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What ever happened to the stork?
As a child, I read precious fairy tales and watched movies like “Dumbo,” each describing a beautiful white messenger bird that dropped babies wrapped in pink and blue blankets to their mothers, eagerly awaiting the big delivery day! I couldn’t wait to be a mom one day! How sweet.
Now, I find myself seven months pregnant, swollen, itchy from my everlasting case of poison oak and feeling nowhere near as gracious and lovely as those fairy tale mothers.
Granted, I am blessed beyond compare to have my family and to be given the gift of motherhood time and again. I love my family. However, my delivery date, I’m sure, will be far from carefree, painless or as pretty as the stork’s graceful entrance.
Looking for the yarn-spinner
Therefore, this time around, I’ve been looking for the guy who fed us the line about the stork.
We grow up with tales that start with “Once upon a time…” and end in “…happily ever after.” Yet, most often, it doesn’t turn out so simply. Is it wrong to want the “happily ever after”? Absolutely not. But where we go wrong lies in our dismissal of the journey.
I am an impatient, admittedly “fly-by-the-seat-of- my-pants, do-it-my-way” kind of person. God finds me funny that way. I hear him laughing all day at my “plan” for my journey. It’s not nearly as amusing to me how often his plan is different from mine. I opt for the shortcut journey, while he seems to prefer the long route.
But the journey is the meat of the story. Without the meat, it’s a B.L.T. made of just two pieces of bread but nothing in between. That’s NOT what a hungry B.L.T. lover is looking for. We need the meat. We need the adventure, like it or not. Every good story needs suspense, questions, surprise endings. And no, there are no “Cliff Notes.”
Unity over happiness
While my husband and I hosted a recent Willwoods Married Couples retreat, it was said that happiness is not the goal of our marriage (or our families for that matter). What? What about those stories that I’ve been describing, that our parents and teachers read to us and raised us on? What about Prince Charming and Cinderella riding off in the carriage, soon to call the stork on the way home to float down to their castle with a bundle of joy, carefree and keeping Cinderella’s girlish figure all along the way, gracefully dancing through life … happily ever after?
Nice thought, but God wants more for us. It is not that kind of happiness that should be our goal, but unity. Unity must supersede happiness. To expect nothing but warm fuzzies all along the way will only disappoint. The road is bumpy and challenging, and if so, we can’t stop and give up there. Instead, we unite with one another in faith in God, in union with him, throughout the good times and bad, the sickness and health.
Need God’s intercession
Only through God and him alone can we arrive at the real place of happiness. He wants us all to have that “happily ever after,” but such an ending isn’t found here. This is not where we can be fully satisfied. The happy ending is in heaven, which will give us life forever.
Your challenge may be financial, it may be found at work, it may be forgiving someone close to you who hasn’t been so “Disney-character-like.” For each such challenge and others, God is near. He can give you the grace.
As for me, as I continue to grow bigger and bigger and bigger each day of my pregnancy, resisting the never-ending urge to itch my maternity-induced allergic reaction to poison oak, I will stop my revenge on the man who created the stork story and thank God instead. He has blessed me with the opportunity to not share in the life of Mother Goose but of Mother Mary, who carried a child against all odds through a journey that was far from any nursery rhyme or childhood classic.
Mary said yes to an adventure that, as we see in the resurrection, gave us the chance for the “happily ever after.”
God is more than a fairy tale author, and for that, we can embrace the adventure.
Elise Angelette is assistant director of faith and marriage ministry for the Willwoods Community.
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