love is the unrelenting muscle

By now maybe you've heard through a grapevine or around the web, the news that Preston and I are expecting a baby. I had thought years ago I would do a lot of blogging about becoming a mom when it happened, that I would want to catalog my daily questions and thoughts in the midst of all the changes and strange cravings and morning sickness, the moments of realization, the moments of gratitude.I don't, anymore. It seems a season for quiet, for listening close, for making silence, as we used to tell my Sunday School students. Becoming a mom is among the most wondrous things that has happened in my life - but I probably won't say too much about it here.But I want to tell you about the sound.I want to tell you about the sound of his or her heartbeat, at 9 weeks, in an ordinary doctor's office on an ordinary Friday, trying to lie still as my nurse practitioner moved the Doppler monitor below my belly button. At first it was just the sounds of searching out the little life that I've been taking on faith is growing inside me, but then.Then, there is this sound, this unbelievable, unyielding, steadying heartbeat. And it isn't my heartbeat. It's hers, or it's his. It's the baby's heart, beating away.The heart is the most unrelenting muscle I have ever heard. The heart is the muscle that begins its work and does not cease, not for one moment. And it begins first. It's already beating as the brain grows and takes shape, begins to assemble thoughts still as mysterious as whatever lies on the other side of this thin place, where heaven and earth are tremblingly close to each other.The heart, beating. It sounds so ordinary and then it sounds so unbelievable. Her heart has been beating for weeks now, without me knowing. His heart began to beat before I knew it, before we tuned in with the monitors and the watches and the steady checking in of doctor's offices.And this matters to you, because your heart, your faithful, steady, unrelenting muscle has been beating in you for longer than you can imagine. It has kept you.I think about how we connect the heart, not the brain, with love. I think how we talk about the heart of God, not the cerebral cortex. And though God is far beyond any attempt to imagine Him having a literal heart, I do not think that we are completely wrong to imagine ourselves, to imagine this world, as in the heart of God.Because God's love is the same unyielding, unrelenting, steadfast muscle. God's love is the patient, ever-present sound echoing through our bodies and our lives. God's love is not too tired to carry us. God's love is the unrelenting muscle that carries us.And this baby, he or she is reminding me that there is something not to be forgotten about the mystery of a heartbeat. About the mystery of how we say that we are close to God, that we are held in His heart, that God loves us.Because love is found in the unrelenting muscle of our lives. And we must love this way: unyieldingly, mysteriously, beginning from before we know it or decide it and continuing long after we think we have done enough, that we are satisfied, that the other person does not love us back or we have given too much of ourselves. We should love this way because it is costly but it is freeing, because it is difficult but familiar, because it is unlike anything in the world and yet it is the foundation of the world.We should love one another this way, because this is how God loves.This baby, he or she has a heartbeat set in motion by God. And this heartbeat, which is different from mine, is teaching me to love again more wild, more free, more unrelenting. Like a heartbeat.Love,hilary