The Labor Pains of Christ Coming (Part Two)
When I left the hospital after birthing my first child, it was with the understanding that we had weeks of doctor’s appointments ahead of us and surgery on the horizon. Nothing too serious, but not what I expected.
When my mother-in-law left the hospital after birthing her first children, she had weeks at the NICU, decades of doctor’s appointments, and the knowledge that one of her twins would never grow up to leave her home. {Reader, I married the other twin.} My husband’s mom spent the week of Christmas in the hospital with her son this year, sleeping in a hospital chair, advocating for him, ensuring that he received the care that he needed. No part of caring for my husband’s twin has been what she has expected,
For many of us, what is birthed from our suffering is not what we expect.
We labor. We survive the pain. We ride the waves of contractions (real and metaphorical), but the results…
We birth NICU stays. Weeks of recovery time. Post birth complications. Sometimes, like my mother-in-law, we birth years in and out of the hospital with our children. Lives we did not expect. And there are those who, heartbreakingly, birth funeral arrangements and an empty nursery and arms that ache to hold what was not given.
We see the same in the labor of our lives, surviving the waves of agonizing pain only to birth cracked and fissured marriages, lost opportunities, broken down bodies, destroyed hopes. We can each think of our own examples of going through gut wrenching pain only to find ourselves saying of the end results, “This is not what I expected. This is not what I hoped for. How did I find myself here?”
In this life, the labor process does not always birth what we expect or hope. Grief greets us as our labor draws to a close. We find ourselves at the end of suffering and stretching, heartbroken by what waits for us and with no physical and emotional reserves to deal with what we’re given.
But Christ…
He shows us that while we do not know how the labor process in this life will go, what suffering will surprise us, what heartbreak will be birthed, we know what waits on the other side of forever. And this is a promise.
When, in this broken world, we are met at the end of our labor with birth defects and stillborn babies, with NICU stays and weeks of recovery time, we know that at the end of our spiritual labor there is Jesus, who heals every wound and wipes away every tear, who gives purpose to every pain, who satisfies every heart cry within us.
This is a promise. We know that at the end of our spiritual, earthly labor, we greet a Savior who far exceeds every expectation.
“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away."” Revelation 21:3-4 ESV
