Pregnancy

"Pregnancy"
Luke 1:30-31, 36-37


In order to determine if he was running to the best of his ability, marathon racer and cardiologist, Dr. George Sheehan went to the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.  There, physiologists gave him a maximum human performance test.  Part of it consisted of running a mile on a treadmill at an eight minute pace.  Then he had to run a mile on the treadmill at a seven minute pace.  And finally a mile at 6 minutes, 40 seconds, with the treadmill at a steeper grade.

All the time, the physiologists kept urging Sheehan to try harder and do more.  When it was all done, Sheehan took out the mouthpiece, gasping, “O God!  O God!”  The physiologists poured over their figures, excited about his performance.  “He went over the hill,” one of them said.  Sheehan had reached his maximum peak performance and gone past it.

The pain eventually began to recede.  As he sprawled out on a chair, feeling content, he kept trying to think of an experience that similarly taxed the human body to its maximum.  Then it came to him.  He turned to the other doctors and asked, “How soon can I see my baby?”

That may be the closest a guy can get to understanding, or getting a taste of what pregnancy and child birth are like.  I confess, I don’t know what it feels like to give birth.  Equally, I don’t know what it feels like to be pregnant.  There have been movies about guys being pregnant.  But they are all comedies.  They are never dramas, like when the movie is about a woman being pregnant.  With a guy, pregnancy is funny.  With a woman, it’s drama.

Guys don’t have a clue as to what goes on in pregnancy.  And I think, if I may be so bold to speak for most guys here, we are happy with that.  We are happy that we don’t know.  It’s OK with us.  Do you agree, guys?  I mean, we get in on the good part of pregnancy, and then we get to sit back and watch.  There’s nothing else a guy can do.  You can’t get morning sickness for your pregnant wife.  She has to do that herself.  You can’t transfer the baby into the guy for a while to relieve your pregnant wife from carrying the child the whole nine months.

We can walk funny, like our pregnant wives, but then we get hit.  So, like I said, there isn’t a whole lot we can do that will ever help us guys understand what it feels like, and what you women have to go through when you’re pregnant.  And, as I said before, we are happy with that.  You women just go ahead and get together with your little coffee and chat groups.  Compare notes and birth stories.  And we will, well, we will continue being guys.

Even in childbirth--maybe especially childbirth--we guys feel mostly helpless.  We’re supposed to be good coaches, run to the store for your pickles and ice cream;  tell you when to breathe, and be generally encouraging and all that.  But when you’re in marathon runner level pain, pushing out our children, we feel mostly helpless and stupid.

Do you remember that Bill Cosby routine, when he tells about the birth of their first child.  He set the whole scene by telling about their expectations for how it would go.  That the birth of their child would be natural and enjoyable.  But then how quickly all that went out the window once the contractions started.  When he told his wife to breathe during one of her contractions Cosby described how she grabbed his lower lip and pulled it up over his head.

That’s when we guys realize that, as helpful as we think we are being, as helpful as we are supposed to be during our wives pregnancy and childbirth, the reality is, we’re pretty worthless to the whole process.  Except for the beginning.

So, with all the courage and stupidity I can muster, I’m going to stand up here and talk about pregnancy.  Even though I’ve already disqualified myself, and I have no idea what you women are thinking of me for even attempting what I’m about to attempt.  But I’m going to take the chance, because I’ve stood by during the pregnancy of my two kids and witnessed them both being born.  And I have extensive experience talking with pregnant women in the churches I’ve served.  So I’m hoping I come off sounding like I’m at least semi-knowledgable.  (You guys are all sitting there smugly smiling thinking to yourselves, “This ought to be good.  We’re going to just let Wing step on this land mine.”)

The reason I’m taking this risk, I hope, is clear.  You can’t get into the Christmas story very far before you are dealing with pregnancy.  Even before Mary’s pregnancy, we are told about Elizabeth.  She’s a woman whose age has taken her well beyond child-bearing.  She’s never had any children of her own.  She’s the wife of a priest named Zechariah.  An angel visited her and told her she will have a baby.  A baby who will eventually become John, the forerunner of the coming of the Savior.  Then the same angel visited Mary.  Mary was an unmarried girl.  She hasn’t had any children not because she’s too old, but because she’s so young.   The angel told her she will have a baby, and that he will be the Savior of the world.

So right off we are dealing with two pregnant ladies.  The early parts of the Christmas story have to do with 15 months of two overlapping pregnancies.  It just seemed to me, that if we are going to understand the Christmas story, we have to be able to understand something of what it means to be pregnant.

We have to put ourselves back in Mary’s time.  And for you older women, you might be able to relate to this better.  There were no drug stores back then you could run to and get a home pregnancy kit to find out if you really are pregnant.  Unless you get morning sickness, there are no signs for the first month or two.  Mary wouldn’t have known, for sure, if what the angel told her, really happened to her.

I remember the first few months of doing those early pregnancy tests.  All negative.  Months of tests turned into years.  Then medical procedures.  Then fertility drugs.  Still nothing.  After each procedure, the promise and possibility of being excited.  But nothing.  Just another negative; looking at each other; looking at the floor.  Finally giving up.  There was a certain release in giving up.  A relaxing.  Embracing childlessness.

Then, BAM!  Pregnancy happened.  First Ryan, then Kristin.  I remember the elation.  The surprise.  The disbelief.  The jumping up and down.  The excitement.  The anticipation.

But those first couple of months, for Mary, would have been filled with all kinds of apprehension and emotional anticipation.  When you get a message from God that you will be pregnant, you don’t have to worry about home pregnancy tests or infertility techniques.  It’s going to happen.

