Surprised By Her Love
I never imagined myself as a mother. Honestly, I never thought I would be a mother. There are a variety of reasons for this. First, I imagined that I would die young. Seriously, I thought I would die before I was thirty years old. I don’t know why, but that was a constant feeling I had growing up. I am now forty-three. When I played house as a kid I never wanted to be “the mom.” I was usually the husband. Watching the live birth video my freshman year in St. Agnes High School pretty much cemented for me that I did NOT want to give birth or be a mother.
If I am honest, there are still many days that I am surprised I am alive and that I am now a mother. Six years ago, I gave birth to my daughter, Vivian Rose. She was not a surprise baby. Her presence in this world was deliberately chosen and intentionally conceived. But it was not the choice I ever envisioned myself choosing. And in some way, maybe I didn’t. There were a series of events that led to her birth. I joke about this, but it is likely very true, there were a lot of prayers from her grandmothers for her to be born. Watch out for the powerful prayers of mothers and mothers-in-law. Those prayers are no joke.
In 2015, I heard the Holy Spirit whisper to my soul, “You are going to have a baby, and it will be the greatest experience of the cross that you will ever have.” There is quite a bit to unpack in that prophetic utterance that forever changed the course of my life. Probably a book or two in the making. But for now, I want to talk about love. More specifically, being surprised by it.
When the Holy Spirit said those words to me, I envisioned many ways that I would experience the truth of that statement. I imagined an “emptying” of myself that would reflect Christ’s emptying of himself. That happens, every single day. Becoming a parent has undone me and stripped me bare in ways that are profoundly unique to being someone’s mother. I imagined that my life would change, that I would experience a “death” of my pre-baby self, only to be resurrected to a new “me,” post-baby. That has happened and continues to happen in many ways. But what I didn’t expect was the experience of being loved more profoundly than I ever had been before.
I have been utterly surprised by how much Vivian loves me. It has disarmed me. It has undone me. It has overwhelmed me. It has renewed me. Her love for me and of me has been an experience of the cross I wasn’t expecting. I never imagined she would love me or like me as much as she does. It truly never occurred to me. But my daughter, she adores me. I am her person. I am the one that she wants to be close to, ALL THE TIME.
As I was lying in bed with her watching her fall asleep, listening to her breathe, I felt the Holy Spirit whisper once again, “This is how I love you. Unrelenting. Ever-present. With adoration and desire. With longing. Always and in every moment.”
When the Spirit first told me that I was going to have a child and that child would bring me into the depths of the cross, I thought about sacrifice. I thought about death.I did not think about love. How much I could be loved. How much I am loved. Her love has surprised me. Her love is changing me. Turns out, the cross might be a great deal more than I ever imagined.