Bends in the Road

On the heels of another whirlwind weekend, I stand back and think about the many mysteries of life. About how one goes and one stays. One moment in time can change everything. How scarily, divinely we stand on the edges of bedlam, literally all the time. 

We spent yesterday in north Georgia, at the ordination of our youngest son into the ministry. As he stood at the front, tall and proud, handsome and bearded, I remembered the baby. Long ago and not very far away, he treated my uterus like his personal jungle gym, bouncing from one side to the other, hands and feet dancing. I wanted to name him Isaac, since it means "laughter" and he was having a party in there. We wound up naming him Jesse Caleb because he was strong and it just seemed right. The day that I birthed the 11 pound man-child, I labored without drugs because I had tried an epidural with the first-born (which didn't work well) and then a drug with the second-born (which only made me drunk and unable to cope with the pain). Every time I tried to get up and walk, as I had done before, my afflictions grew more intense than I could bear. Eventually, the midwife urged me to limp into the restroom, thinking I might jostle something loose. As he and my husband talked me through a few contractions, suddenly Jesse began to make his entrance, with me standing up. The midwife yelled for the nurses to bring the cart: "We're having a baby in the bathroom!" What went through my mind were two things: #1 - my Mom and Mother-in-law will miss the birth! - and #2 - I am not having my baby in a bathroom. So I held his head and walked back to the bed, where Ken and Daddy picked me up (no small feat) and carefully laid me down. The next push brought the baby, who presented with the longest cord known to childbirthing, wrapped neatly and tightly around his neck not once, but twice. The next few blurry moments still move through my brain like a movie in slow motion. The panic, the blue baby, the low Apgar score, the team of nurses rushing in. We were afraid to breathe. But then a lusty cry. Pink skin. More fussing. A man-sized sneeze and we all tilted into laughter. It was really years later before I fully contemplated what conspired in that bathroom and how God intervened. If I had remained upright, there's a high likelihood that this child would not have made it. I was compelled to walk to the bed, no matter what it took. Then the midwife knew just what to do to treat him, with a dicey situation looming. 

With deacons and pastors lining up to pray for Jesse and his wife, and then later as his three darling babies were passed around at the reception, I couldn't help but think about how God precisely kept him safe. There are a trio of extra hearts beating because of a split-second decision that came not from wisdom or knowledge, but because that's just how He does it sometimes. There are peoples' lives that Jesse is affecting as he ministers, not to mention the blending of families and his marriage to his lovely wife. In the turning of the pages, we won't always be safe. There are horrible things that happen to good people and stories that don't end like this one. At the same time, none of us knows all that we have been spared from so far....a curve in the road, a narrowly-missed boulder under the water, one more drop of cholesterol down the wrong tube. There are a thousand praises to be made every day for all that we don't know. And a thousand praises more for all that we do.