A friend of mine, who has been dealing with infertility for over two years, recently shared this fantasy with me... She said that whenever she's out hiking, she imagines that just around the next bend in the trail, she will find a newborn, wrapped up in a blanket, lying under a tree, just waiting for her to find him. Because it's her fantasy, she can take the infant home and raise him as her child. No need for police or birth certificates or any of that legal stuff. She feels like she just wants God to drop a baby out of the sky for her...
And I thought this was an interesting fantasy, because we do want things to be simple. We don't want to be forced to deal with complicated sadness around first parents or discarded IVF embryos, and we don't want to wrestle with all the deep, yucky, selfish stuff inside of us, or the brokenness of this world, or how unfair life seems. I've been amazed at the big theological questions raised by infertility. And, of course these big questions are raised all the time by suffering and trials and injustice much more significant than mine!
And this also got me thinking about the storks dropping all the baby circus animals in the Disney movie "Dumbo," and how sad Dumbo's mother was when she thought she was being passed over.
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this post is a sad one...a good one. how is it that one cartoon movie scene could stir so much? i too remember that scene. just thinking about it sort of makes me want to cry. and while i love the eternal hope in your friend's fantasy, that's got to get hard to sustain when every bend is empty.
just really hard.
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