My daughter wakes herself up very early to get herself together and then get on public transportation to high school. This year is the first time that I’m not taking my girl to school every day. She and I have taken that ride since we started her on pre-school at 2 1/2.
Before her first day of school, I thought about when I first met her. I cut her umbilical cord. Then the obstetrics team went about the birth rite rituals of our time: they preserved some cord blood for cryogenic storage, took a footprint for the government, and declared her to be a 10 on the APGAR scale.
Babies are no longer made to cry. Instead, they are cleaned, swaddled, and handed to the father, who stands shaking in the delivery room (in this case, not with a video camera). And Dad cries.
The head nurse said, “Come meet your daughter, Dad.”
I held her, felt her breath, then I saw the strength in her eyes. She wiggled a hand free from the hospital blanket and reached for me. Nothing was ever the same again.
And laying his hands on him he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” 18 And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized, 19 and took food and was strengthened.
Is it a corny cliché that the birth of my first child was the spiritual experience that brought me to God?
Clichés exist because the experience happens to many people. Everyone is born. Everyone has biological parents. It is always a miracle and God always calls. Some would shrug at the significance of the event; something that happens thousands of times a day, and over a trillion times in the history of humankind, would be deemed commonplace; per se not a miracle. That sort of conclusion has got to be wrong. Humanity celebrates great achievement and lionizes the power of our heroes who can sustain consistency over the long term.
In the years that have followed my daughter’s birth, the power of this moment is totally undiminished. In that moment, there was birth and there was rebirth.
I thought about this as I watched my teenager prepare for her first day of high school, and I think about this everyday, in the moments after I tell her that I love her, and when I watch her take her first really independent steps into this big world.
Lyrics
In the mornin’ sun
’round seven o’clock
The parking lot fills
around Toys-Я-Us
And my little girl,
she will get away
Ride her bike down
Toddler Hiway
Take your Close’n’Play
Toddler Hiway
...All my darkest hours talking like this... 