Stages of labour, clinical signs of progression, management of each. Studying stages and progression in some specific area of life always gives insight to the stages and progression of others. We are often a people who don’t want to have a course to take; we just want to arrive. But the birth of anything good takes time both for growth and development, and then to actually be born. Process. And the greater the value of the thing being brought forth, often the greater the personal cost for its arrival. We’ve all experienced “labouring” over something, even if not to birth a child. We’ve all felt the increase of intensity and pain, and how it can take over all of you. We’ve felt the transition points, where it’s so close, but not there yet; where we “can’t do it anymore” and need the encouragement and presence of others around us. We’ve felt the complications of something-not-right that requires intervention (sometimes life-saving). We’ve felt the deep push; the unparalleled desire and uninhibited effort to bring forth this new type of life.
I think that as parents we continually labour over our children. New stages of life, new lessons they must learn, new battles we fight for them. Or sometimes it’s the same old ones coming ’round again because the intended outcomes were stillborn last time. But we can only progress. Nothing new comes forth without dlligent endurance and participation.
I have felt the gravid stretch of being the mother of teens. They’re uncomfortably large to stay “in the womb”. They’re kicking and stretching, anxious for freedom. They’re growing closer, closer, but still developing. Still unprepared for life independent. Everyone is a different individual, but the moment will come when it’s time for birth, and a great change takes place. Suddenly, outside the safe cover of inside-mum, there is perceived hunger, cold, dirty diaper, isolation -things never experienced before because they were provided without being realized. (One of the challenges of adoption is that there was a severely premature separation from the mother. All of these uncomfortable and even dangerous experiences of life suddenly took over a child unprepared. And while an orphanage may save a life from death, it is not adequately equipped to develop a child toward strong and healthy life. Perhaps this has been more like NICU. With Satan’s consistent aim to steal, kill, and destroy, and Jesus’s mission to bring abundant life (John 10:10), the NICU is always a war zone.)
– We learned ways to assist and comfort women in labour (positioning, breathing, etc). Makes me wish I’d taken Lamaze classes in my pregnancies! It is painful even to acknowledge the pain required to bring forth life. It’s part of the curse (Genesis 3), and can raise a big question as to “why”. I think it is more revelation, not punishment. Life was meant to be much easier. Not effortless (because it’s valuable, and the gift is in giving of ourselves), but always fulfilling. But it wasn’t supposed to be dreadfully painful, and certainly not at risk of death. God breathed His very life into us at creation, and does into each new creation He makes. By choosing not what God gave, by choosing to know both good and evil, by choosing independence and the right to decide for ourselves, the agony of death enters: separation from God. He is still God of Life, and still is Creator, and still is at work, but now life comes at great cost. Birth back into His family and eternal life came at greatest cost (the life of Jesus, as our substitute for the deadly separation and evil we chose). A life was never intended to cost a death, but now it does. That is the price of choice.
So we, as image-bearers of God, now experience the unintended and severe pain of offering life to another. It’s our small picture of what’s actually happened, our small price to pay alongside THE Creator, in effort to bring forth life on this earth. Praise God there is Isaiah 65:13, “They shall not labour in vain.” Our Creator is also now our Savior and Redeemer, and in Jesus’s resurrection, in each new child born, in each person who chooses to be reconciled, “born again”, to God through Jesus’s self-sacrifice, LIFE wins.
“‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O Death, where is your victory? O Death, where is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the works of the Lord, knowing that your labour is not in vain in the Lord).” -1 Cor 15: 55-58
– We also learned paperwork and proper documentation on the partograph and in Indian charts.