the purpose-driven womb

My son doesn’t know why he exists. He hasn’t given it a moment’s thought.

Yet his existence is sure. On every doctor’s visit we hear his heartbeat, pounding like a piston. When my wife eats chocolate, he kicks out the Morse code of his pleasure. At times he twists and rolls, gyroscopically, and if I speak to him then, the low tones of my voice rumbling through my wife’s belly, he pauses as if to listen. Just last night, when I read to him aloud, the eruption of my dramatic voice startled him and he flinched.

My son senses; my son reacts; my son lives. But why he does so is utterly beyond him. Certainly he didn’t choose to exist, did not choose the warm, cloistered life of the womb. The first glimmering senses simply rose in his mind like a soft dawn, without request and wholly unexpected. Without any say in the matter, he is.

Now, my wife and I had something to do with his existence, of course. But no matter how deliberate, how loving, how hopeful and life-changing our decision to bring a child into the world, our reasons fade into whimsy compared to their stark and monumental consequence: out of very nothingness, a person. Can mere mortals bring into life a personhood, a consciousness? What are we to this new being, this world co-voyager, that we should decide he should exist, should experience feelings, desires, emotions? As if we could pour awareness into any bucket!

My own parents – two others foreign to me, outsiders – what are they to me, that they should have had power to choose my existence?

The womb is far more consequential than our slight roles. Something utterly profound occurs there, molding us for purposes large and deep. As the Psalmist says,

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. … When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. (from Psalm 139)

My son is no accident, nor the result of any human decision. Neither am I. God brought us into the world to fulfill the days He ordained for us. We belong here.

And like my son, who floats through the dark coziness of the womb with only flickering awareness, I can barely begin to contemplate why.

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copyright © 2005, michael w. hobson