Bowing low before the Lord the other day I had an experience that grew my understanding of His love. As an expectant mother, I was praying for the little one. I love him/her already, this tiny baby growing inside of me. And I look forward to the love that will expand when he/she is in my arms, showing me a personality uniquely and beautifully belonging to him/her. It was in that moment of prayer that I realized more deeply and more fully than I ever had before the profundity of our Creator’s love for us. Just as I look forward to loving more fully the baby I already love, God, like a pregnant mother, looks forward to the love that He will share with each person who walks this earth.

From the beginning of time, God knew the people who would inhabit His world. He knew the cultures that would bring variations of music and food and language and clothing and art and architecture to the canvas of His world’s surface. He knew the religions that would form out of our search for Him. Just as in my pregnancy I know that my child will color my world with laughter and stories and precious touches that are not yet, He is and has been pregnant with a whole world’s history’s population of personalities that would communicate to Him, through Him, in Him the joy of living the Life He has given. Perhaps they will be people who turn their love toward Him; perhaps not. Yet they are the creation born of a loving God who gives life because it is intrinsic to His nature. I pray to be a mother who nurtures that way.

All of this makes me anticipate motherhood in a more acute way. I do not merely look forward to having a baby, but I see ahead to the reach such a relationship will bring to my soul as I experience in the life of my child more of what God experiences in His anticipation and enjoyment of the lives He created us to live. I am but one mother in a world of mothers, but to me, this life I’m to steward is extraordinary, if by nothing else than to open up a deeper region of my soul.