Somewhere deep within me, life is growing. Distinct and separate it will one day be. But as for now, it is one with my life. That which I consume, it consumes. That which I enact, it joins me in participation. We are fused beings whose physical union is temporary but whose relational union is eternal.
The external world will be changed, just as any life brings effects to the people, earth, and time with which it lives. Brothers will shift in relationship as they seek to include another sibling. Parents will shift in patterns as four arms now care for three lives. Extended family will have one more to hold and to name.
Friends are being grown alongside this one, all school peers still in wombs around the city and beyond. Future teachers might not yet have found their callings. Future professors are college students with dreams and a lot of hard work ahead of them.
All will change. But for right now, I hold the change within. The external world only experiences the small glimpses of this new life – fewer meals cooked by a queasy mommy, less charisma from an exhausted wife, more fear as I wrestle with anxiety over health and future, and financial accounts beginning to contribute to the modern childbirth economy.
All of the effects little in comparison to the internal change I feel most profoundly. It is a reality I carry while the world moves on as it always does. New and fragile, it makes its presence known through the expanding waistline and the change in appetite. Tiny and in early stages, it is on the trajectory towards the most profound creation – the human life fully alive.
Do I seem distracted? Living in another world? Only partially present?
It’s true. I am. I am living in-between worlds, holding a future within that is real but not yet whole.
Time will bring the two worlds together eventually. But for now, it’s the reality I hold within me. Creation’s growing pains live within this perishing body. If this is not miracle, then I have lost eyesight for it. If I have assumed miracles to be without their pains, I am the saddest of all, for every miracle will remain unrecognizable.
For now, this queasy and distracted life-holder simply pauses and gives thanks for miracles within view.