During this time Mary apparently didn’t tell Joseph what had happened with the angel’s visit.  The gospel tells us that while she and Joseph were betrothed, that she was “found to be with child.”  Once she starts looking pregnant, once everyone discovered her pregnancy, that’s also when Joseph found out.  For most women, part of the excitement that is generated is when you start to “show.”  But for Mary, that’s when the secret is out.  That’s when she can’t hide anymore.  There was no jumping up and down from the thrill of being pregnant.  She and Joseph probably didn’t hug each other in sheer love of each other at the news.

Mary took the angel’s message with so much grace and acceptance.  Without too much questioning, she said, “Yes.”  At some point there must have come the sudden fear of, “Oh my gosh; what have I done?”  Is it a question most women ask themselves, either privately or out loud?  Do the questions start taking over the initial elation?  Questions like, How is this going to change everything?”  Does early excitement begin to be mixed and mingled with those “reality check” kinds of questions?

Until then, Mary’s life went on normally.  “This is pretty easy,” she might have thought to herself.  But then when her pregnancy was clear to everyone, and the fact that she and Joseph had not married yet, and that Joseph wasn’t the father of her baby, the reality checks of pregnancy came hard and fast.  When did Mary sit down and say to herself, “Oh my gosh; what have I done?”  Questions that hadn’t even entered her mind up until that point.  When did she finally realize, as most women must, that being pregnant as she was, was going to absolutely and irreversibly change her life?

See, I may be wrong here, but I’m not sure guys think about those kinds of questions with their wife’s pregnancy.  We don’t start thinking about such things until well after the birth, when our children cry, and we don’t know what’s wrong, and we don’t know how to fix it.  I think guys think their lives will remain pretty much unchanged.  We’ll be good fathers and all that.  But for the most part, we don’t assume children are going to change or affect our life direction, vocation, and goals.  When that reality hits, we are totally unprepared for how to deal with it.  Women, because they think about these kinds of realities the whole pregnancy, have at least a nine month jump on us.


Women get a much more real glimpse of all this because something happens around the fifth month of pregnancy.  Many women talk about losing track of their bodies.  It feels like their body doesn’t become theirs anymore to control and do with what she wants.  The child, growing inside of her, controls what and how much she eats, how well she sleeps, how she walks, how she is able to function or not function in her daily life, and how close she has to be to a bathroom at any given time.  Even just sitting in what used to be a comfortable chair isn’t comfortable any more.  Let alone riding on a donkey for several days.

Everything in a pregnant woman’s body seems to change and there’s nothing she can do about it.  In pregnancy, a woman finds out she has been taken over by something much larger than herself.  She has given up all sense of control to do anything about it.  That’s why women may be more ready to understand the life changes that come with pregnancy--because so much has changed already for them.  We goofy men go off to work each day, kiss our pregnant wives, and tell them how much they are glowing.  We are clueless.

I think about Mary.  She’s having to deal with her ever enlarging body, and the fact she was losing control of her body.  But more than that, she was also dealing with the reality of losing control of her life.  Not only had pregnancy taken over her body, but God’s plan had taken over her life.  She simply bowed before it at the angel’s visit.  How happy was she with it all once it all started unfolding?

I’m kind of like that.  I get these grand ideas or make some big plan.  I assume that everything will just go grandly.  I work it all out in my head and assume that it will work the same way in reality.  Then real life takes over my grand plans.  They start spinning out of my control.  All my assumptions about smooth sailing go overboard when the first wave hits.  Especially when the plans have to do with the Lord and the work of his church.  I have the clear assumption that all has to go well since it has to do with God.  Why then do I all of a sudden find myself backpedaling, compromising, or just plain doing damage control?

Mary must have sat down and cried at several points as she lost more and more control over her situation.  I think that’s why she finally ran off to aunt Elizabeth’s house.  Elizabeth would understand.  Elderly Elizabeth finally got what she prayed for in her pregnancy, and quickly found herself in a similar out of control situation.  Mary probably wasn’t looking for any answers to her problems from Elizabeth.  She didn’t want Elizabeth to solve anything for her, or explain the odd ways of God.  She just wanted to be with someone who understood what it was like to have your body taken over by pregnancy, and your life taken over by God’s plans.  Now, Mary’s sledding down a hill, with all kinds of obstacles in the way, and it was God who gave her the primary shove.  And Elizabeth is on the back.


Then there comes the time in the last weeks of the pregnancy when women say, “Let’s get this over with!  Let’s just have this child!”  After nine months of planning, preparing, and “nesting,” there is a resoluteness that sets in to get it over with.  The nine months have run their course.  The waiting has turned into impatience.  The discomfort is at its greatest.  The time of birth, too, is out of a woman’s control, unless it will be a C-section.

I think of Mary, plodding along toward Bethlehem, sitting uncomfortably pregnant upon the donkey.  They finally arrived after what must have been an unbearably longer journey for Mary than for Joseph.

Then Luke tersely states, “While they were there, the time came for her to give birth.”  How much is hidden in that verse.  How much had come before and during the pregnancy for Mary to finally get to that verse in the story.  Nine months of an emotionally difficult pregnancy went into that statement.  We don’t even know, physically, how the pregnancy went for her.  Simply that the time finally came to give birth.  Finally.  Did she look at Joseph and say, or at least think, “Finally we get this thing over with”?

But then what?  Then comes life.  After pregnancy comes life.  When Mary, when any woman is pregnant, the child within her is self-contained in the womb.  But once the birth happens, once the pregnancy is over, that life is out.  Then there’s a whole new set of issues to face.  But that’s another sermon.

At this point in the story, Mary is still early in the pregnancy, and the majority of the nine months lay ahead of her.  The surprise is beginning to fade.  The reality is beginning to set in.  Harder days lay ahead.