a new creation

Well again, I find myself putting months in between my blog posts but so be it! Strangely enough my last post on Mother's day flows well to this one four months later... because now I'm starting my own journey into motherhood! :) Chris and I will become parents to a little screaming, pooping, sleep-sucking miracle in April! 

If you knew me as a little kid, you probably knew of my obsession with becoming a mother. When I was eighteen-months-old my mom tells a story of how I threw a full-blown tantrum in Toys R Us over a baby with a "real" heart-beat. From that point on, I carried my babies with me wherever I went-- all vacations, shopping trips, family walks around the park... My baby dolls even had perfect church attendance for a number of years. One of the best days of my childhood was one Ash Wednesday when the minister not only put the cross of ashes on my forehead but on my baby's little plastic forehead, too. Finally, an adult recognized that my baby was real!! 

Alas, my baby dolls eventually became socially inappropriate and I transitioned into babysitting-- my favorite middle-school Friday night. Many hours have I spent pretending to be mom to other people's kids. (And a few of them I will always count as my own.) 


And now it's finally my turn!! 

Being pregnant is the most out-of-body experience anyone could imagine. The day those (much anticipated) blue lines appeared on my pregnancy test, I knew my body had been invaded by a little alien. My appetite has been stolen and replaced by a fat, 18-year-old college boy's. (Yes, I have eaten pancakes in bed past midnight. Yes, I eat dinner at least twice a night.. usually three times.) My emotional stability has been stollen by a melodramatic teenage girl and my youthful energy has been replaced with my 94-year-old grandma's need for an early bedtime. 

Of course while you all will soon see the obvious changes to my silhouette (bye double zero jeans...), inside of me, invisible to all of us, is the most incredible creation. When my baby was only the size of a single poppy seed, his/her little heart had already started to beat. And only a month later my blueberry-sized baby was growing arms and legs! And as I type this, that little plum-sized booger is doing somersaults! 

Meanwhile I have gone to work, watched movies, baked cookies, wasted time on Facebook and painted my toenails. Not once did I concentrate on creating a tiny set of lungs for my baby. Never willed my baby's eyeballs into existence. God is making this new creation in me. I am quite literally just a vessel. 

Many years ago, God made me into a new creation by His Son's death and resurrection and made me an ambassador for Christ. "So whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come... So we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us..." - 2 Corinthians 5:17; 20

What a miracle life is! What a miracle life in Christ is!

-Brigid