THE BEGINNING OF POSSIBILITY

“For You created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be.”  (Psalm 139:13-16 NIV)

A birth brings new possibilities into the world. In this sense, birth is the polar opposite of death, which is the end of possibilities [on this side of heaven]. A birth opens up not only one possibility but a multitude of them… With birth, a new life is launched into the world -- a life filled with possibilities. A newborn baby is filled with potential that will later be realized. As a person grows, possibilities become realities. Birth is the beginning of possibility.  

-- Robert Martin Walker in “Prepare Him Room”

HEAVEN IS CLOSER THAN WE IMAGINE

Heaven is close. Perhaps closer than we imagine.  It's a little like saying to an unborn infant in his mother's womb, "Do you realize that you are about to be born into a great big world full of mountains, rivers, and a sun and a moon? In fact, you exist in that wonderful world right now."

"Wait a minute," the unborn babe might say. "No way. My world is the one surrounding me.  It's soft, warm, and dark.  You'll never convince me that just a few hairbreadths outside the uterus exists this place of rivers, mountains, and a sun and moon, whatever that stuff is."

Dear baby! There he is, safe in his little world, ignorant of the fact that a more glorious world is enclosing and encasing his.  A world for which he is being fashioned.  Only when he is birthed into it will he comprehend that all along his warm dark world was within it.  This other place of wonderful beauty was present all the time.  Only inches away…

-- Joni Eareckson Tada in “Heaven, Your Real Home”

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A TESTAMENT TO THE CREATOR

“You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”  (Psalm 139:13-14)

Those are some of the most poetic and prophetic words in the Bible. They may be some of the oldest, too. While most scholars attribute Psalm 139 to David, one rabbinic tradition says it goes all the way back to Adam. If that is true, these are some of the oldest and truest words in the history of humankind.

Every moment of every day, we experience the miraculous on both a microscopic and macroscopic scale. Miracles are happening all around us all the time. But the greatest miracle is the one you see in the mirror. There never has been and never will be anyone like you. Of course, that isn’t a testament to you. It’s a testament to the God who created you.

-- Mark Batterson in The Grave Robber

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THE GLORY AND MYSTERY OF IT

"You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank You for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous -- how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb." (Psalm 139:13-15 NLT)

Twenty-eight thousand pounds at birth! That's what Dr. Bernard Nathanson estimates we would weigh if we continued to grow throughout gestation at the rate we grow in the first two weeks of life. That's how steep the trajectory of cell division is.

Add to this biological tumult the unimaginably intricate and precise processes of organization that take place during this time, and the picture is breathtaking. Everything from the ability to hit a baseball to the swirl of cowlicks to the sound of a person's laugh are fixed into place. In magnitude, the change is comparable to a tsunami; in complexity, to the transformation of winter into spring. The first two weeks of life may be the most important.

But the real glory and mystery of it all is that it takes place on a scale that is microscopic. The grandest, most awesome stage of human life is, for all practical purposes, invisible.

-- Ben Patterson

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