Where was God in my birth room?

If you read my birth stories in my previous blog posts, you know that I had two very different birth experiences. Both in the labor and delivery, and then the immediate postpartum periods. Yet, I felt the comfort of God in both. My smoother birth didn’t feel somehow more “#blessed” than the one that took everything in me to endure. I felt He carried, honored and comforted me through both.

Hands laid on me in prayer throughout labor sustained me when the strength I had was failing. Playlists of music calling on my God for His presence pulled me out of what felt like “the valley of the shadow of death.” It’s like He was saying, “Here, I am with you. Even here. Especially here.” The silent and spoken prayers in my dark moments of doubt and fear covered me with a kind of protection I was craving, but no one else in the room could give me. And I’ve seen time and again the way my prayers over my fellow Christian clients have come to place of unexpected strength and peace upon receiving the same.

I had the honor of attending 7 births with the same traditional, homebirth midwife, who has since passed away. She said that when babies were born, some of them took a few extra minutes to breathe. And when that happened she’d flick their heel and rub their back, and it was like she was telling their soul that was looking for their body, “here you are! come on in!” And then all at once they’d come in and start screaming.

That image has always stayed with me, and I feel it in every birth. The arrival of this new soul is powerful, and I adore that moment when parent and child meet. They know one another, on such a deeper level than I can ever comprehend. It’s a profound spiritual experience. A gift every time I get to be there to witness it.