“He Is the Love of My Life and He is a Miracle”

On mother’s day I awoke early and went downstairs in the quiet of the morning to the living room. The sun had already risen over the horizon lighting up a cloudless, blue sky. I opened my laptop computer to check my email and the news and that is when I found this miraculous story.

It is a very simple video of a young mother holding her baby and sitting before the camera of her computer. As I watched she started to hold up individual pieces of notebook paper to the camera, each with a phrase or two printed in her own handwriting. She herself says nothing, but I was captured by the very simplicity of her method of communicating a very powerful personal story. As she presented each handwritten page I watched her face too. I watched as her face revealed the depth of her being and the depth of her love for this little baby she held in her arms.

This is a Mother’s Day story of unequaled beauty and love. This mother defines the meaning of motherhood, what it means to bring a child into the world. This child is the product of the love that she and her husband have for one another and their physical expression of that love. All of that is true. But we often tend to romanticize love. We take the Disney view where marriage means that when we look into each other’s eyes and say, “I do,” we will “live happily ever after.” Life, though, is made up of reality. Life is often hard, sometimes it seems, too hard.

Too often when life “deals us a bad hand” we want to flee from the pain of it, get rid of it, put it behind us a soon as possible. What could be more painful and troubling for a mother than to hear that there is something wrong with the baby in her womb? No man can know what that must feel like to a woman. There is no bond like that of a woman and the child, alive and growing inside her body.

The young woman in this video had to deal with that news. She had to make a decision. Her decision was not easy, and would not be easy, ever, even after she gave birth to this child who she felt stirring in her body for those 9 months. But as you watch, see how that decision for life has made all of the difference in her life.

“You alone created my inner being. You knit me in my mother’s womb.” (Psalm 139:13) Yes, God is present in every moment of our lives from conception to our natural deaths and beyond. Sometimes we don’t understand the mind of God, especially in a situation like the one in this video. We question God in our anger, or our sadness. But this mother shows us the true nature of God in her simple, undivided, unconditional love for her infant son, Christian. Yes, Christian is his name. The mystery of the true nature of God is evident throughout this little video of a mother and her child.

The American poet Wendell Berry wrote in his poem, “Some Further Words”

“I think the issues of ‘identity’ mostly

are poppycock. We are what we have done,

which includes our promises, includes

our hopes, but promises first. I know

a ‘fetus’ is a human child.

I loved my children from the time

they were conceived, having loved

their mother, who loved them

from the time they were conceived

and before. Who are we to say

the world did not begin in love?”

In the face and eyes of this mother, you can see how God works in and through the realities of life, even through the greatest sufferings that life can bring to us. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to the God of Love and Life.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=aeItyVFx0Zo