Three Birthdays
When grief and joy comingle
It’s been a birthday blitz here in the last four days. Two of our seven living children celebrate birthdays at the end of April. Both of them are boys, and both of them were over their due dates by five days and a week, respectively, which I never seem to forget (those past Aprils felt very long, I know that much).
We never know what the weather will be like this time of year, during the reliably capricious Wyoming spring, but God has smiled on us. Our newly minted eight-year-old got the tail end of a cold snap on Thursday, but we still savored charcoal-grilled steaks for his birthday supper, and he managed a quick catch-and-toss with his new baseball glove and baseball with his big sister. We’ve had brilliantly beautiful and warm day today, and we savored wings and sauce, spicy French fries, homemade coleslaw, and baked beans on the patio picnic table to inaugurate the turning of seasons and the beginning our son’s teenage years. He played a pickup basketball game with his siblings, a neighbor friend, and his dad after he opened his gifts. I marveled at how tall he’s getting, as I watched him press shoulders with Jon as they jockeyed good-naturedly (or not) for the ball. It is a special privilege, I thought as I watched them, to witness children growing. It is a wonder, and it is marvelous.
The end of April also marks the anniversary of our first miscarriage, now eighteen years ago. In those first years after that pregnancy ended and our child died, I struggled in April, as the grass turned green and tulips and daffodils bloomed, and grief returned, as it tends to around anniversaries and holidays. I think God was merciful in granting us two magnificent sons at the very time we had sorrowed in the past. The birthday of our first child will never disappear; it remains a faded but cherished memory. And now we rejoice over the other two birthdays, moving from a time of weeping to a time of laughter, a time of mourning to a time of dancing (Ecclesiastes 3:1-4).
Today was Jubilate Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Easter (or the third Sunday after Easter, since people seem to like two different forms of numbering). The Gospel reading in the one-year lectionary was from John 16:16-22:
[Jesus said:] “A little while, and you will see me no longer; and again a little while, and you will see me.” So some of his disciples said to one another, “What is this that he says to us, ‘A little while, and you will not see me, and again a little while, and you will see me’; and, ‘because I am going to the Father’?” So they were saying, “What does he mean by ‘a little while’? We do not know what he is talking about.” Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, so he said to them, “Is this what you are asking yourselves, what I meant by saying, ‘A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me’? Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”
Jon preached this morning about how hard that little while can be. We all carry crosses, and thankfully we do not bear them ourselves. But nevertheless, they can be heavy, and the wait itself seem interminable, as we look toward glory and the resurrection of all flesh. Thinking of our waiting as the time of a laboring mother is illuminating in the best way. Labor requires physical demands that even I can’t fully appreciate now, and it certainly taxes the spirit in ways few other experiences can, fraught as it is with bodily pain and anticipatory hope and apprehension all at the same time. When I was deep in labor, I remember feeling as though I was removed from myself, in a sort of a haze, like I was down a distant tunnel with everyone else out in the open. The end seemed far, far away.
And then the baby was born. When each of our children were born, and they cried out for the first time outside my womb, I didn’t experience a complete clean-slate wipe of memory of everything that had come before, but it was pretty close. The euphoria, the relief, the gratitude, all mixed up in the literal sweat and blood and tears. And this happened every time. It was a marvelous mystery, the anguish followed by the joy.
In God Grant It, a devotional book by C.F.W. Walther, a faithful Lutheran pastor and the first president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Walther writes of this.
Divine sorrow, not worldly sorrow, is the way tot the joy of faith on earth. It cannot be otherwise. True faith is not a passive adherence to the truth of everything in the Bible. Even a person who does not have a broken heart can do this much. True faith is a divine power worked by the Holy Spirit to comfort Christ’s own in firm confidence against all uneasiness of conscience over sin, God’s wrath, death, judgment, and hell. It is that power by which a person is born again, love of sin is rooted out of him, his heart is purified and renewed, and the love of God and neighbor is poured into his heart.
I love how Walther places all of the work of true faith in the Holy Spirit’s divine power. Most Christian women who have experienced pregnancy, labor, and delivery would acknowledge how incredible our bodies have been made, and how much is out of our control. Thank God He has done this for us, not only in bearing children, but in saving our bodies and souls from eternal death. He gives us confidence in the midst of our woeful failures, our sins, and all the punishments we bring upon ourselves. Death, even the death of children, is not the end. He gives us a new heart and new love, and He promises to be with us always. I thought of John Donne’s incredible poem, one of his Holy Sonnets, “Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God,” when the speaker pleads with God to “bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.” This is no easy trip to the spa; this is a recognition that often, brokenness comes before rebirth, that God uses our suffering to bring us to Himself.
Next week we will get out another candle, a baptism candle, and remember our new teen’s baptism birthday (we celebrated our other son’s baptism birthday already). We’ll sing a stanza of “God’s Own Child, I Gladly Say It,” and remember our beloved ones who have gone before us and rejoice in the hope we have now and in what Christ has promised us.
There is nothing worth comparing To this lifelong comfort sure!
Open-eyed my grave is staring: Even there I’ll sleep secure.
Though my flesh awaits its raising,
Still my soul continues praising:
I am baptized into Christ; I’m a child of paradise!