might be screaming “I can’t do this,” when she hits that wall. I remind her that when we most feel that we just can’t anymore, we are in transition (8-10cm) which is the hardest, but shortest stage of labor. Once we conquer that, she can push her baby out.”

Somehow, death is required for life, as surely as labor is required for birth. So as the Holy Spirit grows inside and among us, idealism and pride and all that’s false dies; the small, the merely human, the insufficient crumbles as the REAL breaks through. Substance shatters illusion, and it hurts, but it feels like waking up. It is life.

“We’re ghosts inside of our bodies
Naked inside of our clothes
We’re all terrified of the writhing ocean tide
But our pockets are all full of hope
These thoughts of home

We were born on heaven’s silver shores
I know it in my heart there’s more to be afforded

Did I hear you in the driving rain
I swear somebody was calling my name again

We were made for the other side of the lake
It’s more than we can take
The fever’s gonna break for us”
– John Mark McMillan

With deep appreciation to Grethel Scott Guilbert