My son is 10 today. This is an excerpt from my book “Learn Love Live” about the day he was born.
When our faith flexes for all to see.
Late one night in March my son Ethan was born. It was an incredible day. The culmination of months of prayer, joy, nervousness, faith, and preparation. Jamie and I didn’t know how to be parents. Sometimes I wonder if we still don’t. But it didn’t really matter at Saint Mary’s hospital in the infant delivery ward the day our Ethan arrived.
Like many first-time parents we were waiting expectantly for the day to come when we would be able to hold our little prince in our arms. Our friends and family celebrated the onset of our parenthood with gifts and parties. It was a season of incredible joy as everyone in our lives gathered around us. A heightened sense of anticipation descended on our circle of friends, close loved ones, and faith family. Ethan’s due date came and went with no small amount of nervousness on our part.
Jamie’s doctor departed for a family cruise and we were introduced to some new guy. He was not the kind lady we had spent the last nine months learning to trust. He seemed capable sure, and kind, and all the kinds of things you hope for if the situation arises when you need another doctor to perform the baby-delivering equivalent of pinch-hitting.
A week passed. Jamie and Baby Ethan were perfectly fine according to all tests, but I was getting super nervous. Still, this was nothing compared to my dad. Finally, the substitute baby doctor guy announced early the next week he would need to step in and help the process along. Allowing nature to delay much longer would begin to cause opportunities for major complications. We trusted this guy because we trusted who invited him into our lives.
So, on a Monday morning we showed up at the hospital with all our bags packed to begin the process. Boy was it a process. All day tests were running, conversations were had, and doctors seen. It was a day of waiting, praying, and trusting. Like never before, and rarely since, Jamie and I both felt the muscles of our faith flex as if to say, “don’t be afraid.”
We shared the news of what was happening, first with our loved ones, and then the world at large across social media. The love poured in. It was if dozens and maybe even hundreds of people were lending us their faith because each one knew this was new territory for us. With every passing moment we drew closer to the miracle we had prayed and waited for. As all those moments crept by, we could feel the reassurance of love.
It was like this incredible substance I spoke of earlier was propping us up. It was a palpable gathering of the unseen activated on our behalf. What one writer in the Bible described as faith via the evidence of things not seen. We couldn’t see it, but we could feel it. The ramifications were evident as our souls were encouraged.
The long day stretched longer. Someone, I think my mother, brought my favorite hamburger and a chocolate shake. I wasn’t hungry. How could I be hungry awaiting such a monumental miracle? But I ate the entire thing and remained not hungry as I drank down all forty liquid ounces of the superb chocolate shakey goodness.
The long day stretched, and yawned, and winked into night as a sliver of the moon rose above our small town as if to say it was almost time. Just like another man in the Bible described the arrival of a baby in a barn—it was the fullness of time, our time, and my son took his first beautiful breath on this earth.
I cried. My wife cried. It was faith made manifest. It was trust personified. It was the full range of the miraculous in motion and thrust upon our family with all the majesty of the moment. Faith was flexing big right before my eyes with the full force of the love God has for all of us.
Ethan was a promise given. A promise born. It wasn’t just a baby born that day, but it was a mother and father, a grandmother and grandfather, an uncle and cousins. A ripple of life echoed across everyone meaning anything to us and we were all changed. We were all made to mean a little more. We were all together in this and it was lovely beyond imagination.
Faith is a muscle we flex across a myriad of moments, but it is also a miracle that resounds with the finality of lightning. It is both ethereal and ever present. It is surmounting and inescapable in its subjugation of the right now and its dance across our unknown.
We can know, and we can hope, and we can see, and we can trust. Even when we don’t feel it, especially when we don’t feel it. Even when it seems elusive and illusive. When our faith seems deeply inadequate, we can borrow some from a friend.
There have been plenty of times when my faith was not enough. I had to look beyond my own hiccups and draw deeply from the reservoirs of a friend. My mentor, pastor, and close friend Mark is a continuing source of this for me.
