His Passionate Embrace Within You

As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, How bones (are breathed to life) in the womb of the full one, So thou knowest not the work of God who maketh the whole. Ecclesiastes 11:15 (Emphasis mine)

Not long after I married John I began to be pregnant in my thoughts and dreams. One night over spaghetti I burst into tears because I wanted a son. It freaked out my husband of eight weeks something major. Me too, if the truth be told. I had not been fond of children.

It would be two years before we would meet John David who would come disguised as the flu and at the most inconvenient and "broke" time. But he lived in me all the while even when he was only a promise, a desire.

In all the different ways women have of being "pregnant" we are favored of God. His delight. The ones chosen to demonstrate His life, colors, words, gifts, feelings, intentions. We let them grow inside of us. We fed them with our own substance and call them to life with a scream.

Convenient, inconvenient. God has the time planned out. He knows what is needed and when it needs to come and who needs to bring it. Just as surely as a young girl growing up in obscurity and poverty was the one to raise the Son of God, you have a call on your life. I have one on mine. God planned and planted.

I have friends whose horizons God is stretching. I feel Him moving my own mental furniture. It is terrifying and exciting all at once. We don't know (understand) the work of God who makes the whole. We don't understand how that life was breathed into us but it is there understood or not.

So we pick up a baby, a book, a paintbrush, a camera, a Sunday School teacher's guide. We enroll in a class, we volunteer, we buy tap shoes, we become a foster parent, we make Paella. We become the ones full of His goodness and glory. We let the world see that "He has placed His passionate embrace" within us. That we are transformed.

God has plans for us. He knows what maketh the whole.

I behold you,

noble, glorious and whole woman...

O lovely and tender one,

how greatly has God delighted in you.

For He has placed His passionate embrace within you...

like grass upon which dew falls,

pouring its life-green into it,

and so it is true in you also...

From Ave Generosa by Hildegard of Bingen

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