Thanksgiving

Tomorrow, we will be having a blessing and thanksgiving service at our church, giving thanks for our Little Dude. Neither of us are really believers in child baptism, but I truly do want to give thanks.

Because I am grateful for him. Part of the reason I am so grateful is that he is an IVF child.

Like most people, I assumed that I would be able to have a child if and when I was ready. It was a very dark time when it really hit home that it might not be possible. There are times in your life when it is very hard to believe in a loving or merciful God. I know that there were times when I just couldn't pray. It was too painful to ask God for something that I wanted so much and that I knew might never happen.

I would never claim that people who have experienced infertility or gone through fertility treatment, like we did, love their children more. But I can say that I have a very sharp appreciation, a very intense joy in our son. Sometimes the memory of how close we came to not being able to have him is like a shadow that makes the light within him seem very bright.

I am truly thankful for our son. And I am truly thankful that my partner, who saw so much of death during his service in Vietnam, can now help to nurture a new life.

We will be playing a song at this service, Bruce Springsteen's "Living Proof". It's a song he wrote about the birth of his own child after a very painful and disillusioning period in his life. He calls his son a little piece of the Lord's undying light and says that when he looks at him:

It was all the beauty that I could take
Like the missing words to some prayer
that I could never make
In a world so hard and dirty
so fouled and confused
Looking for a little bit of God's mercy
I found living proof.

I know just what he means.