Mark likes to joke that he is Iron Man because he has a mechanical heart valve. I’ve never done it, because I don’t make a habit of putting my ear to grown men’s chests, but his wife says she can hear it ticking away at home in the silence of the night. Every flicker of Mark’s heart is a faith moment as he trusts in what he can’t see. He’s lived a full life of putting Jesus at the center, loving people well, and leading and serving with great integrity. He is without a doubt one of the greatest men I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.
Mark had been my family’s pastor for a while. He loved us through some big changes in our life. He led us through even more changes. And he helped launch us into our dream of becoming pastors of our own new, growing, and healthy church family. All of it came with a lot of bumps, talks, prayers, conversations, and confidence. His faith muscle is even bigger than his biceps (which are gigantic). I know when my faith is flickering I can borrow some from him.
There was a guy like this in the Bible who met Jesus one day. He needed help. He needed a miracle. Jesus asked him if he believed and he said, “Yes! But help me with my unbelief.”
This guy’s story demonstrates what way too many people are being silent about in their own faith journey. We’ve spent years communicating (intentionally or otherwise) you can’t experience both faith and doubt at the same time. I’m not buying it. The faith in our life flexes so much more when there’s uncertainty to face down first.
Ethan’s first breaths weren’t the normal baby breaths doctors expect to be greeted by. There was something much different about them. Something alarming to the people who know what to look for.
So, after a moment of celebration and wonder the well-meaning doctor pulled our son from my wife’s arms and whisked him away to another room. Suddenly, here at the end of an already long and emotional day we found the depth of raw emotions butting up against our years of working faith. We prayed. People we love prayed. Friends, family, and our church prayed. Heaven was on the receiving end of a barrage of people flexing together. The culminating trust of so many echoed big along those hallowed corridors.
Part of me wonders if those who went home before us jumped in to lend their faith as they heard the echoes pass them by. It might sound like wonky theology, but I can just imagine Grandma and Grandpa King picking up the clarion call as they mustered their faith from their remarkable perspective. Jamie said it best from the midst of her confused and longing heart, “I want my Ethan.” Love wants what love wants. It wasn’t just a cry of desperation. It was a statement of faith echoing across eternity as it was repeated in the mouths of praying loved ones.
Ethan’s birth was the culmination of something hard to articulate in a few pages. The sudden alarm for his well-being was something altogether different. As the combined prayers of the many continued in petition of our Heavenly Father the strange breathing normalized. Ethan was returned to mommy’s embrace.
Just like that God showed me how good the experience of our faith at work can be. He didn’t show it to me once. He didn’t even show it to me twice. He showed me twice in the same day.
Faith flexed the moment Ethan was born. It was the bright miracle of a new life entering this world for all to see. It was the holy awe of what it feels like to love a living creation of your own soul. Faith also made itself known as the alarming moments of misunderstanding fell away before complete trust in our amazing Father.
Faith is practiced. It is work. It is art. It is a muscle we hone, and it is also a miracle. The miracle of faith isn’t only a progression of movement between moments, it is also a sublime experience of the miraculous in the moment.
There will be plenty of moments throughout our lives when we must lean deeply into faith in the private spaces of our day-to-day decisions. There will also be those penultimate circumstances when a loved one, friend, neighbor, or son need us and our faith. Our faith is a beautiful thing when it stands on its own—trusting Jesus like the guy in the story I mentioned. Our faith is a glorious thing when it stands together as it did for us the night Ethan was born. Those are amazing moments of holding, helping, and hoping within a community of people all believing and trusting for the same thing. Such a myriad of personalities coming together and bombarding heaven with a joining of faith catches the attention of heaven in an entirely different way.
Faith is the substance of our hope. It is the evidence of what we don’t see. It is the everyday stuff, the working it out stuff, and it is the miracle happening just when we need it most.