Thursday 14 August 2008

Reflections

When we saw our daughter she was so beautiful, it was hard to understand why she couldn’t live. I knew that her little chest was too small. I knew it couldn’t hold healthy lungs, that she didn’t have functioning kidneys, that she was too small and so weak, but it didn’t connect at all with the full picture...her chest didn’t seem that little, her body too weary. She seemed so perfect.

Leah’s little body was distorted enough to cause death, but not enough to make her seem anything but lovely to me. Her creation stunned me in the moments that I saw her. She came out of me. Marvelous. Incomprehensible. Amazing. We rejoiced in how wonderfully she had been made.

Yet my beautiful child was suffocated by her skeleton, a deformity lurking inside her that prevented her from having the full and happy life I longed for her to have.

I don’t presume to know the mind of God, but I do think that becoming a parent has helped me comprehend his character as a father more fully. I wonder, as he looks upon me, as I looked upon my child, does he feel the same thing? Love for a creation so beautiful and yet so inwardly crippled, longing for his child to live fully in him, unhindered by the deformity of a sinful nature?

2 comments:

Nicole said...

I know this is an old post - but it is amazing... so deep, and yet so true as well. I've thought I never understood the gravity of "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son" so much as when I've had to face the possibility of losing my child. I love this post so much - do you mind if I share it on my blog??

Amy said...

Feel free to share anything you want- that is why I wrote it- to help/encourage people who need it.