Made to submit

A birth and death story

Ft. perfect little toesies

Dear reader, I’m not sure how helpful I would find a piece like this before I experienced birth. Turns out nothing anyone said to me about birth was true because no one was me. No one has my body or my soul or my sin. I was totally and wonderfully and thankfully unprepared for what awaited me — not for lack of preparation but by the grace of God Himself. He writes our stories (and designs our bodies) totally uniquely. But even when of and for His glory, reading others’ birth stories isn’t always wise when you haven’t crossed the Rubicon yourself yet (though this is more a spiritual than physical retelling of a birth story). Just saying. If you’re waiting on the other side, for whatever reason, pray and discern if this post is for you right now. Maybe read Psalm 139 instead? And remember that by virtue of the Holy Spirit within your living temple you already have all you need inside you to give birth. Fear not. It’s the coolest thing in the world.

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My daughter’s name is Talita Lorraine, named so because we pray Jesus touches her, takes her by the hand, and calls her every day of her life — Talita, Spanish for Talitha — to be a warrior for Him — Lorraine. She is named after my mum, and my mum is a book in herself.

Birth is a wild experience. And even though I’m about to try, I haven’t the words for it. Anyway, AW Tozer says if you can put something into words, it is second-rate — which is probably why most women struggle so much to explain their birth experience. All births are first-rate, though nothing remains unmarred by sin. Perhaps birth, at least in the abstract and often in the material, is one of those unspeakable divine realities of which Paul writes. So enjoy this second-rate piece. Glory to God.

The Lord leaves no stone unturned in a willing life, even if that willingness is just the willingness to be made willing. I sit here. I’ve been sitting here for a while. Your will be done reads more like, make me will Your will be done.

If you’ve read anything I’ve ever written, if you know me, my life, my story, and — oh certainly — my journey since the Lord called me, it has been and continues to be marked by a particular stone needing to be overturned. A boulder. A monolith. A mountain:

Independent lack of submission to the will of God. In case that sounds nice, let me put it this way: I have made every effort to have Jesus (or some version of Him, or God the Father-who-helps-me-with-my-problems, or the “feeling” of the Holy Spirit) without truly following Him; that is, without going to the Cross and picking it up. Peter tried to do this: He tried to separate Jesus from the Cross; Jesus called him Satan. For there is no Christian faith without total death; and not the pretty, church-y kind; ashes on the altar once the Fire has consumed the sacrifice. So, Jesus without the Cross is not just watered down doctrine (how nice to think of it this way!). Rather, it is a satanic endeavour.¹ And death to self is not giving my husband the larger half of the avocado. It is murdering all my comfort, everything I ever wanted for my life and future, and everything I ever thought of myself and thought myself to be. It is, as Paul writes in the Christ Hymn, complete obedience and submission to the will of God resulting in a complete emptying of self (followed by, most likely, a lifelong series of events and happenings and situations that I would not have chosen for myself). Anything less is an attempt to separate, even a little, Christ from the Cross. Which is satanic.

Ok, so that’s my starting point. It couldn’t be less pretty or more dangerous.

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Talita’s birth made me submit, if only for four and a half hours. It was a start.

I’ve heard birth experiences of God’s peace, His joy, His delight.

Not mine.

Mine was of God’s omnipotence in and through my being. His unrestricted and unquantifiable power and sovereignty over creation. Over me. Over my body and my spirit. I was nothing more — and nothing less, thank you Jesus — than His vessel for the birth of my daughter.

I refuse to say that I was in pain. Pain is not the right word. Pain tells you something is wrong. And something wasn’t wrong. Maybe for the first time in my whole life, something was actually right.

I wasn’t in pain, but I was used, bent over, broken, split open. Groaning alongside all creation from all parts of my being.

Do not be afraid

For you have found favour with God

It was everything I’d ever prayed. It was what I named this publication out of a desire to be just that. And it was nothing like I thought. I was Eustace Clarence Scrubb! For the last two years, I’d been trying to claw off the dragon skin of Hannah’s will. Birth was the first time I felt the Lion had His claws in me.

Talita’s birth was exactly 740 days after the Lord called me back to Him. Seven days to represent His unchanging and holy perfection, and 40 to represent the wilderness of my soul He is walking me through.

