Deliverer.

Hi Wolfies!
I am pleased to announce that last month Hubbs and I welcomed our sweet little daughter into the outside world. We are all adjusting to each other quite nicely, I think, and Hubbs and I are just over the moon about our sweet little Vivy. Sometimes I cry just looking at her because I am so grateful that we get to keep her. She is contemplative like her daddy, doesn't handle the heat well like her mommy, and is stubborn like probably both of us. What a doll :) I can't believe she is real. I can't believe she is ours. Sometimes all I do all day is stare at her and sigh as I say to myself, "She will never be this little again....."

Being a baby is hard work.

Listening to daddy sing a Hymn during family devotions!

Overall I had a pretty uneventful pregnancy, for which I was thankful. Towards the end I kept thinking, "Really? Is this really how the world is peopled? It seems like something more monumental should have happened if I am about to give birth." And while the size of my swollen ankles did seem like they could be some type of monument, that was pretty much it.

Physically, that is.

Spiritually, though, I have to tell you, I felt like there were arrows coming at me and battles I was not up to fighting for a lot of the time.
Maybe I have mentioned this, but since I met Hubbs I have been more fearful and convinced myself that I have more diseases, ailments, and syndromes than I ever even thought about my entire life before I met him.
Chalk it up to the fact that when my life is now linked to someone else's, I feel more of a weight to be here. More of a weight to stay around longer.

The devil knew this, of course. He knew the fear; he was the one putting it there. But with the pregnancy he made me terrified that either the baby or I wouldn't be making it home. Which, to his treacherous credit, is not ENTIRELY irrational. It happens. Which is why I so easily believed it; it was not outside the realm of possibility.

As the due date was approaching and then receding behind me on dates on the calendar, I kept praying and praying for some insight about these fears; something to help me through.
And Him being good like he always is, not too long before our little Sassafrass was born I was doing my devotions one day and the Lord gave me a picture of childbirth. No, not like a vision of it (thank the Lord, that would have been terrifying), but a picture of how childbirth relates to the gospel.

Because everything relates to the gospel. If you have been reading me for any length of time I would hope that you would see that the gospel can be seen everywhere if you are looking for it.
It's what I pray my eyes are opened to. I want to see Jesus in the supermarket and the wind and in Tuesday night dinners and cold rainy mornings.

That afternoon I was reading in Romans and came up to chapter 7.
"Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord." (verses 24-25)

Huh. It struck me as funny. "We call Jesus Christ 'the Deliverer.' Rightly so," I thought, "wretched woman that I am. I needed a Deliverer."

"And so does your baby," Jesus said back to me.

Suddenly in that moment I wasn't afraid for my life---or hers----anymore. I got to be her first picture of the gospel.

You know, it's pretty neat that only inside a woman's body can life be created. Up until that point my body had been the place that gave her life. Without me she could not exist. I was her breath, her sustainer. But you know what? If she just kept staying inside of me forever, I would not continue to be Life to her. No, she would die inside me.
Wretched woman I would be, the cocoon she was in would become a body of death to her.
She had to be delivered.
I had to be her deliverer.


And in that moment I knew a little bit more about the gospel.

Like Vivy in my womb, this body of sin we are born into we have to be delivered from. Spiritually, we are walking around in our locked tombs unless Jesus comes and delivers us from these wretched bodies of death.

And Thanks be to God! He came and has delivered us! This short life, where we will never be as young again as we are today, does not have to be our end!

As for me, the Lord didn't let my devil-imposed fears come true. I didn't have to die to deliver our sweet girl. I got to do it in a hot tub and on a squishy bed. But a few times during labor as I was trying to remember that I got to be a "Christ figure" to Vivy and deliver her from her first body of death, this picture kept coming to mind:

And I realized that he DID have to die to deliver me. Thanks be to God, wretched woman that I am.