Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Baby Talk and Prayer

In the past few weeks as my wife's pregnancy has progressed, now to 24 weeks, I have begun talking to the baby here and there. Usually it is right before bed when I'm pretty tired, which causes some interesting trains of thought to run out of my mouth. Often though I find it challenging to talk to the baby and of course, being the future physician & scientist that I am I need to figure out why. That's when I realized that talking to the baby in my wife's womb has striking parallels to...

Prayer. Yes, I am comparing baby talk to praying to God Almighty. Let me explain.

1. In both cases I'm talking to somebody that I have an important, soul-level connection with yet,
2. The person is an unknown mystery to me
3. The person has great power to ultimately change my life
4. In both cases I fear my ability to hold up my end of the bargain in the relationship
5. Both provide me with infinite learning opportunities
6. Both can and will bring me moments of great joy and happiness, and moments of frustration and... frustration
7. and the list goes on and on.

Anyhow, whenever you make analogies there is always the point at which the analogy fails. God of course loves me unconditionally despite my flaws, while the baby in its humanity will have periods of conditional love for me.

Ultimately though I think that my struggle results from my inability to consistently have faith in what I cannot see. I have always said that my faith struggles with God are caused by my scientific nature of needing to observe with sight, sound, and touch. However, the baby is narrowing that definition for me. I can feel the baby kick inside Katrina. I can hear its heartbeat on the monitor. I can even see the ultrasounds and Katrina's womb growing. However, I cannot see the baby directly and that is the disconnect. That is my disconnect with God as well when I'm not in tune with other aspects of my reality with Him, which is vastly more often than I would like.

So that is the dilemma that I'm working through.

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