On Being Pregnant

My Plan For My Life

Jenn Snow with Baby Snow inside

My incredible wife, Jenn, is pregnant with our first child who will be born in early July (inshallah). For a guy who thought he’d never get married or be a father, this is quite a turn of events for me as well as a blessing that brings me to my knees.

In forecasting the events of my life years ago, I always thought I would become a reclusive academic, living in the north at some liberal arts college, teaching courses in religious studies to a brand new set of freshmen year after year. Today, this forecast makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

Thank God my plan for me didn’t happen and God’s plan for me did. Some people think that if you give up your plans and follow God’s plan, life will suck because, as everyone seems to agree, God is no fun. But what actually happens, if you’re willing to receive it that way, is that God’s plan is actually far more fun and pleasurable than your own. God is not a policeman waiting to arrest you or a judge waiting to send you to prison. God is an amazing friend who throws fabulous dinner parties. When he invites you, go! For the shrimp cocktail alone, go!

God made sure that I didn’t turn into a literary monk, seeking my personal fulfillment in an ivory tower of abstract ideas that had nothing but contempt for earth, flesh, blood, sweat. He tore down the bridges in front of me and blocked my path. I didn’t understand what was happening when he did it so I received it as an arrest and a punishment for a crime I didn’t know I had committed.

God’s Plan For My Life

It didn’t occur to me until much later that God desired to plant a new seed in me, to impregnate me with a new idea. It was not in my soul’s best interest to escape from the earth by locking myself in an ivory tower. God’s desire was for me to get back down to the earth, dig my fingernails deep into the soil, draw out water, harvest grain, bake bread, feed the hungry on the very steps of that ivory tower, to build an ivory bakery, if you will.

It was the sticky, sweaty, messy joining of what’s above with what’s below that God had in mind. Through that joining, seeds are planted. Life grows in moist hidden places where dreams are waiting to be born and visions are waiting to be revealed. That is where our real life is, not in some sanitary crystal palace made only out of our perfect plans.

For the last 10 years I’ve been watering the seed that was given to me. Just like my wife has been pregnant with our child who will arrive this summer, I have been pregnant with a seed whose first fruit, a book, will also make an appearance this summer.

God’s Plan For You

God can bring forth what he wants to bring forth without us, but it gives him great pleasure to bring it forth through us. Haven’t you noticed?

This joyous activity of God, this continuous impregnating and bringing to birth, is happening always and in everyone. Some know exactly what to do with it. Some learn to nurture it. Others interrupt it, distort it, or outright ignore it.

But every human being is given the opportunity every single day they wake up to feel that new seed moving inside and then decide what they’re going to do with it that day: water it or ignore it.

Every day, Jenn says to me, “I can feel the baby moving.” And we both get quiet and try to feel the movements.

Can you get quiet enough to feel the seed inside you moving? What are you pregnant with?