Unseen

    When I was pregnant with my third child, my 2 year old asked, "Is there really a baby in your tummy?" When I said yes, he said, "Pull it out." He wasn't trying to kill his brother--that would come later. He just wanted to see what was happening with the baby. Truth be told, I did too, but as a grown up, I knew that wasn't possible. We women are privileged to carry a baby inside us for nine months and, although we now have the technology to know how the baby develops, the womb has no windows. How God is weaving our little wonders together in the darkness of our womb is unseen. We just have to trust God to do what is best for our child.
     I thought of that in our mothers of prodigals prayer group the other night. When it comes to God's spiritual development of our children, we want Him to "pull it out". We not only want to see what He is doing, we want to supervise. Worry can convince us that if we cannot see any spiritual growth, nothing is happening. Our prayers for them are not working. The truth is, God's is not obligated to use our timeline or methods for reaching our loved ones. Our proper goals for our children's spiritual growth are also tainted by our selfish desire to control the outcome.
    Right now we are seeing "Son"ward growth in our son. But in those seemingly, spiritually stagnant times, I try to remind myself of the hundreds of things God used in my 16 year journey toward Christ. No one but God knew how or when that spiritual gestation would result in my new birth. We must patiently trust the God who has been pursuing prodigals since Eden to know the best way to reach our wayward big wonders. Spiritual birth, like physical birth, is the culmination of processes, for the most part, unseen.