Yielding to the Mess: Birth in the Bible Series

If you haven’t read the previous blog on Birth in the Bible, go ahead and check it out! If you just wanna stay here or if you read it last month, here’s a recap. Birth is a clear image of how we enter into the Kingdom of Christ. We are “born again”. And birth is an image of how we can make sense of both our suffering and the hope we have amid that suffering. It’s good stuff, people!!

That’s a beautiful thing to hand to mamas as they process their birth experience to be able to correlate the labor they’re preparing for to the narrative that God's invited them into. And the beautiful thing is that our salvation was born of a woman's body. Our Savior. Jesus took on flesh himself. He chose to enter our story of birth. He chose to enter into the messy, bloody beautiful, holy smelly experience of birth. 

 He chose to enter in humility. He grew in the womb. He was surrounded by amniotic fluid for nine months, and he was sustained through Mary's placenta. He slowly descended through her vaginal canal and he was birthed and sustained through her breast. That is the reality of our Savior and the humility that he came with. 

 Jesus chose to enter into the tension of birth, entering into our experience of both suffering and joy, to ultimately invite us into the kingdom. Birth helps us to orient ourselves in the story. 

 I named this business ‘After Eden’ very intentionally. I tend to ask my clients, where does our exiling from the Garden leave us after Eden? How does that affect our interaction with birth? I think the invitation to all mothers is to allow the pain in childbirth as a result of the fall to point us to our need for saving and ultimately to the hope of new life in Jesus. 

 A huge preparation piece for birth is understanding the suffering that you're about to experience. That is an equipping tool for birth. We have to accept the suffering that comes. We accept that suffering and we yield to that suffering. Submission and yielding to pain is largely talked about in birth communities and it’s because it’s a key piece of mental preparation for labor. 

We wait in expectation for the yielding to suffering that will bring new life. And that's what Paul is saying in the Romans verses I shared in the previous blog (Romans 8: 22 - 25 MSG). We've grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. I've loved sharing that with women. This correlation between how we prepare for birth and how we wait for our hope as well, that we accept the suffering. 

We acknowledge that there is suffering. We acknowledge it, we yield to it, and we wait for hope. Now, I don't think yielding means we don't do anything! There is action that needs to be taken toward pain in labor. We need to have pain management tools for moving our pelvis and moving around and using pain management tools. But ultimately, we're yielding to Christ and we're yielding to his plan of redemption and we're waiting for hope. 

I think birth’s clearly in the bible. It’s clearly showing us the hope we hold onto as we yield to the messiness of birth that Christ Himself entered into.