Waiting For the Gift
by Violet Sim
The Wait
My journey of motherhood started in 2014 with my first pregnancy which did not make it past the first trimester. During Mother’s Day celebrations in church, there were often mixed feelings. While the right thing to do is to honor and celebrate the mothers, there was a lingering thought, “If my first pregnancy didn’t end up in miscarriage, I would be standing up to receive that gift or be acknowledged as a mother.” During that period of desiring a child and seeing close friends getting pregnant with their first child and moving on to the second child, I began to question if the Lord has passed me by in the gift of having a baby.
I held on to the tension of believing that God desires to give children and yet, choosing to say that He is good even if I did not conceive again. After all, God is unchanging in His nature, and regardless if I am to conceive or not, He is good! With that, I learned to posture my heart to be unoffended at God in the waiting.
The Gift
“Children are a gift from the Lord.” - Psalm 127:3.
After waiting for two years, in 2016, I conceived again. God has a sense of creative humor as I see how He revealed His Sovereignty and precision in His timing to bring forth His gift to us. He ordains all our days and in His perfect timing, our firstborn was birthed on 10 October at the 10th year of our marriage. The number “10” reminds me of the completion of a season of waiting and testing of my heart. There’s an idiom in Chinese that says, “十全十美 (shí quán shí měi)”, signifying perfection! It seemed like a mark of God’s delight over me as well as Alan’s readiness to receive His gift.
The completion of my waiting season did not offer completeness of self. Having children must not and cannot define my identity. My identity is drawn from my relationship as a child of God, not as a mother. This biblical view helps me to navigate many moments where I evaluated myself based on how well I have done as a mother and liberated me to come before God as how He sees me – His child.
Stewarding children is a dynamic experience because children point us to God even while we are nurturing them to be more God-conscious. I was searching the house for a specific lego car and asked my almost 5-year-old son to join the search, to which he replied, “Mama, just pray, God will help you to find it!” And true enough, by the end of the day, I found that lego car in an unexpected place. Parenting is an excellent way to test the depth of the fruit of the Spirit in my inner life. “Mama, you need to pray and ask God to help you to be more patient!” Ouch! But it is all so true. My son wasn’t being rude, he was just so honest that I lack patience and need the Lord to work His patience in my life. Over the last four years, I discovered that only by God’s grace and His transforming power in my life that I can sustain the stewardship of children He has given me.
Children are indeed a gift from the Lord as God desires to see me grow in Christlikeness through the process of stewarding the children. Life as a stay-at-home mother may seem to be mundane, unproductive and excluded from many social events or ministry engagements. But I take comfort that the Lord is not after productivity nor activity, but He is after my heart. He does not pass me by as I stand “behind the ministry scene”. God is reminding me that I am right at where He desires, stewarding children to know Him and always pointing Mama back to God.