"God has no problems," Corrie ten Boom says, "only plans."

Good things to ponder as a mother on the verge of birthing another sweet, innocent, beautiful life with God's purpose in mind...

...an excerpt from Elisabeth Elliot's daily devotions...

"I am getting married in June. My question is this: What responsibility do you feel a Christain couple has in regard to having children? . . . I know the Lord is totally in charge of the future, but it frightens me to think of my part in bringing a child into an unhappy and unstable world."

Music, balloons, cream pies. Brain tumors, barbed wire, death. This is the world we live in. Ever since the Garden of Eden was sullied by evil it has been an unhappy and an unstable world. Has it ever been right to bring a child into such a world? For the Christian it is right--a thousand times right. For it is the will of God that married people accept the responsibility of children. It is the will of God that we live in the world--this world of light and darkness, of gladness and suffering--for it is this world that Jesus Christ came to redeem. Christianity, alone among the religions of the world, looks steadfastly at the facts, whatever they may be, and says there is an ultimate explanation, an ultimate purpose, a glorious answer.

"Everything belongs to you!" Paul said. "The world, life, death, the present, or the future everything is yours, for you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God."

We cannot protect the child we bring into the world. ("This, this is the victory of the grave; here is death's sting, that it is not strong enough, our strongest wing," wrote the poet Charlotte Mew. "But what of His who like a Father pitieth? His Son was also, once, a little thing....") But we can bring him to the Cross, where all longings, all hopes and failures, all sin and sadness and pain and fear are gathered up in everlasting love and transformed for us forever into glory and beauty and Joy.