The wilderness comes before the claws. His perfect holiness comes before it all.

Giving birth was an act of total submission, but the kind of submission I needed to experience: involuntary. There was absolutely nothing I could do to change how it happened or how it progressed.

And it looked like submission. It looked like eating grass. I spent the entire time bent down, face forward, doubled over. Any attempt to lay in the bathtub or rest face upwards failed. I scrambled up and bent over again. I had to be in constant, ceaseless prayer. My body moved, but I wasn’t the one moving it.

And I couldn’t stop trembling.

I was powerless. Talita Lorraine’s birth was four and a half hours from first surge to the moment she was born. From the outset, I had less than 30 seconds between surges. I couldn’t speak. By the most intense part, I had less than 10 seconds between the surges that were guiding my baby out. That is all very unusual for a first-timer.

And all the while, I was bowed, trembling.

Apart from Me you can do nothing

I was aware of nothing except the Lord humbling me, breaking my spirit open, breaking my hips open, freeing me, showing me who is Lord and who is not. I clung to my mum’s neck and the cross around my own.

The intensity of the Godhood of the living God was all I knew for those hours.

Face down, trembling, praying. Submitted.

Like a newborn myself, the Lord carried me through that birth — His Spirt primarily; an indescribable sense of I can’t do this and I can’t do anything but this coming from a place that wasn’t me — as well as His hands and arms in the form of my husband’s hands and arms on my hips, His neck and chest in the form of my mum’s neck and chest to which I clung, His wisdom and familiarity with my body through my midwives that I knew not except to follow, His steadiness through my sisterfriend that just was.

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Having a child has made me realize how much of a child I am. Is this one way women will be saved in childbearing? We become like children again?

Or maybe it is through the breaking. For what a thing it is, to have your body taken, broken, bloody, and opened to life.

This is my body, says the Lord Jesus, and through it we enter Life.

Or maybe it is through some kind of death.

Jesus asked the Father in the garden if there was another way. There was not. So He submitted. He became the Sacrifice that finally sufficed. To follow Him, to be co-heirs of His eternal glory, is to die also. There is no other way.

So, in merciful symbolism, there was no other way for Talita’s birth to proceed but in total submission. Everything Hannah died for four and a half hours — which isn’t very long but it’s four and a half hours more than before.

The Cross is, after all, the intersection of man’s will and God’s.

Jesus, in that Garden, didn’t need to be made to submit.

I did. I do. Thank God for a God who knows me.

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Humble yourselves therefore

under the mighty hand of God

I hold my baby in my arms — and thank God I do, she is a delight of delights — and it makes me more aware than ever that I have never practiced the presence of God. Not really. I haven’t sought Him with my whole heart and ached and panted and hungered for Him. I’ve done all those things for a Feeling or an image of Him — or myself. I have intermittently been a vessel for His glory, but that kind of lukewarm and punctuated faith is wretched, even to me. At times I have recognized Him — but the demons did also. I haven’t trembled at His feet in the last six weeks. The submission to God I experienced in birth is etched into my body but not my soul. So I have no conclusion to offer. I don’t even know what humbling myself means. I can only offer a weak and pitiable thank you to God Almighty for the manner in which He continues to be faithful to the unfaithful, to draw the distracted. He is the hound of Heaven, chasing me, each of us, with deliberate speed, unhurrying chase, and majestic instancy.² I simply “stand amidst the dust o' the mounded years”.

My soul magnifies the Lord

M spirit rejoices in God my Saviour

For He has looked upon the humble estate of His servant

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There are more second-rate words and sentences I could write, but I’ll leave it there except perhaps to add something that 30-something-year-old unmarried and childless me would have wanted to read. Jesus is equally begotten and equally Saviour in all willing (or willing to be made willing) lives. Not all women will bear children. Life is painful and complicated and each journey is unique. Creation groans in many ways and through many sounds and wounds. But He is Saviour in the childbearing and in the not-childbearing, in equal glory and majesty and submission and goodness to be grasped and tasted and seen. Childbirth is one way; it is not the way. Jesus is the Way.

Glory to God in the highest heaven,

1. I watched a sermon by Michael Koulianos that pointed this out to me, thank God. No memory of which sermon.

2. https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/hound-of-heaven-4117.