Highlands Cluster Uniting Church

“Well I hope you don’t get sent to the stables!” a wise woman recently said to me. Those around us looked at her in confusion as well as some horror. The comment had come out of nowhere.

However I knew what she was referring to. Bearing twins, and seemingly getting more heavily pregnant by the day, I knew that she was pointing to the ancient Christian story of the Jesus being born in the sheep shed.

I laughed with her, and agreed that I too hoped that this wouldn’t happen to me. Yet, it will unfold as it unfolds. Probably not with sheep and outcasts being the first to welcome the babies. However as women who have been pregnant through the ages know, with any pregnancy there are risks and fears and always the great unknown.

It takes time for new life in the womb to be knitted together: as limbs take shape and lungs grow.  It also takes time in each of our own lives for new life to be born.

I think Jesus the Holy One is always calling each of us into new life, life in which we are more truly ourselves, more deeply healed, and more set free for love. 

Just as it takes energy and commitment and a lot of waiting to bring babies into this world, so too it takes energy and commitment and a lot of waiting for new life to be born within us. And both are risky enterprises.

Yet Christ will not force new life upon us. This is always invitation and gift.

If we are prepared to take time, to make room for the new possibilities that Christ desires to birth within our lives and if we are prepared to wait, then, like the everyday yet startling miracle of babies being born, the miracle of new beginnings and different stories can be birthed in our own lives.

If only we have the courage to stop seeking to control our lives and futures, and instead surrender in the face of the reality of the great unknown.

Doing so not alone, but from the arms of the Holy One who certainly does not promise easy deliveries and fairy tale endings, but who does promise authentic life and love, and intimate Divine presence along the whole mysterious way.