Giving birth to something new requires patience for what God will bring.

Whenever my husband and I thought about the possibility of having a baby—whether it was dreaming about our first child or when we considered the somehow more daunting possibility of adding another baby to our family—I noticed that a strange phenomenon began to occur.

I saw pregnant people everywhere.

I’m sure they had been there all along, but for some reason the idea that I might soon be one of them meant that I noticed these women more often. I saw them at the grocery store, walking around town, picking up a latte at Starbucks. The list could go on. And this is a phenomenon that lasts throughout all of pregnancy.

As I write this, I’m 35 weeks pregnant, and the baby boy growing in my womb is having a heyday. In fact, he was so active this morning that he woke me up long before my alarm went off. By this point in the pregnancy, I feel tired. I also feel large and unwieldy. Navigating tight spaces can become precarious, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve apologized to someone for accidentally “belly bumping” them because I failed to leave enough space to skirt around them.

By this point in time, we’ve been waiting for seven-and-a-half months to meet this baby, and if all goes well, we’ll probably be waiting another month still. Whether we like it or not, there’s no way to expedite or automate this long, careful growth process. Being pregnant and preparing to give birth to a baby is all about patience.

And just as I’ve been more prone than usual to notice pregnant people around me in my day-to-day life, I’ve also been keenly aware of the many places in Scripture where the story of a pregnant woman or labor pains or images of new life show up.

When I was expecting my daughter (now a highly energetic 2-year-old), the last sermon I heard prior to going into labor was a meditation on Revelation 12 and the significance of the pregnant woman in this chapter.

“A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth. … And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. But her child was snatched away and taken to God and to his throne; and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God” (Revelation 12:1-2; 5-6a).

There are many different interpretations of this text. Some see the woman as a symbol for Mary, who is here giving birth to Christ, part of John’s apocalyptic retelling of the gospel. Others see her as representative of the church, giving birth to the saints who will bear out Christ’s witness even in the face of Satan (the dragon). Others with a dispensationalist bent see the woman as representing the chosen people of Israel who have been guaranteed a place in heaven.

The pastor I heard reflect on this passage—at the La Verne (Calif.) Church of the Brethren—did not focus her reflections on the identity of this apocalyptic woman but on the work she was doing in giving birth to new life in the midst of death and chaos. And this metaphor of labor pains as connected to the coming (or sometimes second coming) of Christ is a trope that occurs several times throughout the Bible.

Birth pangs or labor pains are used as a metaphor for the painful beginnings of something new and the inbreaking of Christ. Matthew 24:7-8 says, “For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”

And in John 16, where Jesus is talking with his disciples and foreshadowing his death and resurrection to come, he says,

“Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”

And lest we forget, the story we commemorate during Advent is one of a real birth, and the main protagonist in the story is Mary, a pregnant young woman.

Just as we may be tempted to focus solely on what happens after birth rather than the process that precedes it, at Advent we may want to skip ahead to the celebration of Jesus’ coming.

We’re part of a culture in the United States that doesn’t have much patience for the “messy middle” or a long, drawn-out birth story.

We are used to instant gratification, and our stores and media hop right from Halloween to Christmas, from one lucrative holiday to the next, without much thought. We’ve normalized inductions and other procedures that seek to shorten and keep labor as pain-free as possible.

One of my pet peeves is that during Advent we so often seem to want to skip over the focus on waiting and watching so that we can get to Christmas and the birth. We sometimes don’t like to dwell with the questions the unknown holds. We’d rather sing familiar Christmas songs than deal with the minor chords and mysterious lyrics of Advent songs.

But I’m a firm believer that if we skip over this mysterious waiting time, we’re shortchanging ourselves. Just as each week the child in my womb stays put and grows is beneficial to his development, so is the time we spend waiting, watching and dwelling with our questions as we prepare to think about what it means to meet Jesus again each Advent. It may feel chaotic.

We may long to have our questions wrapped up and our life neatly packaged, but there is value in meditating on both the brokenness and the beauty that can be found in the midst of this mess.

Lest we forget, the Christmas story is an earthy one. It’s about something nebulous or mystical—God’s Word and Spirit—becoming something tangible and made of human flesh. It’s about a new life entering our midst and radically reorienting our world, just as a new baby comes and turns our days and nights upside down.

And the birth of something new is never without pain or loss of some kind. As my doula said when my daughter was born, “Being born is an earthy business. And it’s painful. But it is productive pain. You are working to bring something new into the world.”

I’m not one to advocate for redemptive suffering. I do not believe God willfully doles out pain or disagreement as part of a divine will or plan. I think God weeps and walks with us when we hurt. But I do think there is something to be said for this idea that—sometimes—pain and events that reorient our lives can also make space for God to give birth to something new in our midst and give us a radically different glimpse of the Divine.

In one of his prayers, Michel Quoist, a French Catholic priest, writes,

“The mother left the carriage for a minute, and I went over to meet the Holy Trinity living in the baby’s pure soul. It was asleep, its arms carelessly laid on the embroidered sheet. Its closed eyes looked inward and its chest gently rose and fell, As if to murmur: This dwelling is inhabited. Lord, you are there.”

Let us not shy away from the questions and those pieces that make our journeys together complicated and messy, for they might be the very experiences and pieces that allow something new to be born in our midst.

Hannah Heinzekehr is director of communications and marketing for Mennonite Church USA and attends New Creation Fellowship Church in Newton, Kan.

This is the cover story in the December issue of The Mennonite.