Common Sense Reborn

August 15

¹³For you created my inmost being;

You knit me together in my mother’s womb.

¹⁴I praise you because I was fearfully and wonderfully made;

Your works are wonderful,

I know that full well.  (Psalms 139:13-14)

Happy Monday Family!  I hope you had a wonderful weekend.  The Z family had a marvelous last few days.  We have been blessed with our third, and final, child.  I have been wanting to sit down and put my thoughts down in this special place, but SGZIII has had us busy.  (All our children have the same initials to their name.)  I think today is the first time we have put her down while she slept.  She has been quite the little stinker, as soon as we would lay her down she would wake up and start crying in that sweet, newborn voice.  We are extremely blessed, a third beautiful baby, healthy, with all her fingers and all her toes.

I have a lot to share with y’all this week, and I hope I will have the time to put my thoughts (and there have been many) onto this computer for you all to read.  I hope that after this week, your hope in salvation, in love, and revival will be reinvigorated.  My hope in humanity has resurfaced, despite the world burning around me, because I held a miracle again on Friday morning when I was handed my baby girl for the first time.

I wish that every parent feels the marvel and wonder in the birth of their children.  I know many children around the world are born without the love of both parents, some without the love of any.  Some are castaway as soon as they arrive, some are neglected and treated as a second class citizen in their own homes.  And then there are the many, who despite all their best intentions, are never able to bring children of their own into the world.  So for me, holding my newest product of God’s grand design, holding her reminded me of the hope within humanity.

I went into our Caesarean delivery with the acute sense that this was the last time.  We were in a new hospital, away from most of our family and friends, with an amazing team of doctors about to bring our first Georgia baby into the world.  I wanted to remember all the fine details of that early Friday morning.  I remember much of our first born, because it was such a battle for Mrs. Z during labor, and then SGZI got stuck and the Doctors performed an emergency C-section.  Due to that, when it came time for SGZII, we opted for C-section, and the only memory that stuck with me from that trip was how much SGZII looked identical to our original, a darn near carbon copy of his older sister when she was born.  That wrecked me because holding my son made me feel like I was holding my daughter for the first time again, and I will get to why that is so powerful in the coming days.  Today, I just want to focus on the details.

It was the details I wanted to remember about this birth.  Watching the red, seconds-hand tick around the clock as I waited for the Doctor’s to bring me in the Operating Room.  The sound of the cooler holding saline IV bags humming intermittently beside me.  The sterility of the OR; the orchestra of machines, suction, Doctors and Nurses talking through the procedure; my beautiful wife, ready to have her gut sliced open and her insides tossed about to remove our third child.  And then the moment of delivery (extraction).  Little SGZIII was not happy.  Her sweet voice cracking into a low, shrill cry.  There is no more joyful sound in the world than that of a newborn baby crying.

I tried my best to commit all the wonderful details of that morning to my memory, but the greatest work-of-art, the greatest product of design that morning was not the beautiful hospital we were in, or the fancy machines that perform miraculous medical work.  The greatest miracle in the room that morning was our daughter, a beautifully designed creation, knit together in her mother’s womb, wonderfully made in the image of God.  It was with the birth of my first child that I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that all creation was the work of a Creator.  And now, eleven years after our first was born, I was reminded again of the wonderful, miracle-working, majestic, loving Father as He blessed us beyond measure once again.  How anyone can hold their child and question the existence of God is beyond me.  How anyone can hold their perfectly-designed, little person and think children are some evolution of nature is completely insane.  How can evolution explain how my newborn child, just minutes old, knew to start smacking her lips and tongue looking for that precious source of nutrients from her mother without any guidance or preparation?  That is the miracle of a Creator, of a God who loves, of a God who blesses the world with new life, with the opportunity and beautiful responsibility of raising a soul into this world to be a good and faithful servant.  I will write about that responsibility in the upcoming days.  For now, I’ll leave you with a beautiful song from Crowder, as I continue to soak in the details of this moment in my life.  May you all have a blessed week. May you all take some time to stop and appreciate the details of the miracles of your life.