Making Room

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the first scriptures that I felt like God told me after I found out I was pregnant is this one from Isaiah 54:

2 "Enlarge the place of your tent,
stretch your tent curtains wide,
do not hold back;
lengthen your cords,
strengthen your stakes.

3 For you will spread out to the right and to the left;
your descendants will dispossess nations
and settle in their desolate cities."

I knew God was telling me that I'd have to make room for this baby, make room for his plan. I heard him, but nothing in me was ready to grasp that yet. But I read Isaiah 54 again last week, and it got me thinking.

I think that "making room" is one of the biggest things we must learn and do if we're trying to follow Jesus. God has always made room in his heart for us, and now Jesus is in heaven, making room for us. God tells us to care for the widow, the orphan, and the alien...but that does not come naturally to many of us. We have to ask God to help us make room in our hearts for them, so we can be moved to action. Many years ago, we knew a teenage girl who needed a home. My husband said we had to make room for her, but I didn't want to. Such things come naturally to him, but not me. But we did make room, and she is like a daughter to us still, though she only lived with us for a year. Our sons consider her to be a sister, though two of them were not yet even born when she lived with us. By the grace of God, and despite my unwilling heart, amazing things can happen when you make room.

The Jewish people, in the time after Jesus' death, had to make room for the gentile converts. The gentiles would be grafted in to Israel, but not all of them wanted to make room. In fact, you could say that many Jews could not make room for the Messiah... Why? Because he was not who they were expecting.

We were not expecting this baby. In my mind, I can now grasp this idea of making room. I can see God being good to us and blessing us with a gift we were not looking for. My heart is still trying to catch up, though. It will. We will. We will make room and who knows who this person will turn out to be.

I was a surprise baby. My brothers are ten and twelve years older than me, and my mother knew the heartache that I will now know. Her mother knew my brothers, but she died years before I was born. I knew that always made her sad, but I didn't really understand that when I was a kid. My mom died eight years ago today, and I cannot imagine having a baby she will not know.