Fearfully and Wonderfully (a Baby Shower Devotional)

Pregnancy means all kinds of body changes and discomforts. Those nine months are usually not described as floating on a euphoric cloud of bliss. As one mom put it: 

“Life is tough enough without having someone kick you from the inside.” 

So, dear pregnant lady (insert name), you’ve got to keep your sense of humor with jokes like this one:

Question: Once a woman is pregnant, how soon can she expect her baby to move?

Answer: Right after she graduates from college. Hopefully!

Humor aside, you are in an amazing process right now. Isn’t it astounding how the womb is this empty vessel until, well, it’s not? Your body is the site of a miracle. A new little human is under construction. You have no control over how this baby is being formed, over the color of eyes or hair, gender or personality.  

God is giving the gift of life, and it strikes us with awe. 

I wonder how your little one is experiencing this process right now? If expression were possible, perhaps he or she would say, like King David in Psalm 139: 

Lord, you are creating my inmost being; you are knitting me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am being fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame is not being hidden from you as I am being made in the secret place. As I am being woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes see my unformed body. All the days ordained for me are written in your book before one of them will come to pass. (Psalm 139:13-16)

I just want to highlight a couple of things from this scripture. First, where the psalmist says, “My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.” The Lord is constructing a little body suit for your child, a vessel for its being, by which he or she will be able to interact with the world through the five senses.

The bodies God gives us are so amazing. Did you know that:

• Embryos develop fingerprints three months after conception?

• That your heart circulates blood throughout your body about 1,000 times a day?

• That while awake, your brain produces enough electricity to light a lightbulb? (I’m quite sure that my brain would only light a dim bulb!)

• That your eyes can distinguish 10 million different colours and can detect light from a candle over 1.7 miles away?

• That if you never cut your hair, over a lifetime it would reach around 450 miles? 

• That there are anywhere between 60,000-100,000 miles of blood vessels in your body? If they were taken out and laid end-to-end, they would be long enough to travel around the world more than three times.

We truly are fearfully and wonderfully made!

Into this little body, God is packing all the DNA and tools that your baby will need to grow, to think and reason, to remember, experience emotions, and make choices. And God is knitting all this together in your womb without you having to do a thing! 

To me, the most mysterious of all is God’s creation of a person’s spirit, which the psalmist describes as the inmost being. Job says that “the spirit in a person” is “the breath of the Almighty.” (Job 32:8) No scientist has yet been able to study the spirit. This is the deepest part of ourselves, the place where we are able to connect back to God. Where God comes to live inside us when we’ve invited him.  

Now I just want to point out one more thing. The psalmist said, “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 . . .”

For all of us, there continues to be secrecy, a mystery around our existence, around each day that’s been ordained for us. We are still being formed and shaped until the day we die. I take great comfort when the psalmist says, “Your eyes saw my unformed body . . .” God still sees everything about us, everything that is unshapely, all that is not yet completed. Yet he remains lovingly committed to us to conform us to the image of Christ. 

You and I can truly say with the psalmist, “Your works are wonderful. I know that full well!”

Our future hope is that someday we will be made complete. I John 3:2 says, “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

Our trials on this earth can feel like a miserable pregnancy sometimes, but the reward will be worth it!