Ready to have a baby?
I once read an editorial in a scrapbooking magazine where a childless woman shared her sister's advice to her about having children. Her sister told her: "Wait until you are really, really ready. I thought I was ready and they turned my world upside down".
My thought after reading this was that I wondered if her sister thought that if she'd been really, really ready the children wouldn't have turned her world upside down. I don't know how anyone can be ready to have children if that is her definition! Children will always change your life.
Often, the things people think make you "ready" probably actually make you the opposite. For example, people think it is important to do things you really want to do - perhaps travel the world, develop an enjoyable career, or decorate the house just the way you like.
Living for yourself, and making sure you do everything you want to do, is no way to prepare for 24 hours a day of serving tiny, demanding human beings.
I often hear Christians saying things like "she wasn't ready to have a baby", or "I'm not ready to have a baby" and I wonder what constitutes readiness to them. I wonder if they have unconsciously and unquestioningly taken on worldly ideas about having children, which don't even necessarily make sense.
How would one discern readiness? Perhaps you would wake up one morning with a sudden overwhelming desire to have a baby. If this is all there is to it, you'd better hope your husband or wife feels the same thing at the same time! Or perhaps having the house and job in perfect order would qualify. A fabulous relationship with your husband or wife? A sense of inner peace . . .
Personally, I think we'd be best to give up the idea of "readiness". God tells us it is good to prepare to do a good job of raising the next generation. A starting point for doing this well is to be married before having children, of course! Thinking about how to marry someone who will be a good parent is also very helpful. After marriage, being ready to raise children only depends upon one main thing: a willingness and desire to do God's will in training children to serve and glorify him. As usual, God's ways are simpler than the world's.
We don't need to buy a house, have a perfectly new car, have travelled Europe, or wait for a sudden rush of maternal or fatherly hormones. We just need to trust God that children really are blessings, and that he will provide all we need physically, economically, spiritually and emotionally in order to do a good job of raising them. Phew, that means all of us can be qualified! It simply requires a choice to believe God!
