One of the greatest days of my life was when Ryan was born. I remember like it was only 18 month ago.
We waited and waited for him to arrive (9 months and 3 days to be exact). I could not wait to see this new life in the flesh. I was insanely crazy about seeing him for the first time. He was me. He was Monica. He was Ryan. I wanted to see what that looked like.
However, I wanted to go beyond seeing. I wanted to go beyond touching. I wanted to experience him in a deeper way. It was not enough for me to just lay eyes on him, I wanted to be as close to my new son as humanly possible. Closer than holding him. Closer than hugging him. Closer than putting him skin to skin against my bare chest.
I wanted him IN me. (I told you this would get crazy).
Have you ever heard a nice old lady say that she could just "eat" your child? We'll that is what I wanted to do. I wanted to eat him and digest him. That is how close I wanted to be to my son. I wanted to stick him in my belly. However, I knew that was out of the question for obvious reasons.
So, I decided to put him in my lungs.
That's right. The only way to get as close to him as I desired was to breathe his new breath into my lungs. In my mind, that was the "closest" I could get to him. Have something generated from INSIDE of him INSIDE of me.
So, as soon as he was born and the nurses laid him under the heater to clean him off, I elbowed my way past them, stuck my nose in his mouth and breathed DEEP! I mean real deep. Several breaths deep. I think I breathed his 8th, 9th and 10th breath. I would have loved to have breathed his first.
I'll never forget that feeling. I'll never forget that smell. I'll never forget closing my eyes and filling my lungs up with the breath of my new son. The breath that I gave, I was now breathing back into me. It was one of the most intimate things I've experienced outside of sex with my wife.
I wonder if God did something similar after he breathed His breath into Adam?
I like to think that He did. I'd like to think that God took a moment in the stillness of creation and breathed some of Adam back into Himself. No rush. No hurry. We can name the animals later. Right now, it's me and you living inside one another.
Jesus will go on to say something similar in John 15:4,
"Remain (lit. "live") in me and I will live in you."
Now that is close.
2 comments:
Wow.
DH, thanks for the invite to read/comment on this blog. I'm looking forward to joining the dialogue about becoming dad to 5, from 8 to 24 years old. You might think you don't have a clue about what you're doing, well then, welcome to the club. With 5 in the game now, I'm still not sure about the RIGHT things to do, I just know more of the WRONG things not to do again. But, if you stay as engaged and connected to your wife and boys as you have been (as evidenced by this post), you're gold.
Thanks Matt! Looking forward to hearing from learning from you on this blog. Feel free to jump in and shed some Stockman wisdom whenever you can!
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