Our little family is in the third trimester now.
Third trimester.
That sounds so much scarier than the first or second trimester did. Now, labor is impending. A birth is coming and coming soon. We are closer now to being honest-to-goodness parents than we are to our past of being just a couple.
All this has been brought forcefully to my full attention as I wait to hear from one of my dear friends who is laboring to bring their daughter into this outside world. I have been praying for the three of them in the silence between text updates, trying not to worry over long silences, practicing trusting that all is well when I so desperately desire that nothing go wrong for our dear friends.
All of which makes me think of the last time I worked in our church nursery.
It was a fairly full Sunday, but we volunteers were handling it well. I was cuddling and rocking a little boy who was sleepy/weepy, which lent me the chance to observe some of the others. There was the brother-sister duo who were playing with the plastic food, the little guy who wanted to read books, and one particular little girl who was on a mission of her own making.
She was attempting to climb up onto the Little Tykes slide, which, ordinarily would not have been much of a challenge for her. She had, for whatever reason, decided that today she wanted to take a a toy up there with her.
This was a good-sized toy, not too heavy, but cumbersome enough that she had to push and prod and shuffle it around while trying to get a leg up on the playset, cacthing it as it threatened to tumble from a precarious perch, adjusting it, and trying again.
My rocker was close to the playset, and I found myself ready to lean over and reach out a hand. One little push and it would be easily centered on the platform above the slide and all that would remain would be for her to follow it herself. Mission accomplished, right?
But before I could lean over and act on the impulse to rescue her, the thought flashed across my mind, "The struggle is important."
I sat back, wondering where the thought had come from, and just that quickly, she had pushed the toy to a secure position and crawled up after it.
The struggle is important.
Sometimes, it is simply important in the sense of accomplishment that follows knowing we persevered when it was hard and got it done anyway.
It is certainly important to the development of infants and toddlers as they learn to hold up their heads, roll over, crawl, run.
Children struggle to read or write or do simple sums but later go on to college and grad school where they have a whole new set of struggles to vanquish.
And parents get to go through their own struggles of pregnancy, birth, and child-rearing - and then they look back and wonder where the time went.
All these struggles are a prelude to learning more, doing more, being more. There is no growth where there is no struggle.
The struggle is important.
Of course, we have families - families of blood and families of Spirit - who gather around us, support us in our struggles, help us with the resources to make it through, and sometimes even remove the struggle from our lives. They are an important part of life, placed there by God's own loving hand of provision.
But we must not be too quick to pray for the removal of our struggles. We must not be so short-sighted as to assume that the faster an issue is resolved, the better it is for us or for our struggling friend.
Growth happens in the action of struggling. Yes, we can grow bitter, but if we truly believe that the struggle is important, we are more likely to lean into the pain, eager for the outcome that rewards at the end.
Sometimes, that outcome is one successful step.
Sometimes, we are rewarded by discovering a world of possibilities between the pages of a book.
And sometimes, after the struggle, we get to meet our very own flesh and blood.
